Myth of Population Control

Since the time of Thomas Malthus, problems of resource scarcity and social pathology have frequently been attributed to "overpopulation," largely caused by the alleged overbreeding by the world's poor. If only those impoverished masses who bear so very many children realized the error of their ways, the reasoning goes, the "population explosion" and its attendant problems could be diffused. Moreover, their own poverty would be alleviated, since they would have fewer mouths to feed.Champions of this Malthusian perspective generally have eschewed any efforts to actually investigate what life is like for the high-fertility poor who fuel the world's rapid population growth. In this slim but incisive book, however, sociologist Mamoud Mamdani demonstrates that by actually investigating and analyzing social reality from the perspective of those who choose to have large families, one can gain an understanding of the rationality behind this lifestyle choice. Indeed, in his study of a village society in northern India, he shows that these rural peasants are not poor because they have many children, they have many children because they are poor. High fertility is, in fact, a reasonable, even necessary choice for people with few resources other than their own labor power and that of their children. Mamdani shows that only when people's basic human needs for material security, health care, and support in old age are met can they begin to consider different life strategies that do not involve having large numbers of offspring. When it first appeared during the 1970's, Mamdani's book was revolutionary in its influence on the population/resources debate among environmentalists. Some hardline neo-Malthusians have refused to budge from their "population control by any means" position, but many others have come to realize that for people to be amenable to family planning measures, social and economic reforms on a large scale must be implemented. The one area where Mamdani's perspective is too narrow involves the role of women in fertility decisions. His study emphasizes the husband and wife as a decision-making unit making successive choices regarding additional births. In reality, however, women often don't have any choice at all as to how large their finished family size might be, and their husbands frequently insist on a larger family than the wife might desire. Indeed, over the past twenty years, it has become clear that empowering women and providing them more choices in their lives is another avenue to lower fertility. Mamdani fails to emphasize this feminist aspect of the population question, but in presenting a concise and thoughtful analysis of how population growth occurs at the local level, he has made a lasting contribution to social and environmental science.