Return of the Malthusians
29th January 2018
From the US, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates Institute, the Population Reference Bureau, the Population Council and the Ford Foundation are very active. In Britain, the charity Population Matters sees checks on population as vital to Africa’s ability to combat shortages of food, while the British quality press decries what it calls ‘unsustainable’ population growth in countries such as Nigeria. More broadly and more importantly, the US State Department, USAID, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Britain’s own Department for International Development quietly spend billions on what they delicately call ‘family-planning’ in Africa.
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All these bodies trumpet what appear to be noble causes: a planet where every pregnancy is wanted, a woman’s right to choose, sexual and reproductive health, and women’s empowerment. Yet while people should and do fight for these goals in their millions all over the world, in Africa they are imposed from on high and from outside by moneyed, bureaucratic agencies. The sums spent, though fairly modest in the Western scheme of things, are more than a little influential in Africa; and the results are not pretty.
Even less pretty are articles such as this one. I don’t see anyone forcibly sterilizing Africans. If people are willing to take money not to reproduce, or be persuaded by money spent on propaganda, that’s not ‘imposing’ anything.
Those who characterize persuasion as force seriously need to recalibrate their brains.