‘A slow sort of country!’ says the Queen. ‘Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
This is a comic parable of the extremely tragic situation in which we now find ourselves. We have to work, to put forth an enormous effort, just to stand where we are; and where we are is in a most undesirable position because, as the most recent figures issued by the United Nations indicate, something like two-thirds of the human race now lives on a diet of two thousand calories or less per day, which—the ideal being in the neighbourhood of three thousand—is definitely a diet of undernourishment.
Furthermore, all observers in the food and agricultural organizations and other international organizations busy with this problem agree that the situation now is a little worse than it was thirty or forty years ago; the average individual has less to eat and fewer goods than he had in the past. Whereas thirty years ago something like 50 per cent of the world’s population was definitely undernourished, almost 65 per cent is undernourished today. The reason for the steady worsening of the situation is clear: in a country such as Mexico or Guatemala or Ceylon, where the population is increasing by 3 per cent per annum, all production, both agricultural and industrial, must also increase 3 per cent per annum in order to preserve even the present low and unsatisfactory standard of living.
If there is to be any improvement, the increase in production must certainly be 4 per cent and preferably 5 per cent per annum. But it is most difficult to keep up an increase in agricultural production of 2 or 3 per cent per annum, much less 4 per cent. This was done in Japan for forty or fifty years by the most extraordinary effort and amazing industry of the Japanese, but it is extremely unlikely that it can be done in many other parts of the world, especially in underdeveloped countries where there is a prodigious lack of capital. Capital, after all, is the margin that remains when the fundamental needs of the population have been satisfied, but in most of the underdeveloped countries the fundamental needs of the population are never satisfied.
It is incredible how little capital a country like India can raise. The last figures I saw from the United Nations were that most Western countries have at their disposal about seventy times as much capital as the underdeveloped countries, while at the present time the underdeveloped countries need about seventy times as much capital as do the developed countries. The situation illustrates the terribly significant and painfully true statement in the Gospels, ‘to those who have shall be given, and from those who have not, shall be taken away even that which they have’ (Matthew 25:29).
Along with the shortage of capital in underdeveloped countries there are great shortages of trained manpower, which is just as necessary to increasing production as adequate supplies of capital, so that it seems extremely difficult to envisage the possibility of increasing production sufficiently merely to keep up with the increase in population, much less to outrun it. So much for our second alternative.
The third alternative is to try to increase production as much as possible and at the same time to try to re-establish the balance between the birth rate and the death rate by means less gruesome than those which are used in nature—by intelligent and humane methods. In this connection it is interesting to note that the idea of limiting the growth of populations is by no means new. In a great many primitive societies, and even in many of the highly civilized societies of antiquity, where local over-population was a menace, methods of limiting population were employed. The methods included some which we would certainly find extremely undesirable, although less fearful than the natural means.
The most common was infanticide—killing or exposing by leaving out on the mountain unwanted children, or children of the wrong sex, or children who happened to be born with some slight deficiency or other. Abortion was also very common. And there were many societies in which strict religious injunctions imposed long periods of sexual continence between the birth of each child. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries various methods of birth control less fearful in nature have been devised, and it is in fact theoretically conceivable that such methods might be applied throughout the whole world.
What is theoretically possible, however, is often practically almost impossible. There are colossal difficulties in the way of implementing any large-scale policy of limitation of population; whereas death control is extremely easy under modern circumstances, birth control is extremely difficult. The reason is very simple: death control—the control, for example, of infectious diseases—can be accomplished by a handful of experts and quite a small labour force of unskilled persons and requires a very small capital expenditure. In the case of Ceylon, malaria was stamped out simply by spraying swamps and pools with DDT and spraying the interiors of houses.
Similarly, digging wells for clean water is quite a cheap procedure. But when we come to increasing production, or to decreasing the birth rate, we find ourselves confronted with problems which can only be solved by the co-operation of the entire population. Increasing agricultural production requires an immense amount of educational work among millions of smallholders and peasants and farmers, and any policy of birth control requires the co-operation of the entire adult population. So the current state of imbalance is likely to continue for a long time.
The problem of control of the birth rate is infinitely complex. It is not merely a problem in medicine, in chemistry, in biochemistry, in physiology; it is also a problem in sociology, in psychology, in theology, and in education. It has to be attacked on about ten different fronts simultaneously if there is to be any hope of solving it. First of all, there has to be a great deal of fundamental research into biology and the whole problem of reproduction, in the hope of producing some satisfactory oral contraceptive which can be distributed easily and cheaply to masses of people.
I was talking last year with researchers in the Rockefeller Institute who told me that they think there is still a great deal of fundamental research to be done. We just don’t know enough yet to be able to produce an entirely satisfactory oral contraceptive. And unfortunately very little money is going into this research; in general, far more goes into physical and chemical research than into biological research, and far more goes into other areas of biological research than into this particular area. Nevertheless, assuming that enough money and ability are put into this problem, it can probably be solved within ten years and something completely satisfactory produced and manufactured in bulk. But within ten years the population of the earth will have increased by five hundred million.
Then we have to consider the time it will take to get the new oral contraceptive accepted by countless millions of men and women all over the world. Some interesting research into this kind of problem was undertaken years ago by the English Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. They made an historical study of the average time it took for an idea which at its first enunciation seemed revolutionary and revolting to be taken for granted and to be acted upon by the whole population. They concluded that the average time is twenty-eight years—roughly the length of a generation. It is very difficult to persuade adults to change their points of view; they have to die off before a new generation can accept new ideas. If it takes ten years to produce chemically, by basic research, what we want, and then another twenty-eight years to get the product accepted, by this time the population of the earth will have increased by about a billion and a half. Again, we are up against the awful Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass parable, rushing on in order to stand in the same place.
Merely from a technical and temporal point of view, we are obviously in a very tight spot. But we have also to consider the political point of view. There would undoubtedly have to be either world-wide agreement or regional agreements on a general population policy in order to have any satisfactory control of the situation at all. But there is absolutely no prospect at the present time of our getting any such political agreement.
The trouble is that political leaders just don’t think in biological terms. Here is a rather interesting speculation: What might have happened if the only man who had had considerable experience in practical biology, and who was in politics, had become President of the United States? I am referring to Henry Wallace. Henry Wallace was undoubtedly a very bad politician, but he did think in biological terms, and by helping to develop hybrid corn he had done something which was unquestionably and unmitigatedly good for the entire human race—which is probably more than can be said for any
