Famine in Ethiopia
Ethiopia is in the grips of a new food crisis that the UN World Food Program says will require $285 million in international assistance over the next six months to avert mass starvation.
I don’t think we should construe the existence of famine conditions in the Horn of Africa (there are problems beyond Ethiopia) as a reason not to send additional troops to Afghanistan. But I do think it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t look at individual elements of our foreign policy in isolation, or see the Afghanistan situation with tunnel-vision. Is there some reasonable calculus of risks in which it makes sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on prevent a situation of chaos in Central Asia but doesn’t make sense to spend a fraction of that in the Horn of Africa? Alternatively, if the US lacks the tools and skills to solve profound governance and economic problems in the Horn of Africa why do we have the needed skills and tools to solve them in Central Asia?
Martin Plaut, the BBC’s Africa analyst, has this to say about the role of bad public policy in contributing to the situation:
There is no doubt poor and erratic rains have hit the Ethiopian harvest. But large parts of the country have not been hit by drought. So why the current crisis?
It is in part the result of policies designed to keep farmers on the land, which belongs to the state and cannot be sold. So farms are passed down the generations, divided and sub-divided. Many are so small and the land so overworked that it could not provide for the families that work it even with normal rainfall.
At present only 17% of Ethiopia’s 80 million people live in urban areas. Keeping people in the countryside is a way of preventing large-scale unemployment and the unrest that this might cause.
This does seem like a system that will make it very hard to increase agricultural productivity. Meanwhile, Oxfam has an excellent new report out called “Band Aids and Beyond” about the need for donors to do more in the way of giving communities the tools they need to prevent food crises, rather than just throwing them aid after disaster strikes. If I may toot my colleagues’ horn for a moment, CAP had a report on a similar, though somewhat broader, theme “The Price of Prevention: Getting Ahead of Global Crises” back in November.
52 Responses to “Famine in Ethiopia”
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October 22nd, 2009 at 12:24 pm
What do the gray and pink colors mean?
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
My cousin was a reserve officer who was sent to Djibouti during Operation Enduring Freedom. He went for just this purpose: Make nice with the locals, give them pumps for their wells, etc. These were some pretty idle people. The danger was with nothing to do, they might go to Somalia or bring Somalian chaos to their own countries.
It was pretty peaceful. Nobody shot at him.
I don’t know how the U.S. has been following up on this, but it seemed like a good idea, except that using troops for something like this might be a waste of soldiers. My cousin ended up agreeing with guys like Thomas P.M. Barnett that we need a humanitarian assistance department that does these jobs instead of the military.
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Is there some reasonable calculus of risks in which it makes sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on prevent a situation of chaos in Central Asia but doesn’t make sense to spend a fraction of that in the Horn of Africa?
You’re the one, for over two years now, that’s been saying the US been intervening in HOA too much.
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:58 pm
My cousin ended up agreeing with guys like Thomas P.M. Barnett that we need a humanitarian assistance department that does these jobs instead of the military
I totally agree with this, Obama campaigned on this, and the State Department is trying, but so far, there are simply not enough volunteers, (which yes, possibly could be fixed with more resources) but in any case, these sort of things don’t work if the security situation has already degraded. Or at least don’t work without coordinating with a military presence.
Which is why we went to Somalia back in ‘92 under a UN mandate.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:01 pm
farms are passed down the generations, divided and sub-divided. Many are so small and the land so overworked that it could not provide for the families that work it even with normal rainfall.
Sounds like Woodham-Smith’s description of the leadup to the Irish Potato Famine.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Sure, I agree. Actually, I’m not so sure that it would be all that much cheaper to create a civilian counterpart. They’d have to be paid at least military wages to be attractive, and as you said, they’d require a few soldiers to keep them from getting shot, kidnapped, etc.
In the end, I’m not so sure that you could get modern American civilians to volunteer to live in a “Wild West” environment. We’d want all the comforts of home, including security guarantees. It’s pretty expensive to important the suburbs of DC to Ethiopia.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Oops: important –> import
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:32 pm
That’s some fairly serious population growth they’ve got over in Ethiopia…
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Norman Borlaug’s recent passing got me thinking whether or not we’re in store for stagnation in per capita food production.
This chart seems to indicate recent decline.
I’m guessing the dropoff is a result of biofuels in the US and resistance to GMO crops in Europe. Am I off-base?
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
The line gives insufficient data to say whether the decrease in 05 is a trend or a blip … or rather there’s nothing to indicate its a trend …
Not to say the famine isn’t a problem it is … but if I did the numbers right its interesting to note that they’re supporting 50% more population with 830K fewer malnourished in absolute terms … something’s going right with food production … it’s just not enough. Or did I miss something?
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Right now some research monkey at Slate is furiously working on a contrariran piece, “Why Famine Aid Causes Famines.”
Wait, they already found some wingnut to propagate that shit. She’s from Zambia. I can’t remember her name. She’ll fit right in over at the Corner.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Ilya @ 9 – as far as I can tell from admittedly limited research (mostly for a climate change study, rather than a GMO analysis), Europe’s resistance to domestic GMO agriculture doesn’t register as a significant factor. Some projections show that the eventual impact of climate change on European crops will force us to shift gears, but for a lot of our major staple crops (rape is a good example) the environmental risks of GMO are a lot more significant than with, say, corn.
Global population growth is a more obvious culprit – the world’s population grew by about 6% between 2000 and 2005, but the conversion of arable land to food crops (harder to measure) can’t possibly increase at this rate without accelerating the very climate factors that contribute to more drought and famine. Biofuels have some impact here, an apparent plateau or peak in fishery production about 10 years ago is also worth considering, and recurrent droughts in areas that were high-yield for most of the last 50 years are having a combined effect.
But I agree that by all accounts we’re looking at a long and possibly irreversible period of stagnating food production, and we have an obvious imperative to shift resources into addressing both the productive, distributive, and environmental aspects of the problem, rather than holding out for the much more expensive military response when rising food shortages increase political instability.
How to make that kind of sensibility look profitable to the companies that are powerful enough to puppeteer policy, though – that’s a complete mystery to me.
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Does Matt propose that we support an ever-growing Ethiopian population on an ever less viable resources base forever? When the population reaches 100 mllion? 200 million?
This is what unconstrained population growth looks like. This is what people like Ehrlich have been complaining about since the 1960s.
Ethiopia had a taste of what the future held in the early 90s. They were bailed out. And their response has been to do fsckall to remedy the situation. I’m sorry, but I am all sympathied out.
I have my charities that I support (Amnesty International, the Smile Train), but bailing out starving countries that are unable to control their fecundity will no longer be any part of my charitable agenda, no matter what Sally Struthers may say.
You want to deny the relevance of Malthus to modern life? You want to claim that god commands humanity be fruitful and multiply? You take responsibility for your actions, you bail out Ethiopia, on your dime, not mine. I’m tired of seeing the sad, but predictable, consequences of deliberate stupidity.
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Re: I have my charities that I support (Amnesty International, the Smile Train), but bailing out starving countries that are unable to control their fecundity will no longer be any part of my charitable agenda, no matter what Sally Struthers may say.
Actually, Ethiopia’s total fertility rate declined from 5.8 to 5.3 in the last five years or so. Progress is being made, though very slowly.
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I know something about Ethiopia and I can say unequivocally that fixing Ethiopia’s a pretty complicated task, whoever is assigned. The military does not know what it’s doing in these types of situations and a civilian force seems pretty much outlandish. There already is something of a civilian force (the international community) and the gov’t is tieing their hands.
The Meles regime makes it very difficult for the international community to do their work. The reason this is news today is that the government finally asked for help yesterday. Up until now they’ve been basically saying they’ve got everything under control. Second, and related to the first reason, there are two ongoing rebel movements in some of the worst-hit areas, especially the Somali Region. Some of the other problems are mentioned in the post and article but deserve some expansion, especially land tenure. The state owns all land and has at least since the Mengistu regime, under which the really awful famines of the 80s occurred. And, yes, the Band Aid phenomenon didn’t do a thing to address the real problems, which rose from the regime itself.
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention that Ethiopia basically can’t use the Nile for irrigation because Egypt controls almost all its water due to an early 20th Century decision by the British government. Egypt is the last stop so in theory Ethiopia could take matters into their own hands but Egypt has said they would consider this an act of war.
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:48 pm
According to the CIA World Factbook, Ethiopia’s population is over 85 million and its total fertility rate is 6.12 babies per woman per lifetime. The annual population growth rate is 3.2%. At that rate of growth, Ethiopia’s population will be over 140 million in just 16 years.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, people on the left talked about the need for population control in the Third World all the time. Now, that suggestion seems to be largely off the table, apparently because it’s considered racist.
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
A Voice of America article in 2006:
So, they need $12 million bucks for contraceptives? $12 million? Can’t, say, Al Gore write a personal check?
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
This is odd. I always considered excessive urbanization to be a big problem in Africa. In fact, I still do. Ethiopia’s population is very rural (even for Africa) and Ethiopia is in trouble. This does not prove cause and effect.
I’m not sure what you mean by productivity or why you care.
Are you talking about yields (production per acre) or labor productivity in agriculture ? If the second, the sure, lot’s of people in agriculture will mean low labor productivity and so what ? If the alternative is urban unemployment, they are still ahead on the game. More to the point, they will each just as much if they live in the city.
You want fewer people working the farms if the alternative is prductive employment somewhere else. I see no reason to think that the growth of non agricultural employment in Ethiopia is limited by labor supply. Do you ?
OK so you must mean production per acre. It would be clearer if you had just writen “production” not “productivity” as I don’t think they are either making any more land or paving farmland over for strip malls.
I don’t see why too many workers would reduce yields. Overfarming will, but it is easy for a smaller number of people to overfarm (I mean I might be too soft and lazy but Ethiopian peasants sure aren’t).
The overfarming problem could be reduced by giving them food have. But that would weaken their incentives to work says Mr Strawman. Exactly, that would be the point.
Note that if they are in the city, but not earning money to buy food, they are a greater burden on Ethiopia.
the the 50s and 60s, Development economists had this idea of getting surplus labor off the farm. The results were not pretty. Huge amounts of money have to be spent on water purification and sewage treatement to keep people in cities from killing each other. A non band aid plan which assumes that there will be a massive increase in aid, is not a good plan.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Ethiopia is one of the most notorious examples of desertification. No amount of water is going to compensate for their horrendous loss of topsoil. It’s unfortunate that their farming was so heavily influenced by the Soviets, but at this point, they need to start planting more trees and building their soil.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:30 pm
The population of Ethiopia, despite the killer famine of the 1980s, grew from 32 million in 1975 to 85 million today, on its way to a projected 169 million in 2050.
While I appreciate Matt’s interest in Ethiopian land tenure and inheritance details, I think the great and good are missing the forest for the trees: unless Ethiopian women stop having an average of six babies each, there are going to be more famines.
This used to be standard center-left orthodoxy when I was a kid: Johnny Carson would have Paul Ehrlich on several times a year, and they would talk about the need to encourage 3rd World contraception. Nowadays, though, environmentalists seem to have largely lost interest in the subject, presumably because it is seen as racist.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Is that it? I thought the hang-up was that women might get abortions.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Ethiopia has the natural capacity to handle significantly more than 80 million people. It doesn’t have the institutional capacity to develop (using the term broadly to include health, nutrition, etc.) in a sufficient manner to leverage that capacity. It is not going to do that from its current political, economic and social position. It’s not the biggest mess in the Horn but it ain’t pretty either. It’s got internal rebellions, external problems in Somalia and Eritrea, a very dodgy clientelistic government, lots of IDPs and refugees, and no doubt 150 other problems I’m leaving out.
The next elections are set for June 2010. A lot will depend on the outcome of that and I’m not optimistic.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Okay, but it’s already over 85 million. Does it have the natural capacity to handle 169 million in 2050? Wouldn’t it be more likely to develop the institutional capacity to exploit its natural capacity more fully if the number of mouths to feed wasn’t growing so rapidly?
Wouldn’t promoting birth control in Ethiopia be the single most cost effective step that the West could take to improve Ethiopia’s long term future?
And yet, judging from these reports Matt links to, and from the comments section here, birth control for the Third World has gone from highly fashionable 40 years ago to quite unfashionable today.
Why?
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I don’t know if I can presume to speak for all left-of-center environmentalists, but for me one of the great frustrations with the US doctrine of recent years was the Bush administration’s opposition to expanding access to contraception and abortion in the developing world, as well as the Vatican’s blatant disregard of the population crisis in favor of a deeply destructive and denialist agenda. The notion that there was some kind of left-wing conspiracy here is news to me.
However, environmentalists have a point when it comes to our approach to population growth. From an ecological perspective, each baby born in the US will have over 20 times the environmental impact of her Ethiopian counterpart. Not to mention that the Ethiopian kid is over 24 times more likely to be dead by the age of 5. If your concerns are more humanitarian than political in nature, it’s clearly far more pragmatic to limit population growth in the developed world than in the Third World. Furthermore, environmentalists tend to recognize that people living in tropical countries will, in the near future, bear the greatest loss of life and famine as a result of the climate change caused overwhelmingly by the Third World, even if a tremendous reversal of birth rates prevailed.
When you’re willing to compromise your quality of life to compensate for its unwitting impact on those careless babymaking Ethiopians who you deem worthy of political neglect, I’ll believe your good intentions. Until then, I’ll suggest that we consider viewing lower birth rates as a result of greater human development, and not the other way around.
The facts don’t contradict that view, and I don’t think politics are a suitable basis for deciding which of the world’s children deserve to eat.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Furthermore, environmentalists tend to recognize that people living in tropical countries will, in the near future, bear the greatest loss of life and famine as a result of the climate change caused overwhelmingly by the Third World
What I meant to say was “…climate changed caused overwhelmingly by the developed world…”
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Steve S (and others),
Promoting population control is fantastic. I’m all for it. And it’s a damn shame Republican administrations have put their socially conservative agenda above it. It is no doubt some important piece of the puzzle.
But it must be accompanied by overall development. The tried and true method is to develop and the first step is getting infant mortality down, which is an entirely different struggle. I think sometimes population theorists get much of the cause and effect confused. It has happened time and time again–infanty mortality decreases, overall health of children increases, the desire/need to pump out more children goes down. Remember, 3.2% population growth used to be the norm. Now it’s the exception.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Okay, so if the Bush Administration had the wrong view on 3rd World population control, then why aren’t the now dominant Democrats pushing the right line hard?
Population control efforts have largely succeeded in many countries. For example, the total fertility rate of Mexicans in Mexico is only 2/3rds as high at present as that of Mexican nationals in California.
So, why give up on promoting population control hard now that Africa is the main remaining location of huge Total Fertility Rates?
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Don’t try a guilt trip on me dude. I have ZERO kids and a vasectomy. How about you? I owe no-one anything in this regard.
I have been a firm advocate of population reduction across the globe. I have praised China, Japan and Europe, and deplored the fact that the US is not following suit. When the subject arises of the supposed “catastrophe” awaiting Europe and Japan in the wake of their “demographic disasters” I am happy to comment on the manifold stupidities of this idea.
But our subject today is Ethiopia, not Europe, Japan and the US; and the fact is that Ethiopia has no choice. It can continue to be an orgy of the living and the dying, or it can get its act together and reduce fertility drastically. It’s irrelevant the path that other countries took in the past; for various reasons, from global warming to modern medicine, that path is not open to Ethiopia.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:41 pm
it’s clearly far more pragmatic to limit population growth in the developed world than in the Third World
Well then, since developed world population growth is exclusively the result of immigration — we should stop the influx cold.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Re: But our subject today is Ethiopia, not Europe, Japan and the US; and the fact is that Ethiopia has no choice. It can continue to be an orgy of the living and the dying, or it can get its act together and reduce fertility drastically.
Unfortunately for Steve Sailor & Co., allowing men, women and children to starve to death (whether they be Ethiopians, Americans, or Bolivians) is not an option, even though “in the long run” the survivors might be better off. We are not permitted to do gravely immoral things and then justify them by what we hope to achieve down the road- and yes, allowing people to starve counts as gravely immoral.
I make no claims to be particularly moral in this regard, but I do donate every quarter, via Catholic Relief Services, to another African country that I particularly care for, which is suffering from some of the same issues of hunger and overpopulation that effect Ethiopia (though not as severe there).
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Re: for me one of the great frustrations with the US doctrine of recent years was the Bush administration’s opposition to expanding access to contraception and abortion in the developing world, as well as the Vatican’s blatant disregard of the population crisis in favor of a deeply destructive and denialist agenda.
Abortion is a particularly vile form of homicide, and is no more an acceptible form of achiving a sustainable population then dragging babies out of day-care centers and shooting them in the head. The proponents of abortion-as-birth-control in this thread ought to be ashamed of themselves. Part of the reason I direct my charitable donations through Christian agencies is because I don’t want a red cent of it to be used to make abortions more accessible.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Just looking around the web, seems the Ethiopian government has a history of dragging its feet on contraception and opposing abortion, though about a third of Ethiopian women want very much to stop having babies. It’s a particularly patriarchal society, where women have few opportunities, and are married as quite young girls to start having babies as soon as possible.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Ethiopia will respond to famines the way the Irish did: by emigrating. Where, I cannot say, but most likely Europe or the U.S., given that East Asians are, shall we see, cool toward the idea of mass immigration.
Incidentally, has anyone taken a long hard look at the question of whether Africa actually *is* developing?
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Nevermind, I found the answer to my own question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Development_Index_trends.svg
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:17 pm
“From an ecological perspective, each baby born in the US will have over 20 times the environmental impact of her Ethiopian counterpart.”
So, clearly, immigration of poor people from the Third World raises carbon emissions and thus must be stopped, right?
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:02 pm
The really interesting thing is that illegal immigration from Mexico to the U.S. not only raises global carbon emissions, it raises global population. The total fertility rate in Mexico is 2.34 babies per woman lifetime in 2009 according to the CIA World Factbook. But the total fertility rate for foreign-born latinas in California in 2005 (according to demographer Hans P. Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California, working from Census Bureau data) was 3.7.
So, people are illegally breaking into America to be able to afford not just their own carbon emitting vehicle, but to have more babies than they could afford to have in their own country.
Now, there are prominent environmentalists, such as Dick Lamm (three times elected governor of Colorado as a Democrat), who have pointed out the environmental problems caused by illegal immigration, but most environmentalists have, in recent years, been silent on the issue.
That would seem to be the acid test of one’s commitment to environmentalism — will it lead you to take unfashionable politically incorrect stands in public?
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:38 pm
So, clearly, immigration of poor people from the Third World raises carbon emissions and thus must be stopped, right?
Fail. Not only is the number of people from the Third World who are able to emigrate statistically insignificant here, but the ethical calculus makes you even more of a dickhead than the obvious xenophobia. Reducing immigration is in itself a bit of a perfect-world solution, so it’s no less reasonable to consider putting the same degree of political capital into addressing the factors that create the very conditions from which people flee. As people who has benefited greatly from the undeserved hegemony of developed countries, it’s a bit dubious to begrudge the pursuit of similar opportunities by the people who are already poised to suffer most from the environmental consequences of our lifestyles. However, if we’re lucky enough to live in a progressive and technologically advanced democracy, we have unprecedented power to advance our own sustainability, adapt our lifestyles to exemplary environmental goals, and contribute far more to human development in the kind of places that so many are desperate to get out of.
But that’s inconvenient, and it doesn’t appear protective enough of white privilege to appeal to the type of people who think like that. I guess that’s your cue to insert a lengthy, tangentially related set of manipulated data from some far-right think tank.
But our subject today is Ethiopia, not Europe, Japan and the US; and the fact is that Ethiopia has no choice. It can continue to be an orgy of the living and the dying, or it can get its act together and reduce fertility drastically.
Funny enough, the exact same argument can be made for the US. We have no apparent means of generating the kind of growth that might dig us out of deficit, few opportunities for our newly educated young, grim prospects for our social safety net, and an ecological pattern that renders every human life destructive to an unprecedented degree. And countries like Ethiopia and Bangladesh, as I said before, will be impacted much more dramatically than us, regardless of their policy toward fertility.
But even when you put the ethical algebra aside, there’s still a human-development threshold that countries must cross before the benefit of policy improvements begins to exceed the cost of the investment. We tend to overlook that when we wag our fingers at struggling countries and say “get your act together!,” but it’s all too easy to take for granted the advantage in development capital we gain by having not so much of our lives consumed by the basic struggle to survive.
Note that the “people power” (I hate that term) required to stabilize a nation enough to enact effective policy is exclusively held by people living in countries with relatively high life expectancies, low infant-mortality rates, secure access to food and water, high literacy and so forth. In cases where even bringing the birth rate down to zero doesn’t bring a country up to those criteria (Ethiopia would certainly apply), it’s dangerously myopic to focus on fertility.
But hey, if it were up to me, no one would be having babies. I can’t stand the fuckers.
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I have no time for Steve Sailer’s “white men should breed more, everyone else should breed less” shtick, but your position is completely incoherent. It makes no sense to claim that Ethiopians breeding is fine because Ethiopians don’t use many resources and then SIMULTANEOUSLY claim that it’s only fair to increase the resources that Ethiopians use. Pick one position or the other, but you don’t get to pick both (unless you want to be an incoherent twit like Hector and assume that who cares what happens on Earth because it will all be sorted out in heaven).
My position is quite clear. I believe there should be vastly fewer people on earth, who should all live like kings. If other people want to swap this for a vision of a grossly overpopulated earth, everyone living like Pakistani bricklayer, I don’t see why I have to support that vision — there’s nothing about it that makes it inherently superior to my vision.
And thus we get to “adapt our lifestyles to exemplary environmental goals”. WHY? Why SHOULD I have to eat less meat, for example, because the rest of humanity can’t get its act together? There is nothing moral about pointing a gun at a puppy and saying “buy this book or the puppy dies”; and that is the situation we have with current fecundity — breeders insisting that everyone else give up something to support their little darlings.
Once again, you don’t get to have it both ways — if you insist on having even one child, then, sure, I agree you have a moral obligation to limit your consumption DRAMATICALLY. But if you have, and will have, no children, then I don’t think anyone has the right to tell you to limit your consumption, on moral grounds.
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:02 am
But hey, if it were up to me, no one would be having babies. I can’t stand the fuckers.
What a loathsome thing to say. It’s sentiments like this that make me think Hector might be onto something.
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:18 am
There needs to be a greater emphasis on contraception education in Africa:
“far bigger crisis than global warming. Say good bye to Africa’s wildlife as Sub-Saharan Africa’s population doubles or more to between 1.5 and 2 billion by 2050.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing phenomenal population growth since the beginning of the XXth Century, following several centuries of population stagnation attributable to the slave trade and colonization. The region’s population in fact increased from 100 million in 1900 to 770 million in 2005. The latest United Nations projections, published in March 2007, envisaged a figure of 1.5 to 2 billion inhabitants being reached between the present and 2050….
A parallel factor at work is fecundity, equal to or higher than 5 children per woman. This is two to three times higher as in the rest of the world, an important factor being that four out of five African women live in countries where there is little access to contraception. Indeed less than 20% of women use modern contraceptive methods, as against 60% or more in Latin America and Asia.”
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004914.html
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:32 am
Here’s Garret Hardin’s essay on Lifeboat Ethics.
“Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor
by Garrett Hardin, Psychology Today, September 1974
Environmentalists use the metaphor of the earth as a “spaceship” in trying to persuade countries, industries and people to stop wasting and polluting our natural resources. Since we all share life on this planet, they argue, no single person or institution has the right to destroy, waste, or use more than a fair share of its resources.
But does everyone on earth have an equal right to an equal share of its resources? The spaceship metaphor can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists to justify suicidal policies for sharing our resources through uncontrolled immigration and foreign aid. In their enthusiastic but unrealistic generosity, they confuse the ethics of a spaceship with those of a lifeboat.
A true spaceship would have to be under the control of a captain, since no ship could possibly survive if its course were determined by committee. Spaceship Earth certainly has no captain; the United Nations is merely a toothless tiger, with little power to enforce any policy upon its bickering members.
If we divide the world crudely into rich nations and poor nations, two thirds of them are desperately poor, and only one third comparatively rich, with the United States the wealthiest of all. Metaphorically each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like to get in, or at least to share some of the wealth. What should the lifeboat passengers do?
First, we must recognize the limited capacity of any lifeboat. For example, a nation’s land has a limited capacity to support a population and as the current energy crisis has shown us, in some ways we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our land…”
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_against_helping_poor.html
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:45 am
AB asserts:
Actually, post-1965 immigrants and their descendants will make up a huge fraction of the U.S. population in 2050, according to the Census Bureau.
The Census Bureau’s 2008 projection forecast is that there will be 439 million people in the United States in 2050.
The number of non-Hispanic whites will grow only from 200 million to 203 million, but the number of Hispanics will be 133 million, up almost 100 million from the 2000 Census.
The Asian population is expected to reach 41 million, despite low birthrates among American-born Asians. Add in white and black immigrants, and the effects of post-1965 immigration policy will likely account for about 150,000,000 of the U.S. population in 2050. In other words, the U.S. population will be about 50% higher in 2050 due to post-1965 immigration, with carbon emissions proportionally higher as well.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/012496.html
If anybody was really serious about environmentalism, they’d at least think about immigration. But very few are.
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:46 am
O.K. So rich nations stop taking resources out of Africa, and stop dumping your garbage in and around Africa. I’d wager that rich nations are getting a hell of a lot more OUT of Africa than they’re putting in.
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:16 am
I’m struck by the spread of “Who? Whom?” thinking over my lifetime.
The proposal that it would be a Good Thing for some nice rich person to pony up $12 million annually for contraceptives so fewer Ethiopians will starve to death in the future would have seemed like a no-brainer in 1974.
But, today, the concept is considered highly suspicious, and probably downright racist.
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:52 am
Bullshit, Steve. You have some perverse need to “prove” that the world is more damaged by not being racist, than by being racist.
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:02 am
[...] on providing resources for communities, such as irrigation for crops, grain stores and wells. Matthew Yglesias | I don’t think we should construe the existence of famine conditions in the Horn of Africa [...]
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:28 am
Wiley,
It doesn’t matter what Steve’s motives are. What matters is the substance of his argument, which seems pretty solid. Environmentalists afraid to speak out against massive immigration for fear of being labelled racist (by knee-jerk liberals such as yourself, who are legion) are avoiding the stance most consistent with their allegedly deeply-held beliefs.
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Gosh, Steve, it took Obama three whole days to reverse Republican policies that hampered the ability of US Aid Agencies to promote family planning in the third world.
But I suppose that actually linking your comment thread spam to evidence would get in the way of the greater cause of blaming every goddamn problem in the world on the PC bogeyman.
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:15 pm
[...] make this health plan really good by kicking the ten year cost up to $7 trillion.” People are starving in Ethiopia for want of a fraction of the DOD’s daily budget in food [...]
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
De Long,
Re: Say good bye to Africa’s wildlife as Sub-Saharan Africa’s population doubles or more to between 1.5 and 2 billion by 2050.
This saddens me, obviously, but I’m not sure what I’m expected to do about it, other then ensuring that we in America protect OUR wildlife and wilderness areas, so as to set an exemple for the rest of the world. I don’t live in Africa. I _have_ lived in Africa in the past, and while I was there I gave presentations about birth control and overpopulation (talking about both the Pill and about natural family planning).
I’m planning on having three children myself, and have no particular desire for a world in which everyone “lives like kings” (and in fact, find the idea of such a world horribly unattractive).
October 24th, 2009 at 4:43 am
I am Ethiopian. I feel as though I am being held as a ransom by my own government who wishes to stay in power forever. Famine is no more caused by draught only. It is a result of bad administration. Do you know a democratic country that goes hungry every year???The Ethiopian government, instead of making a few changes which will compromise the sole power it holds, but improve the situation of the population, it prefers to threaten the western and other helping world with millions of potentially dyeing people if not given immediate assistance. But as much as it saddens me to see my fellow Ethiopians die, I believe it is time to stop the hand out, for the sake of many more millions whose life will be threaten in the future! As they say ‘Paying ransom guarantees the next kidnapping!’