bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 21–24
On a Hinge of History: Mutual Vulnera-
bility of South and North by Ivan Head,
published in June 1991 by the University of
Toronto Press, $35.00
In 1988, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) approved a series of studies by Canadian scholars on the theme, “global disequalibria and the resulting mutuality of vulnerability of societies in both the industrialized and the developing regions of the world”. This is the first book in the series.
Ivan Head, former President of IRDC, quotes John Ruskin, “Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.”
Head’s approach is an ethical one. The industrialized countries (the North) are inherently susceptible to events in the developing countries (the South). The North has failed to notice the profound changes which have taken place. Its dedication to military security, desire for ever more comfortable lifestyles, and indifference to the swelling populations in the South, have all combined to threaten global environmental and social stability. These now, much more than the possibility of nuclear war, challenge the very survival of the planet.
Head analyzes the roots of disequalibria, focusing on economic, environmental, demographic and political matters. We excerpt a section on demographics, about the chaos which will result if global population continues unabated, forcing massive, and unprecedented, movements of entire populations seeking survival and acting beyond the control of governments.
From prehistory until about 1000 AD, the world’s population did not increase by much. In earliest times, life was so precarious, and food supplies so unreliable, that a rough balance obtained between births and deaths notwithstanding an undoubtedly high fertility rate. The introduction of agricultural practices about 8000 BC lent a greater certainty to food supply but was for a long time largely offset by recurring crises of other natures — plague, war, etc. Population growth was modest for many centuries — from about 300 million at the time of the birth of Christ to some 800 million in the mid-eighteenth century. The doubling period was about 1,500 years. An equally important phenomenon is the fact that the rate of growth was approximately the same in all regions of the world.
From about 1850 onwards, growth accelerated immensely. Mortality decreased with the advent of science and technology. The next doubling period was reduced by 90 per cent; the world required only 150 years to grow from 800 million to 1.7 billion in 1900 That acceleration has continued. By 1950 the figure had reached 2.5 billion. By 1987, 5 billion. Doubling, which once had taken 1,500 years, had now been accomplished in 37.
Growth figures of this magnitude are difficult to digest. They work out to an annual increment of a little more than 100 million persons. One hundred million is about the population of Bangladesh. From now to the turn of the century, then, the world’s population will grow by the equivalent of one new Bangladesh every year. That growth will be almost entirely in the South. In the next twenty years, 9,950 births out of every 10,000 in the entire world will take place in the developing countries.
Since 1950, another important distinction has become apparent. The long-standing, roughly parallel, growth rates of countries industrialized and developing ceased. From 1750 to 1850 the two groups were not that far apart: 0.6 per cent annual growth rate for the nations of Europe, North America, and Japan, 0.4 per cent for Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each group eased upwards in the next century from 1850 to 1950; 0.9 per cent and 0.6 per cent respectively. From 1950 onwards the change has been startling. Between 1950 and 1970 the growth rates increased and reversed. Accepted projections distribute the population for the year 2000 —6.25 billion — as 4.95 billion for the developing countries, 1.3 billion for the industrialized countries.
As the developing countries’ share of world population grew, their share of production dropped: from 44 per cent in 1800 to 19 per cent a century later and to 17 per cent in 1950. In 1980 the production share had risen to 21 per cent, but the population share was 75 per cent.
Another comparison between North and South is equally salient. The current size of those developing countries is now at the threshold of industrialization and in the infancy of self-government is immensely larger than the size of the Northern countries at a comparative moment in their history. India is now 853 million, Indonesia 181 million, Nigeria 113 million, Mexico 89 million. In 1800, by comparison, France was about 30 million, Britain 10 million. In 1850 the United States was about 24 million, Japan 30 million.
The challenges to contemporary developing country governments are thus incomparably greater than were those to the now industrialized countries at an equivalent time in their history. Not only are populations severalfold larger but instant communications reveal to the poor the contrast of living standards with the better off. In all countries, North and South, governmentally imposed curtailments of freedom have followed on population growth; zoning laws, emission standards, and water and land use restrictions are among those well known. Authoritarian measures in countries with populations much greater than Canada’s are not, therefore, entirely without precedent. Nor should we be surprised if they increase, as they will, even in the democracies. The challenge to democracies everywhere is to ensure that those restraints be chosen wisely and administered justly. It is a formidable challenge.
North America is home to one of the fastest growing of all national populations. The population of Mexico in 1950 was 25 million. Before this decade concludes, it will be 100 million. At that time more people will be resident in Mexico City alone than occupied the entire country a half-century earlier; as many as the entire population of Canada. Similar growth patterns and demographic shifts can be cited in dozens of developing countries. They represent a wholly new dynamic in international relations, one that is as yet absent in the policy formulation of governments of the North. In its absence, those policies are bankrupt because they are failing to anticipate social upheavals of historically unprecedented scale.
The survival instinct within each human being is a powerful force. In the quest for food, fuel, and shelter, immediate needs are given primacy. The more desperate the need, the more desperate the measures that will be taken. If social structure and economic circumstance combine to deny even a minimum standard of living, environmental havoc and communal disruption are the usual result. If these in turn are so threatening as to diminish any likelihood of a decent life, flight then becomes an instinctive response.
In earlier centuries, families fled religious persecution or economic hardship most often in search of a ’better life,’ or a ’new beginning.’ Today, entire communities seek refuge elsewhere to survive. Whereas Samuel de Champlain brought thirty-two settlers with him to New France in 1608, and the Mayflower carried 102 persons to Massachusetts Bay in 1620, hundreds of thousands have fled Vietnam since 1980. Each day, as many as five thousand persons enter the United States illegally across the Mexican border (less than half of them are apprehended); each day in June 1989, more than five hundred Vietnamese landed in Hong Kong.
Dislocated human beings threaten the stability of the communities in which they land, as they reflect the instability of the societies from which they have fled. These surges represent an immense and growing threat to a peaceful world: corrosive in influence, debilitating in impact, unpredictable in outcome. The issue may well be the largest, yet least recognized, international challenge of this and coming decades. It bears little resemblance to movements of the past and its understanding and management will not be derived from earlier precedents.
It is difficult for anyone from an industrialized country — save, perhaps, members of North American aboriginal communities — even to comprehend the agony and the hopelessness of those people in developing countries whose circumstances are described by the World Bank as ’absolute poverty.’ The Bank’s definition of that phrase is so shocking as to remove it from the personal experience of virtually every single person in Canada. To exist in absolute poverty is to be so calorie deficient that one lacks the energy needed to work. This is not a definition of idleness, or indifference, or absence of opportunity. It is a definition of reality: because of insufficient food, one is too weak to put in an effective day’s work. At present in the developing countries of the South, in the aggregate, one out of four persons falls into that category — more than I billion persons too weak to effectively help themselves.
Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s have circumstances in North America been so desperate that there were large numbers of persons migrating in search of work — and food. In Canada and the United States, elaborate safety nets have been designed and put in place to ensure that those tragedies need not recur. In these countries, the unemployed and economically deprived are in greatest number able to find food and necessities because the social economy is able to provide it. Far the greatest percentage of those in need of this kind of assistance are physically able to work. They lack not strength, but jobs.
When one seeks to remain above the threshold of survival, one is reduced to the most basic biological functions. In two fundamental respects, however, humans are distinct from other creatures with which we share this planet. For one, we are more dependent on water — for drinking, for food preparation, for bathing, for washing clothes. Second, humans require cooked food, and for this they need fuel. These two dependencies create the pattern of activity most common in the poorest regions of the world: the carrying of water and the carrying of tree branches or animal dung. These are labours almost inconceivable today in the countries of the North. They are not the simple carriage of a pail of water to a house from the pump in the farmyard, or the movement of firewood from the lee of a building into the interior stove. They are arduous trips several kilometres long. So lengthy are they that the circle of denuded landscape around many African villages can be accurately described: it has a radius of 7 kilometres. That is the distance that a person can reasonably walk in quest of firewood and return in a single day. In many places, nothing of a woody nature remains inside such a circle.
There is a second distinction as well. It is women and children, almost exclusively, that act as beasts of burden carrying water on their heads or their backs. And although the practice is not quite as pervasive, women and children nevertheless carry far more than their share of firewood. This form of gender discrimination is an issue that only the developing countries themselves can address. Yet it must be addressed as one of the major inequities, most widespread, found in rural sectors of impoverished societies.
Firewood and water, under these circumstances, are not squandered. Indeed, for millions of persons in sub-Saharan Africa, fuel shortages are so acute that supplies permit only one cooked meal a day. In countries dependent on root crops such as cassava or on coarse, unmilled grains such as millet and sorghum, which require much cooking, there does not exist an alternative of uncooked fruit or vegetables. Malnourishment is thus compounded by a lack of both food and cooking fuel. In the result, more is at stake here than the level of unemployment or a healthy diet. Children are stunted both physically and intellectually. In Mexico, a recent government study found that only one in every five children under the age of four was of normal weight or height. Worldwide, 146 million children under age five are underweight for their size. This suggests that some countries are at risk of populating themselves with a generation that will be even less capable than the current one to tackle the challenges of the coming decades. (In contrast, those societies such as Japan and South Korea that have been able to sustain healthy economies and – thus — healthy diets find that the younger generation is taller than the preceding one.) Diet is not, of course, the sole factor influencing either physical or mental health and growth. Social, as well as nutritional, elements must be taken into account. Nevertheless, the denial or deficiency of key nutrients in the diets of women both before and after conception has been linked clearly with low birth weights and with mental and physical retardation. In the South, an estimated 600 million women of child-bearing age suffer from nutritional anaemia.
We in the North have long been properly concerned about maternal and infant needs in our own communities. We are concerned not simply out of a desire to reduce infant mortality; we are properly dedicated to the rearing of a healthy, competent generation capable of assuming our responsibilities in the age-old cycle of all living creatures. We should be equally concerned about the competence of the coming generation in the South. Those children will be the contemporaries of our children and grandchildren and will outnumber them five to one on a planet increasingly pressed to provide the natural resources of earth, air, and water in adequate measure and wholesome quality. To meet that challenge successfully, the human species will require the full panoply of skills and talents of all societies, both North and South. The health of children in the South is therefore in the interest of the children in the North. That being so, the adults of the North bear a fiduciary relationship and responsibility towards them. It is a responsibility that is shamefully disregarded, as evidence adduced at the September 1990 United Nations Children’s Summit clearly revealed
The statistics cry out. UNICEF, the United Nations agency responsible for children, reported to the Summit that each year in the countries of the South 700,000 children go blind as a result of a vitamin A deficiency that can be overcome for pennies a day or simple servings of green vegetables. Hundreds of thousands more are born with brain damage that could have been prevented had their mothers been given access to iodized salt while pregnant. Fourteen and a half million children have died in the past year from preventable causes — treatable diseases and inadequate nutrition. Of that number, 3 million die from measles, whooping cough, and tetanus, all preventable by simple immunization at a cost of a few dollars per child; 2.5 million die from diarrhoeal dehydration. Infant mortality rates, until recently, have eased but are now once more on the rise. In Nigeria, 174 infants die for every thousand live births; in Afghanistan, 162; in Mali, 159. By comparison, the rate in Finland is 5, and in Canada 6.
There is no mystery about these deaths and deprivations. No research is required to reduce them substantially. No magic medicines are needed. No more is necessary than a modest allocation of resources. In the North and South, that requires some shift in priorities, some decision about what is most important, about which element in our society most deserves help and public funding. One element common to most countries is military expenditures. In few developing countries is a larger share allocated to any other budgetary item than to the military. In the South, the comparisons are so startling as to be disgusting. There, the ratio of soldiers to inhabitants is 1 to 240; of physicians, 1 to 1,950. Since 1960, developing countries have increased their military expenditures at a rate that is double the rise in per capita income. As a percentage of GNP, developing countries dedicate 1.6 per cent to health care, compared to 5.2 per cent to military expenditures. (The comparable figures for the industrialized countries of the North are 4.6 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively.) In recent years, over twenty-five developing countries have spent more on military activities than on health and education combined.
A much more sensitive spending comparison, one that generates even more anguish, is the amount expended in the North to extend the life of the very elderly by a few days or weeks, compared with the amount spent in the South to encourage the health of the very young. No category of social expenditure has risen more rapidly in the United States and Canada in recent years than has that of health care. No age group of our societies consumes more of that expenditure, and is more demanding of it, apparently, than the aged. In California, studies are under way that indicate that an increasing percentage of all health care costs is dedicated to the needs of persons in the final few weeks of their lives. Some of these, of course, are accident victims, or the severely ill, but most are better defined as elderly and infirm. If the welfare of our children will be increasingly dependent on the welfare of their peers in the developing countries, the health care claims of the aged in the industrialized countries must be examined and weighed. Particularly will this be necessary as the percentage of aged in our societies increases as it is now doing. Smaller family units and longer life expectancies have transformed the demographies of the countries of the North. In 1900, only 4.7 per cent of Britain’s population was over sixty-five years of age. Today, that age group represents 15.1 per cent of the total. Fifty years from now, in the European Community as a whole, 25 per cent of the population will be sixty-five or more.
The contrast with the countries of the South is vivid. In several African countries, for example, more than 40 per cent of the population is under fifteen years of age. Because of the demographic imbalance, by the turn of the century half of all people alive will be under the age of twenty-five. In the developing countries as a whole, where five-sixths of the planet’s population will be, 35 per cent will be under fourteen.
As migration from the rural areas intensifies, the population of the urban centres builds. Throughout the South, dozens of cities are already overcrowded, yet destined to grow even larger. In 1960 there were only three cities in Africa with populations of more than 500,000; today there are twenty-eight. In 1960, of the ten largest cities in the world, only three (Shanghai, Beijing, and Buenos Aires) were in the South. In 2000, only two (Tokyo and New York) will not be in the South. The balance of urban concentration is already overwhelmingly in the South. Of the twenty-five cities in the world with a current population of more than 7 million, sixteen are in the South, including the largest, Mexico City; it has 18.1 million inhabitants — two-thirds the population of all Canada. By 2000, forty-five of the sixty largest cities will be in the South, eighteen of them larger than 10 million.
Faced with numbers of this magnitude, the provision of basic services on an equitable basis becomes absolutely impossible. Squalor and depravity increase. Political instability grows. And the future is placed in jeopardy. By the year 2000, 51.2 per cent of the world’s population will be urban. And, because of the youthful trend of the population of the South, urban dwellers in increasing percentages will be young. By 2000, there will be 247 million more urban children between the ages of five and nineteen than there were in 1986. Of that number, 233 million will be in the developing countries.
In the absence of economic opportunity, urban youths find themselves on the streets: abandoned, uneducated, unemployed, alienated from any societal norms, without any loyalties except to their own gang, and — increasingly — with easy access to rapid-firing weapons. The Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues reported in 1986: ’The fate of the street generation is inseparable from the uncertain fate of cities. Bursting or decaying, they were never built with the needs of children in mind. Today, the notion of man as a measure of all things has long vanished from urban life, and huge urban agglomerations have become increasingly inhuman and unmanageable.’ One hundred years after Dickens, the phenomenon of street children has returned in numbers far in excess of anything known to Oliver Twist.
The reaction of young persons facing a future without hope is predictable. Yet governments are not always wise predictors. Current events in Gaza and the occupied territories of the West Bank provide ample evidence. So do the appalling events now unfolding in so many large cities in the South. As has been common in the slums of big cities since long before Dickens, street crime is a means of survival. The common urchin activities of pickpocketing and petty theft have given way in the age of television and machine-pistols, however, to homicide bout de papier Vol. and kidnapping. In countries as geographically disparate as Brazil and India, the kidnapping of wealthy businessmen and farmers or their families is an increasingly common entrepreneurial activity. In Bogota, contract killers fix their price according to the vulnerability of the target; for an unsuspecting creditor or landlord or in-law, the charge may be as low as U.S. $100. These business enterprises consist of two teenagers, one motor bike, and one assault weapon. As between the motorcycle and the machine-gun, the latter is far and away the cheaper and the easier to buy.
When brutality is commonplace, a community becomes enured to it, and even countenances its covert use in response. In Sao Paulo, street children are hunted down and killed by the armed mercenaries of shopkeepers who are enraged at the incidence of shoplifting. Unwilling, perhaps unable, to distinguish between runaways and robbers, between street children and street youth, police and vigilantes mete out cruel punishment in the service of the privileged. In Rio de Janeiro or in Lagos, the image of the police is as clearly defined as it is in Toronto or Los Angeles. It was vividly described by Michael Harrington in The Other America: ’For the middle class, the police protect property, give directions and help old ladies. the urban poor, the police are those who arrest you.
Why, in these circumstances, do people continue to migrate to the cities? Simply because life in the city, desperate as it is, violent, overcrowded, and uncertain, is often superior to what is available in the village. Moreover, it offers the promise of social amenities such as hospitals and schools, and the lure of opportunities for employment. Hard-pressed governments are often simply unable to extend into the countryside even the most basic of social services, clean water, or shelter, or able to assure the distribution of food or cooking fuel or the other essential ingredients of a tolerable life. Even less are they able to do so when burdened by heavy foreign debt, and by creditors and the international financial institutions who insist that government expenditures be reduced.
These conditions are the consequences of many factors, often interacting with one another. Certainly, poverty and population growth are major contributors and it is of little benefit to address one without the other. Each must be understood better in the North than it has been to date. Because poverty has either been endured or ignored in Northern societies for generations, the novelty of population growth may have a better chance of impact.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 21–24. Read the rest of this issue →
