A Matter of Life and Death

World population could explode to 28 billion by the middle of the next century, with disastrous consequences. The remedy? A more equitable distribution of world resources.

Gerard Piel

THE THIRD United Nations conference on world population will be convening this September in Cairo with "a broader mandate" from the UN General Assembly. The agenda is to reflect "the growing awareness that population change, poverty, inequality, patterns of consumption, and threats to the environment are so closely interconnected that none of them can be considered in isolation." This is why the Cairo conference is an International Conference on Population and Development.

With population on the agenda, however, people may find it hard to think about anything else. The world population is exploding. Growing from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 5.4 billion today, it has more than doubled in less than a lifetime. This is the largest addition to human numbers, ever, in the shortest time ever. And now the population is doubling again. It is surging by more than 90 million a year -- three babies a second -- in the largest annual increments, ever. The population explosion quickly extrapolates in popular discourse to the terminal misery envisioned by Thomas R. Malthus two centuries ago. In the face of this explosion, a word like "development" disappears in the retinal blindspot -- unfortunately so, since development holds the key to avoiding humanly disastrous population growth. The "power of population" was first reckoned by Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, and it has supplied the model for thinking about population in public opinion and public policy ever since. Malthus's principle is easily grasped: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second." For readers who lacked such acquaintance, Malthus carried the two series out nine steps to show that "In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as 512 to 10." Geometric and arithmetic series do indeed diverge. Given the finite size of planet Earth, however, it requires no such calculation today to conclude that human increase cannot double many more times. One may, likewise unassisted, imagine people happier at a smaller ultimate census than at a larger one. The present doubling is nonetheless inevitable; members of the ten to 12 billion world population are already here among the living. Can we do something to forestall the next doubling?

The Malthusian model does not help to answer this question because it doesn't provide for a population explosion. This deficiency is evident in the absurdity to which Malthus carried his diverging series. A merely arithmetic increase in the means of subsistence could not have sustained the population explosion, underway even as the Essay on Population was published, that has since doubled and more than re-doubled the world population. Public policy must be founded on a model of population growth that comprehends population explosion. And that model must necessarily reckon with the real-world variables -- "poverty, inequality, patterns of consumption and threats to the environment" -- included in the mandate to the Cairo conference.

The conference is one of a cycle of UN conferences scheduled over a five-year period to secure the data necessary to underpin such variables. The cycle includes a Summit for Children, held in New York City, in 1990; the Conference on Environment and Development, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992; the Conference on Human Rights, in Vienna, 1993; the Cairo conference; the Summit on Social Development, in Copenhagen; and the World Conference on Women, in Beijing, in 1995. These conferences constitute the most ambitious inquiry into the state of the world ever undertaken -- a level of ambition commensurate with the present magnitude and tempo of change in the circumstances of human existence.

The conference cycle has begun just in time. A strong early consensus holds that the present increase in population and the production of material goods has brought us in range of the Earth's limited capacity to sustain the human presence. It is not only that population doubled in the present half century. The doubling population overrode the arithmetic constraint on increase in the production of the means of subsistence and twice doubled the output of material goods, thereby doubling per capita consumption. In consequence, people are now diverting to their use and improvidence an estimated 40% of all the energy captured from sunlight by life processes.

The unprecedented increase in consumption of material goods presses another concern onto the agenda of the UN conferences. It brought an equally unprecedented increase in differences in per-capita consumption. Between the best-off 20% of the world population and the worst-off, the difference tripled. From 20 to one in 1960, the difference grew to 60 to one in 1990. The number of persons living in direst poverty is correspondingly larger than ever before, estimated at not less than one billion.

A few people have always been rich, and most people poor. Today some countries are rich and the countries of most of the world's people are poor. The rich countries are rich in the sense that almost all of their people are relieved of toil and want. Poverty in those countries is relative and persists as a social institution. In the poor countries, almost everyone is poor. Their poverty is absolute; there's not enough to go around.

Even today, village people in poorer countries live very much as their forbears did from the time the agricultural revolution settled them in villages 10,000 years ago: by the sweat of the brow. The biological energy of their bodies gets the means of subsistence to renew that energy and not much more. With traditional tools and practice, they can increase their means of subsistence only by bringing new land under cultivation. By improvement of tools and practice, over all those years, their forbears sustained increase in the rate of population growth from thousandths of a percent per year to hundredths. The arithmetic increase in output, overtaken by arithmetic increase in population, afforded no increase in individual well-being. An individual could improve his circumstances, therefore, only at the expense of others. Status and force, accordingly, governed traditional agricultural civilization.

Now industrial revolution has brought rich countries abruptly into history. Two centuries ago, mechanical energy began to displace biological energy in the work of producing the means of subsistence for the people of those countries. Machines not only displaced people from work but began doing kinds of work that no number of people working together could do. Production of the means of subsistence -- and of a now still diversifying catalogue of goods and services beyond -- proceeded to increase on "a geometric ratio" and at a power superior to that of population. Whole populations began, therefore, to enjoy increase in individual well-being. Contract and persuasion, accordingly, came to govern in industrial civilization.

The industrial revolution continues at an accelerating pace and it is going world-wide. During the present half century it extended to the centrally directed economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. With their population added to that of countries that preceded them in industrial revolution -- in Western Europe, North America, Japan, and the antipodes -- one-fifth of the world population has now experienced this transformation of the human condition. And the latest arrivals, too, seek to build institutions of self-government. In the present inquiry into the state of the world, national representatives and UN experts are finding their work expedited
by an emerging new consensus. Reflecting on the past two centuries of economic and demographic experience, they are in increasing agreement that population explosion marks the first phase in the transformation of the human condition that attends industrial revolution. A population undergoing industrial revolution makes a transition from near-zero growth at high death rates and high birth rates to near-zero growth again at low death rates and low birth rates. Every industrialized country has followed this trajectory. Demographers not long ago recognized this deflection in the trend of human population growth and have since brought it under systematic study. While the details of particular episodes are in controversy, a population typically makes the "demographic transition" in two phases. Improvement of individual well-being in the population, secured by increase in production of material goods that runs ahead of increase in population, brings increase in life expectancy and decline in the death rate. The population now increases at a rate measured by the increasing difference between the birth and the death rate. If this first phase is prolonged, the population grows to much larger size.

As decline in the death rate begins to reflect decline in the infant and child death rate, the birth rate follows the death rate in decline. With the birth rate converging again on the death rate, in this second phase of the transition, population growth again approaches zero. Today, except for increase attributable to still-lengthening life expectancy, natural increase in population has come to a halt in the industrialized world.

In Europe in 1600, where and when the industrial revolution had its earliest beginnings, life expectancy stood at the low level -- less than 30 years -- prevailing in traditional agricultural civilizations around the world. As in Thomas Hobbes's state of nature, life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Evidence from baptismal records and graveyard headstones, however, shows that life expectancy was beginning to lengthen in European countries during the 17th century. It did so even as epidemics and famine, especially in association with the Thirty Years War, cut their saw teeth in the rising curve of population growth. In the 18th century, the curve of population increase grew steeper. From that period, Henry Adams dated his "acceleration of history," which was measurable because "it took the form of utilizing heat as force, through the steam engine, and this addition of power was measurable in the coal output." The high birth rate that had barely offset the high death rate was now delivering net additions to the population.

By the end of the 18th century, the peoples of Europe were committed to a prolonged explosion that was to double their 50 million census at 1600 four times and over to 1.2 billion by the mid-20th century. They were one-tenth of the world population in 1600; one-third of it in 1800; nearly half of it in 1950.

As their numbers swelled, the Europeans avalanched out of their subcontinent to occupy the New World and to colonize and colonialize the rest of the continents. Their geometric increase did not overwhelm their means of subsistence. The huge ampli-
fication of demand induced still huger amplification of supply, implemented by increasingly competent and diversifying industrial technology.

The European response to the lengthening of life expectancy shows that this deferral of death, this conquest of life, has consequences for a population other than the demographic. Survival, today and in posterity, no longer engrosses individual consciousness. Assurance of life frees human potential for discovery and creation of new possibilities of life. As people live longer, they discover that they have rights in their enlarged existence; living long enough, they assert them. As the median age rises from 13 years to 30 and beyond, a population of children becomes a population of grown-ups. The divine right of kings yields to the sanctity of the individual.

Over the last 150 years, the population of the industrialized world has come through the second phase of the demographic transition: earlier in some countries and later in others, the birth rate eventually followed the death rate in a prolonged, accelerating decline. Industrial revolution engages all aspects of human existance. The family in industrial civilization is typically and even necessarily a small family. The mutual-aid, extended-kinship family goes into decline, setting its component progenitive families loose on their own. For better or worse, people migrate from village to city. In the division of labor that so vastly increases their product, they exchange the independence of self-employment for free time from wage employment. They are compelled to literacy. They get their living not by muscular exertion in the field but by stress on the nervous system in factory, office, or shop. Women go to work, willingly or of necessity, outside the home, and sex roles become less differentiated.

Around the middle of the present century, perfection of contraceptive technology facilitated the final decline in the birth rate in the industrialized world. The total fertility rate fell everywhere to the zero-
population growth rate of 2.1 infants per female reproductive lifetime -- and, in some countries, still lower.

Demonstrating that the knack for industrial revolution was not somehow exclusively confided to Europeans, the Japanese launched their own revolution in the last decades of the 19th century. On a smaller scale and in a much shorter time, they recapitulated the European experience, population explosion included. Overtaking the Europeans, they arrived at about the same time with them at the zero-growth fertility rate.

The population of industrial civilization can be said, in an important sense, to be the first population created by human choice, rather than natural constraints. The populations of other species produce offspring in great numbers; natural selection then prunes them back. Survivors diminish rapidly in number up to the minority that survives to reproduce the species. Such was the age structure of populations in agricultural civilization; it persists in the populations of developing countries today (see Figure 1). Industrial civilization brings very nearly all its newborn through metamorphosis to full human form and capacity. The youngest may be the smallest age-group (see Figure 2). Variation in the size of the age groups -- up to the eldest -- reflects differences not in survival but in decisions about childbearing in their parental age groups. As mortality continues to yield to longevity, the eldest become the most rapidly growing age group. The population explosion now announces the entrance of the rest of the world population into the first phase of the demographic transition. Population growth began to rise above the near-zero rate in what are now the world's poor countries early in the period of their subjugation in the colonial empires of the European states. Over the past 50 years, with the leading edge of industrial revolution crossing their borders, the population of the politically liberated, "underdeveloped," and now "developing" countries entered the phase of explosive growth. Their own economic growth, economic assistance, and the ministrations of UN technical agencies have put the most portable industrial technologies -- preventive medicine, sanitation, mass education, and the green revolution in agriculture -- to work in synergy with one another to some extent in every country. Life expectancy lengthened, in consequence, by a decade on all the continents. In no small degree, the improvement in this index, especially the more recent improvement, is owing to reduction in the infant and child deaths that are still half of all the deaths in the poorest countries. The fall-away of death rates from birth rates raised population growth rates above two percent in all the countries and above three percent in some of them. "Explosive" is the only proper term for this development. Comparable decline in the death rates of the now industrialized countries transpired over the course of a century or two. The developing countries contributed more than their share to the doubling of the world population since 1950; they increased from about 1.5 billion to 4 billion today.

These peoples were, of course, 90% of the world population in 1600. They doubled their numbers (roughly) over the next 350 years, as the Europeans went through their explosion. Now, after less than half a century, they once again constitute 80% of the world population.

For evidence that the developing countries are truly entrained in the demographic transition, consider the progress of countries comprising 40% of the combined population of the developing countries into the second phase of the transition. Their birth rates have begun to decline, and their fertility rates have come down more steeply. These are, of course, the countries that have progressed further in their economic development and shared the proceeds most widely in their populations. In a few of them -- South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cuba, with a combined population of less than 100 million -- the total fertility rate has fallen to the 2.1 zero-growth rate. These populations have come through most of the first and all of the second phase of the demographic transition within the span of a human lifetime.

That compares with the 300-year passage of the first fifth of the world population. The technologies pioneered over those centuries by the first fifth were, of course, there on the shelf and ready for installation in the countries that followed. In the sudden lengthening and assurance of life, these people were ready to reduce their fertility at a lower standard of living than the people
who preceded them in the demographic transition. They are able to do so, employing the portable and convenient technology of contraception.

China and its population provide still more decisive evidence of the worldwide pervasion of the demographic transition. Since 1949, that country's forced-draft industrialization has made it the world's ninth largest economy; it is now the fifth largest producer of steel and the largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer. With a population equal to that of all the industrial countries combined, China remains a country of the poor. Until recently, however, China divided its increasing product with equity imposed by revolutionary ardor. The average income of $370 in 1992 hovered just above the median income. It was double that of 1949, despite the concurrent doubling of the population.

Much of China's GDP per capita has reached the people through public expenditures on education and health. The population, 90% illiterate in 1949, is now 75% literate, and nearly all of the children are in school. Life expectancy, less than 40
years in 1949, now exceeds 70 years. Deaths of children under five, which exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births in 1949, had dropped to 36 in 1992.

This is the setting in which a second fifth of the world population today approaches full passage through the second phase of the demographic transition. By 1991, China's total fertility rate had fallen to 2.3 -- barely above the zero-growth fertility rate of 2.1. Upon arrival at the zero rate, China must still anticipate huge population growth. The median age in China is 24; half the population, therefore, are in their reproductive years. Even at the zero-growth fertility rate, China's population is bound to increase to 1.5 billion. But it will settle in at that level.

Popular discourse, especially in the United States, attributes this astonishing reduction in fertility rate to the aggressive promotion of contraception -- lately the coercive promotion of the "one-child family" -- by the central government. Over all these years, the press has had less to report about China's industrial revolution and the percolation of its benefits into the huge population. Developments that transpire over decades do not qualify as news events: to successive waves of correspondents on assignment to China, it always looked like a poor country. The insistent promotion and widespread distribution of contraceptives by the authorities, no doubt, hastened the country's "contraceptive prevalence" rate to the level prevailing in the industrialized countries; that is, 70% of the reproductive-age population. And the coercive policies have revived the practice of female infanticide and increased the rate of abortion. But the principal cause of the decline lies in the pattern of equitable development.

Elsewhere in the pre-industrial world, the demographic transition proceeds in the same relation to progress of industrial revolution and the equity with which its proceeds are distributed in the populations, confirming the Chinese model. Since 1992, the UN Development Program has kept track of "human" as well as economic development in the developing countries. In the eight largest countries ranked with China in the "medium range" of human development, a population of 650 million has arrived at a combined total fertility rate of 3.2.

India, with 870 million, is the second most populous country. It leads the "low range" countries. Like China, India sought development in some independence of the world economy but by mixed state and private enterprise under central planning. Its progress in development and success as a welfare state is summed in a total fertility rate of 4.0. The eight largest countries in its range, with populations totalling 600 million, have a combined total fertility rate of 5.6. In the 38 poorest countries, with populations totalling 350 million, the total fertility rate remains close to 7.0.

With no less than a doubling of the present 5.6 billion world population fated by these numbers, it can still be said that the population explosion has passed its peak. The rate of population increase, rising for the past three centuries, went a little above 2.0% around 1970. If all goes well, it will continue on its present downward slope to 1.5% at the end of the decade. Multiplying a larger total population from year to year, the declining percentage now produces the largest additions -- that 90 million a year, those three babies a second -- to the population each year. By the end of the decade, again if all goes well, that absolute number will begin to shrink. How well will it all go? The answer depends on whether the population explosion excites the Malthusian reflex or is understood to be a phase of the demographic transition. The Malthusian reflex prescribes the neo-Malthusian remedy. Malthus mistakenly attributed the population increase that had become perceptible in England at his time to the power of population -- that is, to the birth rate and not to the decline in the death rate. Contraception stops conception, say the neo-Malthusians; issue contraceptives, therefore, to the natives. (That Malthus disapproved of such remedy makes it truly neo-Malthusian.) The durability of the Malthusian model of population growth has powerful expression in the proposals put forward by representatives of the rich countries at the UN conferences. They urge the efficacy of the neo-Malthusian remedy and declare their readiness to provide poor countries with instruction in "family planning," the necessary supplies, and financing of any incidental expense. The offer involves the rich countries in no large financial obligation and it leaves intact the prevailing neo-colonial relations between the rich and the poor. It comes naturally, moreover, from the outlook of the domestic family-planning movement, especially in Great Britain and the United States. From its beginning in the late 19th century, it was suffused with condescension, eugenic anxiety, and middle-class preoccupation with the procreative proclivities of the poor.

Recognition that the population explosion portends the end of world population growth commends the approach of the developing countries that insisted upon insertion of the word "development" in the title of the Cairo conference (and called it population "change," not growth, in the charge to the agenda). In the procession of countries toward the zero-growth total fertility rate, it can be seen that a country's progress toward that objective relates to its progress in economic development. Their rate of economic development, therefore, fixes the date at which, it may be hoped, the developing countries will complete their passage through the demographic transition. And that date in turn fixes the size at which the world population may be expected ultimately to settle. The faster, the sooner, the smaller.

One measure of progress in the developing world, especially in the more populous countries, is the increase in the detail and reliability of their vital statistics. On these real data, the Population Division of the UN secretariat has been perfecting a computer model of the world population. Confidence in the data encouraged the publication in 1980 of long-range projections, looking to an estimate of the size of the ultimate population. The medium-fertility projection found the population increasing to 6 billion in 2000 and settling at 10 billion in 2100. The present doubling, in other words, could be seen as the last. Significantly, the model showed the present poorest billion people contributing 4 billion descendants to that ultimate population. In the high projection, the population was settling at 14.9 billion in 2100.

In 1990, with more confidence in the data and their model, the UN demographers ran a second long-range projection. Reflecting unfavorable trends in the 1980s, the medium projection this time showed the population reaching 6.3 billion in 2000, passing 10 billion in 2050 and settling at 11.5 billion in 2150. The high projection showed the population passing 28 billion in 2150. The poorest billion have swelled in this projection to 14 billion.

The logic of these projections leads on to topics in which the developing countries have difficulty holding the attention of the industrialized countries. Plainly, if humankind is to choose its future, industrial revolution must be hastened in the developing countries. To that end, they ask for the transfer of the necessary technology from the industrialized countries and the economic assistance necessary to secure its infrastructure. For 40 years, they have gone unheard.

At the founding of the United Nations, it was voices in the industrialized countries that argued the wisdom of economic assistance from those countries to hasten the development of the "underdeveloped countries" then emerging from lapsed European empires. As early as 1950, a "Group of Experts" commissioned by resolution of the General Assembly rendered a report that set the terms of discussion ever since. Technology transfer would be necessary to feed the growing populations and to employ people displaced from the land in new industries. The countries' own income from export of commodities and investment from the industrialized countries would finance most of the undertaking. To induce profit- and interest-bearing investment would require, however, outright government-to-government grants in assistance to the building of the necessary physical and social infrastructure. The Group of Experts estimated that outlay at a figure that came to a little more than one percent of the combined 1950 GNP of the industrialized countries. Total investment from all sources at the rate of $19 billion a year would see underdeveloped countries taking off on their own at the end of the century.

In "Point Four" of his inaugural address in 1949, President Truman had already pledged expansion of the Marshall Plan, then funding the reconstruction of the economies of Western Europe, to provide economic assistance to the building of new industrial economies in the underdeveloped countries. The Cold War quickly overran that commitment. In 1961, however, if only as a Cold War ploy, President Kennedy roused the General Assembly to declare the 1960s the Decade of Development and pledged one percent of the U.S. GNP to the cause. When the 1960s went into history as the Decade of Disappointment, the industrialized countries renewed their pledge, but at the "more realistic" level of 0.7% of their combined GNP. That pledge remains outstanding.

Meanwhile, the "Third World" had become the scene of the bloody proxy wars -- an estimated 150 of them -- fought by the parties to the Cold War to a standoff by assurance of mutual destruction. "Official development assistance" never exceeded 0.2% of the GDP of the industrialized countries. Except for the trickle that went through the multilateral agencies of the United Nations, its Cold War motivation and incorporation in much larger flows of military assistance compromised what little contribution it made to development. From the United States, 60% of the "foreign aid" flow went to three client states.

As early as the 1950s, private direct investment from the industrialized countries in plantation, mine, oil-field, transportation, and port facilities began to outrun governmental outlays to assistance. The underdeveloped countries became the developing countries. What development those countries, with the exception of China and India, have seen is due principally to private investment. But that contribution was indirect; for the investment went primarily to expedite the delivery of agricultural commodities, metal ores, and, especially, petroleum in rising volume at falling prices to sustain and fuel the fourfold expansion of the industrialized market economies.

At the same time, an ever smaller number of always larger corporations have made the economic connection between the developing countries and the industrialized world. The 350 largest non-financial transnational corporations now account for 30% of the output of the world market economy. Their turnover is larger by several hundred billions than the combined product of all the developing countries. In trade with the developing countries, from three to not more than seven of these corporations make the market for the commodity at hand. In no small measure, they owe their own expansion in this period to their advantage in negotiating terms for every commodity, from petroleum to labor.

Under their supervision, the flow of economic assistance has been made to run uphill, from the poor to the rich countries. OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, could hold the corner and make the price on oil for no more than a few years. The 1980 OPEC price can nonetheless be taken as measuring the scarcity value of petroleum and so charging its fair "Ricardian rent." A host of environmental considerations argue for it; a similar understanding sets the price of diamonds. Discounted by inflation, however, the price of petroleum has returned to its pre-OPEC 1973 level. Using the 1980 benchmark, petroleum, alone, carries an annual subsidy from the poor to the rich approaching $200 billion.

In recoil from inflation set off in the 1970s by the momentary inability to control the price of oil, the industrialized countries embraced deflation. They set aside the goal of full employment and shrank their welfare states. Even as the financial community has alternately celebrated and deplored signs of "recovery" and "recession" in the low amplitude business cycle, growth of the world economy has not much exceeded population growth for two decades.

Deflation in the world economy, despite continued subsidy from the poor, has arrested development in the developing countries. With the exception of China and East Asia's "newly industrializing countries," economies have stopped growing and some have gone into decline. As the net of four decades of trade with the industrialized world, they have a combined debt of $1.4 trillion. To maintain their credit-worthiness they are invited by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to "restructure" their economies in the deflated image of the holders of their official governmental debt. Restructuring, along with the arrest of development, has reduced their social expenditures. The consequence, in the poorest countries especially, is the reversal of such favorable demographic trends as decline in infant and maternal mortality. Through the anxious years of the Cold War standoff, the UN Security Council held world attention as the forum that kept the nuclear superpowers talking. With less attention paid, the General Assembly served as the site of another standoff. There the developing countries argued the common interest of rich and poor in the acceleration of their economic development. Debates would conclude with resolutions reaffirming the desirability of economic assistance and even, with the industrialized states voting, citing the 0.7% figure. This was inexpensive; binding resolutions are reserved to the Security Council, subject to veto by any permanent member. Debate hardened when OPEC succeeded in setting the price of oil. Exporters of other resources essayed the organization of similar cartels (with much less success, industrial technology having ready substitutes for all except oil). The rebellion climaxed with the General Assembly resolution in 1976 that proclaimed the New International Economic Order in which no nations are more equal than others.

In the late 1980s, with the number of member states passing 180 and the progress of the more advanced developing countries reflected in the sophistication of their UN missions, the General Assembly set out to raise the level of discourse. It convened the cycle of international conferences that began with the Summit for Children in 1990. They are addressed to world opinion, especially that resident in the industrialized countries. The faith is that informed electorates are wise electorates. The hope is that action to accelerate the demographic transition will follow. The charity will be seen to reward the giver as well as boost the receiver.

The second conference, on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, undertook to estimate the effort humankind must make to choose its future. In Agenda 21, it set out a plan for "sustainable development" that would bring population growth in the developing countries to a halt at a smaller size and at an earlier date. That effort was lost in the reporting of the conference to the industrialized world. "Environment" is another word which pushes "development" into the blindspot.

Agenda 21 nonetheless stands as a first attempt to take the full measure of the task of settling humankind at home on Earth. It sets out an inventory of needs to be met and deeds to be done: 2500 projects and programs in environmental repair and infrastructure building, engineered and priced out by qualified experts in the developing countries and in the UN technical agencies. The developing countries are to supply most of the projected annual $600 billion capital requirement. From "savings" ready in their under-employed labor forces and under-utilized resources, they are committed to invest $500 billion. The industrialized countries are invited to invest $125 billion, 0.7% of their combined GDP. That is to move principally in the form of the technology necessary to catalyze the yield of wealth from people and resources. By 2025, the developing countries would be set on the course of self-sustained environmentally sustainable development.

The Rio conference has established that the task is a finite one. It is well within the reach of the Earth's resources, known technology, and the annual turnover of the industrialized countries. On the precedent of the peacemaking at the end of the Second World War, those countries would now begin to make good on their promises of economic assistance and technology transfer to the developing countries. Effectively placed, Agenda 21 shows, the investment would make the present doubling of the world population the last one. In full partnership with the presently industrialized countries, the once-more-developing countries would join in "sustainable development of the biosphere."

The dawn of any resolve in the industrialized countries to join the partnership is clouded by the family planners, who most actively shape public opinion on population questions. They argue that curtailment of population growth cannot and need not wait on development. They cite the decline of the fertility rate in poor countries and claim there is unmet need for birth control counseling and supplies among 350 million women there. The countries they cite have, in fact, all experienced significant development; while they welcome help in meeting that unmet need, they insist it is a consequence of development, especially as reflected in infant death rates. Women in those countries protest the single-minded concern for their habits ahead of their needs. Human needs that can be met only by development are bound to grow in those countries as populations age in their passage through the demographic transition. The elderly are already the fastest growing age group in China.

The industrial countries were readier 40 years ago to render economic assistance to then underdeveloped countries. Government had retained war powers for the first tasks of peace. Now the global economy is in private hands. The 24-hours-a-day world financial market -- conducting currency-exchange transactions at ten times the rate that facilitates world trade -- disburses the credit. Not long ago, it out-traded the central banks of Germany, England, and France and vetoed the romantic notion of the European currency unit. The countries belonging to OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Developement) have made no adequate response to the
crisis next door in the "economies in transition," now the edge of anarchy. The 35-year period during which the size of the ultimate world population is open to concerted international action exceeds the reach of corporate consciousness. In the major
US transnationals, a quorum of the world's 350 largest, the half-life of top management is five years.

The privatized global economy may nonetheless be compelled to take action in time on the large and long-term question of the human presence. It must respond soon to deterioration of its home base. Unemployment has been averaging ten percent in the OECD economies; the income of families below the top few percentiles has been static or declining, and the number below the poverty line increasing. Consequent weakening of the social fabric -- evident in such crucial indicators as drug use, homicide rate, prison population, family stability, births out of wedlock and the rest -- besets all these countries and engenders political instability in some. The beneficiaries of the monetary ("supply side") management of the industrialized economies -- in the United States, the top one percentile received 90% of the last decade's total increase in income -- will be compelled to recognize the urgency of fiscal ("demand side") measures to lift their economies out of doldrums. The 0.7% for technology transfer to the developing countries would be a small add-on to the indicated need for investment in domestic public works and repair of the social fabric. For large private interests, which have accepted public subsidy before, it would go toward starting a century-long expansion of the world economy.

The first action asked of the industrialized countries by Agenda 21 is that they restart their economies. The electorates in those countries may yet assert their interest in the choice now being made by default. For the survival of market economies and self-governing polities, the present doubling of the world population must be the last. The logistics of sustaining a population of 28 billion would invite unsparing tyranny.

Originally published in the June/September 1994 issue of Boston Review

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