How the UN Is Exploiting the Population Issue

by Ellen Lukas

9/01/03

Display Full Article/Printer Friendly | Send to a Friend For over half a century, well-intentioned, well-educated people in the West were taught to dread an inevitable "population bomb," caused by a worldwide explosion of births and a dearth of resources. Examples abound: • In 1946 Julian Huxley, first head of UNESCO, wrote, "War is a less inevitable threat to mankind than is population increase." • In 1967 William and Paul Paddock wrote Famine -- 1975!, demanding forced population control. • In 1968 Paul Ehrlich's best–seller, The Population Bomb, asserted: "In the 1970s, the world will undergo famine. Hundreds of millions will starve…. The cancer of population growth must be cut out…or we will breed ourselves into oblivion." • In 1972 the Club of Rome published Limits of Growth, advocating population control; the Club of Rome refused to disavow the book until ten years later, when it admitted it had "exaggerated the situation to awaken public concern."   • Pop-science prophet Carl Sagan appeared 25 times on Johnny Carson's TV show to warn of too much population and too few resources. While baby boomers worried that the ski slopes were overcrowded, the general conclusion was that responsible people should not have more than two children.   • Some "good people" even agreed that forced population control might be necessary in a country as big as China.   As we look back on the predictions, we must admit that the doomsayers were at least partially right. The 20th century witnessed a population growth unprecedented in world history. Because of better health care, nutrition, education, and sanitation, millions of children in developing countries didn't die in infancy. Roughly 20 years were added to the life span of every human being. According to United Nations (UN) statistics, from 1900 to 2000, world population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion persons, with 80 percent of that growth occurring since 1950.   Yet, even with these skyrocketing numbers, there was no worldwide famine or dearth of resources. Other calamities -- wars, genocide, AIDS -- certainly befell humanity, but not the Malthusian doom that had been so widely predicted.   And this spring, when the UN Commission on Population and Development met for its annual review of the state of the world's population, Joseph Chamie, the head of the highly respected United Nations Population Division, reported to commission delegates that something very new had occurred. As a result of extraordinary changes in population growth rates, he said, "redistribution of the world's population was well under way" with many fewer young people and many more elderly. In Chamie's view, "That change will result in a new international population order." Prev - Next >> Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8