Oiling the wheels of the Doomsday machine

At the United Nations Habitat Conference at present being held at Vancouver, 2,000 Government delegates are engaged in discussions based on totally false premises which all serious students of the world we live in know to be false and which many of the delegates themselves know to be false. Unfortunately, it is politically expedient to adopt these premises and political expediency always gets a higher priority than biological and social reality.

What they are discussing is the type of settlements that will be required by the six to seven billion people who they assume will be living on this planet in the year 2000. Needless to say, there will never be that many people on the earth, not even for a single generation, for it cannot conceivably support them.

Indeed one can be quite confident that long before the end of the century, world population will have been drastically reduced by famine and disease. This is the point made by Paul Ehrlich, one of the most humane and compassionate men I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, in his guest editorial in the June issue of The EcoIogist.

Now, my life is almost entirely spent among people who study these problems and all those for whose judgement I have the slightest regard will agree with this statement, though many may not be in a position to make it themselves. For some reason, it is the man who announces a catastrophe who is considered evil, not those who help to bring about the conditions that make such a catastrophe inevitable - which is precisely what highly respected Government experts are doing by condoning, indeed formulating, policies which do not take into account our planet's limitations.

The Environmental Fund, in their statement published in our June issue, point out that trying to produce more food on ever more marginal land by ever more dubious methods will not prevent the impending population crash, nor for that matter will family planning.

Whether we like it or not, both these statements are true. World per-capita food production is now falling and taking all relevant factors into consideration, we can predict with confidence that it will continue to fall, while the ineffectiveness of family planning is manifest to all but the most naive.

The Environmental Fund suggested that aid should be given only to those areas where it could in fact serve to offset disaster. This is a perfectly logical conclusion, if one accepts the premise, which I do not entirely, that aid actually helps. If there is not enough aid to go round, then it must clearly be rationed and this is the most sensible way of rationing it.

In my comment in the June issue, I pointed out that it was suicidal for any country to become dependent on foreign food supplies - either from aid or trade, because among other things, there was no guarantee that they would be obtainable for much longer. Indeed, the world food shortage, in the next few years, is likely to be on so massive a scale that if nations are to be sure of feeding their populations they must contrive to become self-sufficient.

I am convinced that this is true and I do not know of any serious student of these matters who would not agree, that to achieve self-sufficiency in food supplies must be one of the top priorities of Government policy in every country that has not already done so and there are very few that have.

Victor Gordon went much further and suggested that all aid is counter-productive in that it just helps to perpetuate the problem without contributing to its solution. His comments may have appeared callous and I understand Brian Johnson's and Henryk Skolimowski's objections to them. It is also true that he overestimates the extent to which aid, as such, has contributed to the world's present predicament but much of what he says is valid.

To see aid in its true perspective, I think it must be looked at as part of the whole developmental process. I am quite sure that the cause of poverty and starvation in the world today is development. There is neither poverty nor starvation among hunter-gatherers nor among slash-and-burn agriculturalists.

Indeed, the most affluent and best fed people in India today are the primitive tribes in such areas as the North East Frontier Territories, which have so far escaped the ravages of development. They live in an unspoilt environment and their biological and social needs are perfectly satisfied. The fact that they do not have plastic buckets and electric toothbrushes and the rest of the rubbish produced by our Western factories is irrelevant - what basic human needs do they satisfy?

As soon as development occurs, - i.e., as soon as people are made to abandon their traditional way of life in order to adopt that of the West - population starts increasing, as does consumption, while the environment becomes systematically degraded by overgrazing, overcropping, over-everything - with a consequent reduction in its food-producing capacity. Development is in fact, the most callous confidence trick ever perpetrated by man. All its benefits are illusory while its costs are very real and very cruel.

A few years ago the WHO (World Health Organisation) was boasting that 500 lives had been saved by its anti-malaria campaign. It was ecologically impossible however to exterminate an insect species by waging chemical warfare against it. Inevitably the mosquito returned and a disease which once killed off mainly the old and the weak will now wreak havoc among populations which have been systematically deprived of their natural controls. Indeed, the WHO will in the end have increased, not decreased, the number of victims of this disease.

Reducing infant mortality by means of modern medicine is also a largely illusory benefit for what is the point of allowing so many sickly children to survive if they cannot be provided with the basic amenities of life?

The Western attitude to death is sordid, even pathological. Death is a normal, indeed necessary, phenomenon; however, what is abnormal and unnecessary is the poverty, misery, squalor and hunger which we, in the West, are systematically creating on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

I agree with Victor Gordon that infant mortality is normal. I go further and say that it is necessary - an essential part of the process of natural selection to which every species must be subjected if its viability is to be maintained. The notion that science has somehow exempted us from the operation of this basic law is one of the most pernicious of the many illustrations under-lying the developmental ethic.

In Britain, by reducing infant mortality, we have increased the number of old people but not that of healthy old people. Many are sick, incontinent and demented and a large number have been abandoned by their degenerate families, to linger on in some institution, where they are kept under heavy sedation until they die - stored like unwanted furniture, out of sight and out of care.

The advantages of the urban way of life are illusory. Human misery and squalor have reached unimaginable heights in the vast conurbations of the West - and no amount of consumer goods and institutional services can reduce them. But for the Third World, urbanisation also means extracting resources from the countryside - forests for their timber, causing soil erosion, landslides, increased runoff to rivers and floods, like the recent ones in Bangladesh which wiped out crops over a wide area.

Agricultural land is built over and worst of all, water, the principal limitation to food production, is diverted from agriculture to industrial and domestic use - to be wasted in flush-toilets and washing machines and other such ludicrous devices - all of which must have the effect of further reducing food producing potential.

As for the benefits of international trade, they are probably the most illusory of the lot. To participate, Third World countries, unless they happen to have large mineral resources, must export forest and agricultural products - for they have nothing else to sell - in order to earn the foreign exchange with which to buy the materials for equipping office-blocks and luxury villas and manufactured goods for use by the growing urban population.

Thus vast areas which should be producing food for their own people, are now growing cotton, jute, coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa, bananas etc for sale to the West. In Kerala, untouchables used to eat shrimps; they cannot any more, for they are required for export. This year, India sold 20,000 tons of potatoes to Britain - but no-one complained of the hideous immorality of this particular transaction.

International trade is in fact best regarded as negative aid. It is, for the West, a means of obtaining food and other essential commodities and at the same time it creates a market for the manufactured rubbish to whose production it has become committed.

Seen in this context, aid - whether it be the official aid that we provide to the Third World or that which they provide for us, via International trade - is but a means of oiling the wheels of the doomsday machine that is leading the Third World towards mass starvation and the West towards economic and social breakdown with all its horrible consequences.

Rather than oiling the wheels of the Doomsday machine, we should be putting on the brakes and starting to dismantle it as fast as we can.

There is a proviso, of course. If a Third World country should establish a realistic plan for really controlling its population; for ensuring its de-urbanisation; and for putting an end to the systematic degradation of its physical environment by deforestation, soil erosion, and salinisation (which we have so far actively fostered with the Green Revolution for instance), then it is our most sacred duty to provide every penny we can muster, to ensure the success of an enterprise to which all others should be subordinated.

But then this would be a totally different sort of aid - one that is no longer part of the developmental process - one that does not serve to oil the wheels of the Doomsday machine.