My mother groaned, my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt.
-- William Blake
DEAR Seven Billionth Baby, Happy birth day! Welcome to the world. Congratulations on your new parents. I hope they will nourish you with love and wisdom as well as food. I don’t know your name. Maybe you haven’t got one yet. Just for now, I’ll call you David because it means “beloved”.
Where do you live? Most probably in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, as it hosts one in every 25 births on earth. And you’re more likely to be a boy (At least you got to be born. In some Indian households you wouldn’t have got even this far, if you’d been unlucky enough to have two X chromosomes.).
Because your family is probably very poor, your first challenge will be making it to your first birthday. About seven babies in a hundred in your region don’t.
Lots of people are using your birth to talk about what they call “overpopulation”, as if people like you are surplus to requirements. As if, like the kids in Old Mother Hubbard’s shoe, there are already too many mouths to feed.
Don’t listen to them, David. As Mahatma Gandhi once said: “There’s enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.” Last year the world produced easily enough food for everyone. Yet, according to the UN, around 1,120,000,000 people were malnourished or starving.
That’s about the same figure as in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death as demand for food outstripped supply. (The Rev Thomas Malthus had suggested the same thing back in 1798.) Yet today the global population is double what it was 40 years ago.
Of course, it doesn’t help if you are one of the billion still going hungry. Last month I flew low over northern Kenya and saw how rapid population growth has pushed families into arid marginal land.
To some extent the terrible slaughter in both Sudan and Rwanda was about too many people competing for too little water and land. Scientific ingenuity can only go so far in increasing productivity. The rest is about politics.
High infant mortality and the need for children to work to support their parents keep the birth rate high. But in the Tiger economies of the Far East, fertility (births per woman) fell by two-thirds in 30 years, as GDP grew five-fold.
It’s partly about prioritising the health of women and girls and, in particular, keeping girls in school into their mid-teens. David, around 2025 we don’t want you to be fathering the eight billionth child!
“Birth control” has become a taboo phrase, pushed to one side by governments that regarded it as a touchy subject, either for religious reasons or because of more concern about HIV/Aids or because the debate became caricatured as rich white men telling poor black women not to have babies.
Nazi eugenics and forced abortions in China didn’t help. Yet I have spoken to Indian and African mothers with five children, absolutely desperate not to have more. The UN reckons that if the 215 million women who want contraception could access it (cost £2.3 billion a year), the projected global population increase could be reduced by a third.
If anyone is one too many, David, it’s me not you. Me, gobbling up 10 or 20 times my fair share of global resources. My challenge is to learn to share the goodies with you. It’s not fair that my kids want fancy gadgets for their birthdays while you still don’t have running water, a basic education, one square meal a day and a toilet.
It may be rather crowded where you come from but, believe it or not, I live in a country where there aren’t going to be enough people to work, pay taxes and care for the elderly. Maybe you will find a future in Scotland one day, looking after me.
Meanwhile, David, may you thrive, learn, laugh, play and dream. Happy birth day, baby number 7,000,000,000.
Lots of love,
Anne.
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