The myth of overpopulation

As the food price crisis deepens, many commentators are pointing the finger of blame at overpopulation. Apparently, the real problem is the “human plague”: all those teeming, swarming billions of people in China, India and elsewhere, who are wolfing down so much meat and rice that food production methods have gone into meltdown. It’s time, we are told, to broach the last taboo: the fact that there are too many people.

Hold on a second… Discussing overpopulation is taboo? What are they talking about? Far from being an unsayable sentiment, the idea that the planet is being wrecked by too many humans — and in particular by too many black babies on that most fecund of continents, Africa — has become entirely mainstream. In recent years, the poisonous notion that the speedily breeding masses are pushing the planet to breaking point has become a casual dinner-party prejudice.

Not so long ago, people of a Malthusian bent tended to keep their views to themselves. They might have whispered them into a sympathetic friend’s ear over a glass of chardonnay, or talked about them at small “population control” conferences for like-minded souls. But, for fear of being denounced as a eugenicist (or worse), they rarely shouted from the rooftops about the need to reduce human numbers.

In his new book Fundamental Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population,/em>, Matthew Connelly explains how, following the Second World War, population-control activists suffered a severe crisis of identity. After the Nazi experience, explicit eugenics — especially in its racial form — stood exposed and discredited. So in the postwar years, population controllers embraced ‘reform eugenics’ instead and rebranded themselves as ‘family planners’.

The population-control lobby began carefully to present itself, as Frank Furedi points out, as a “benevolent and technocratic movement”, merely concerned with “improving Third World women’s reproductive choices” rather than “reducing human numbers”. Out went the old-fashioned, pre-war, Malthusian talk of plagues of unfit people swarming the world’s green and pleasant lands… in came arguments about empowering women in Africa and Asia to “choose” to have fewer children.

Until recently, population control remained a fairly minority pursuit and always dolled itself up in such “family planning” drag. Not anymore. Now, more and more world leaders, commentators and eco-activists accept the idea that the world is overpopulated (global population is currently 6.7 billion) and discuss the need to “control” or “reduce” the population in the most lurid, brazen, shameless language.

From the left to the right, Malthusianism is resurgent. Here in Britain, you can pick up a respectable liberal magazine and read that it is “sheer irresponsibility” to “reject population control [in Africa], a continent stalked by famine and stunted by malnutrition, where each year brings another 10 million mouths to feed.” Or on the other side of the political spectrum listen to the far-right British National Party scaremonger about how “population is expected to mushroom over the next 20 years”.

In mid-May, Prince Philip gave a typically royal and misanthropic pat explanation for the food price crisis: “Everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great — too many people.” In the same week, an anti-royal, left-leaning newspaper columnist put forward a strikingly similar argument: “[A]lthough the swelling billions (that’s people in the Third World) are not now emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, they will see that we are doing it and will (totally understandably) want to join in the carbon bonfire.”

British environmentalist James Lovelock says Earth is suffering from “a plague of people”. Former Thatcherite turned philosopher, John Gray, also labels humanity a “plague” and says world population should be reduced to 0.5 billion. Meanwhile, the novelist Lionel Shriver, beloved of the latte-drinking classes in London, says that even though the issue of overpopulation has become “racially, religiously and ethnically sticky”, we must recognise that “the threat of overpopulation is back and here to stay”.

From left to right, liberal to lunatic, it is now commonplace to hear people screeching about the horrors of overpopulation. They are as wrong, and as backward, as the original Malthusians were.

The central mistake made by population controllers is to treat population growth as the only variant and everything else as a fixed entity. Malthus, writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, predicted correctly that population would grow, but incorrectly that food production levels would stay the same. So he developed a nightmare vision of an Earth plagued by half-starved people looking for a scrap to eat. He didn’t reckon with the Industrial Revolution; his pessimistic mindset did not allow him to imagine that mankind might come up with better ways to produce and transport food.

Likewise, the neo-Malthusians, many of them environmentalists, see population as a wild variant, and everything else — food production methods, human ingenuity, technological progress — as rigid things that will never provide us with a leap forward. They, too, are driven by a deeply pessimistic view of humanity, and a belief that everything from energy to resources to land-space is severely limited. They see newborns as little more than “mouths to feed”, when in fact they are also potential brains that can be put to work and hands that can help build a more productive world.

Commentators who claim that discussing overpopulation is taboo are flattering themselves. They want us to believe they are making daring and dangerous arguments, when in fact fretting about human numbers is now as mainstream as it gets. The real taboo today is to argue that human life is always valuable, and that we need more people to make a success of life on Earth, not fewer.