America Abroad How Bush Has Wimped Out

By Strobe Talbott

In 1968, when the U.S. was sinking into the quagmire of Vietnam, Robert McNamara resigned as Secretary of Defense and became president of the World Bank. Having retreated from the war against communism, he threw himself into the struggle against another enemy, which has turned out to be more robust and insidious: human misery so extreme and extensive that it can spread across borders in the form of marauding armies or refugees fleeing hunger and chaos.

As McNamara quickly realized, the poorest countries were all but beyond help if their citizens brought babies into the world at a rate that defied the ability of society to make life worth living. In his inaugural speech after coming to the bank, he identified overpopulation as "one of the greatest barriers to economic growth and social well being." That was 23 years ago. There were 3.4 billion people on the planet.

Five years later, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, an enlightened and conscientious fellow named George Bush, wrote that "success in the population field" might "determine whether we can resolve successfully the other great questions of peace, prosperity and individual rights that face the world." By then, there were an additional half a billion mouths to feed. Most of the increase had occurred in countries like Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya and Nicaragua, with annual growth rates of around 3%, which means the population doubles every 23 years.

Now, with the world head count at 5.4 billion, McNamara, 75, has returned to the subject of the population explosion with a vengeance. Bush, by contrast -- even though he is in a position to do much more good than a private citizen like McNamara -- has wimped out in spectacular fashion.

In a paper imposingly titled "A Global Population Policy to Advance Human Development in the 21st Century," to be issued this week by the U.N., McNamara estimates that a billion people are living in what he calls "absolute poverty," their lives "so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy and disease as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human dignity," and that 40,000 children die each day. Yet he argues that the statistics, depressing as they are in many ways, still offer some grounds for hope -- and a major incentive for action.

Our species was on the earth a million years before it numbered 1 billion. That was in 1800. It took only 130 years to reach the second billion, 30 years to reach the third, 15 the fourth, 12 the fifth. The good news is that a graph of this exponential growth projected into the future forms an S curve, taking off slowly, then rising sharply, but eventually flattening out. Fertility rates -- the average number of children per woman -- have declined dramatically. In part that is because of severe limits on family size in the most populous country, China, but it is also due to the worldwide promotion of birth control by the U.N. and private organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Foundation.

The trouble is, even if fertility rates in the Third World dropped immediately from around 4 births per woman to the "replacement level" of 2 (a baby to replace each parent), the population would still climb to more than 8 billion sometime in the middle of the next century. That is because the vast numbers of females born on the steepest part of the S curve in the '50s and '60s have generated "demographic momentum," a boom in childbearing that will last for some time to come.

How big that baby boom is and how long it lasts will depend on what happens to fertility rates during the decade ahead. Jessica Mathews, vice president of the World Resources Institute, illustrates the point neatly: "A young woman today who bears three children instead of the six her mother may have borne will have 27 great-grandchildren instead of 216." If enough women follow that example -- which means, above all, practicing contraception -- the world's population may eventually stabilize at around 10 billion, rather than the 15 billion some demographers predict. A human race twice as numerous as it is now might be able to feed itself and avoid disastrous social, political and environmental consequences. However, at three times today's level, there would be far greater risk of a Malthusian cataclysm.

McNamara concludes by recommending that the U.N. help developing countries establish step-by-step, long-range programs, financed with the assistance of the World Bank, for coming as close as possible to zero population growth.

The U.S. should take the lead in this campaign, but it probably won't as long as Bush has anything to say about it. He cravenly repudiated his earlier championship of serious family planning when he went to work for Ronald Reagan. As President, Bush has kept in place his predecessor's withdrawal of U.S. payments to the U.N. Fund for Population Activities and International Planned Parenthood on the specious grounds that they support abortion.

Bush continues to pay lip service to this canard out of fear of Republican right-wingers who claim to be "pro-life." In its implications for the slums and villages of the Third World, that slogan disguises a policy that is pro- death. Bush, who hopes that his standing as an international leader will help him next year, says his position has "evolved" after much "soul- searching." Soul-selling is more like it.