The "New Security": Population at Work Again by Norman Myers

THE "NEW SECURITY": POPULATION AT WORK AGAIN

Norman Myers

"War is often thought of in terms of military conflict, or even annihilation. But there is a growing awareness that an equal danger might be chaos-as the result of environmental catastrophes, mass hunger, economic disaster, and terrorism. So we should not think only of reducing the traditional threats to peace, but also of the need for change from chaos to order."
Willy Brandt, former Chancellor of Germany, 1986

The Chinese tell of a mythical war (during the Cold War era) when Russia invaded China. In the first day, the Russians took one million Chinese prisoners. Russia asked China "Do you give up?". Answer, "No." On the second day Russia took two million prisoners. Same question, same answer. On the third day, Russia took five million prisoners. The Russian asked, "Do you give up now?" The Chinese replied, "No-do you?"

Population Pressures

In more cases than not, countries with rapid population growth feature slow per-capita economic advance, stagnating per-capita food production, over-extended social services, over-exploited resources, and slower development than those countries that have stabilized their population or have a slow growth rate. The rapid population growth countries also tend to be those that feature the most civil strife. The countries in question include many in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Southern Asia, ones with the worst track records in both environment and development and with the highest population growth rates.

So great are the stresses generated by too many people making too many demands on their environments, that the pressures create a first-rate breeding ground for pushings and shovings. This conflict can be expressed in two ways. First, there can be social dislocations and political upheavals within countries, notably civil disorders, riots, insurgencies, even revolution. Second, there can be confrontation with neighboring countries, ranging from political tension to outright hostilities.

Let's be careful not to over-state the case. The relationship between population and conflict is rarely causative in direct and exclusive fashion. It would be simplistic to assert that more people must mean more conflict. But in many instances, we can see that conflict would not arise so readily, nor would it prove so severe, if the associated factor of population growth were occurring at a more manageable rate.

Population & Conflict Linkages

One illustration of the population/conflict linkage arose in the case of Ethiopia in the early 1970s. The country's traditional farming area of the highlands was losing huge amounts of topsoil per year. This erosion was due partly to rudimentary agricultural practices, partly to inequitable land-tenure systems, and partly to the pressures generated by a population that had more than doubled during just the two decades 1950-1970. The results included a marked fall-off in agricultural production with food shortages in cities, and with ensuing disorders that precipitated the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. The new Dergue regime did not do enough to restore agriculture. For this reason among others, throngs of famished peasants started to stream into the country's lowlands, including the Ogaden region bordering Somalia. In Somalia too, steadily increasing human numbers, together with inefficient agriculture, had led to much over-taxing of traditional farmlands. For these reasons, there was a migration into the Ogaden from the Somalia side as well. The result was a clash between the two sides, and the start of outright war in 1977.

A second illustration lies with El Salvador. It is not only the most unstable country politically in Central America, but it endures the worst population pressures. True, the so-called Soccer War in 1969 with neighboring Honduras broke out not only because of population increase itself, but because the most disadvantaged segments of the population-those that were also growing in numbers the most rapidly-found themselves denied access to natural resources, notably agricultural land as a result of the nation's oppressive government. Yet the scope for strife would not have grown so severe if the population had not been one of the fastest growing in the world, trying to subsist in landscapes where water supplies were declining, soil erosion was widespread, and forests had become a matter of history. This combination of problems caused one tenth of El Salvador's citizenry to take up residence in neighboring Honduras, where they constituted a prime cause of the outbreak of hostilities.

$90 Billion Compared to $17 Billion

Note the costs of the Iraq war, $90 billion, not counting the greater costs of undoing the war's damages. Then recall the price of supplying family planning facilities to the millions of developing-world couples who want no more children but lack the birth-control wherewithal to put that wish into practice. A grand scale family planning program budget of $17 billion per year was agreed upon by the world's governments in 1994. The developing countries have paid the great bulk of their two-thirds share, but the rich countries have regularly protested they have never been poorer and they have largely failed to pay their full whack-less than half in 2000. The most dismal back slider has been, guess who, the United States, even though the program's cost for an American taxpayer would be the same as a beer every two months. Were all countries to meet their commitments, we would likely reduce the ultimate global population by fully one billion people. There would be a further payoff: everybody would be enabled to have as many or as few children as they wish (declared a basic human right 35 years ago), and there would be fewer unwanted births and fewer abortions. We would come out ahead on several fronts.

Genuine Lasting Security

Many population and environment problems spring to mind, all of them reflecting population pressures to some degree. They include topsoil loss, spreading deserts, shrinking forests, large-scale pollution and global warming. They are all, ultimately, security threats. We cannot respond to these new security threats through old-fashioned measures. We cannot resist an advancing desert by sending tanks to stem it. We cannot halt soil erosion by bombing it. We cannot stop acid rain with infantry. We cannot drive back global warming by launching missiles at it.

All in all, then, national security is no longer about fighting force and weaponry alone. It relates increasingly to population, also watersheds, croplands, forests, climate, and other factors rarely considered by military experts and political leaders, but that, taken together, deserve to be viewed equally as crucial to a nation's security as military prowess. The situation is epitomized by the leader who proclaims he will not permit one square meter of national territory to be ceded to a foreign invader, while allowing hundreds of square kilometers of topsoil to be eroded away each year.

Yet however much this is a built-in facet of our new 21st century world, we have yet to mobilize the political collaboration to reflect it. We simply do not recognize it as a strict fact of life. Nor will the changed outlook come easily. The two most important features of our new world have nothing to do with conventional politics or economics, least of all with military strategies. These two features are, first, that no country can support an indefinite increase either in its number of people or in its consumption of environmental resources, let alone both; and second, that most mainstream policies of most governments assume that, on the contrary, it can.