Why “Demographic Fatigue” Contributes Little to Our Understanding of Contemporary Africa

Lester Brown and his colleagues from the Worldwatch Institute have put forth the concept of “demographic fatigue” as the explanation for what they understand as a “crisis” engulfing the African continent.¹ Their publication Beyond Malthus coins the phrase “demographic fatigue” to describe what they perceive as the inability of governments to cope with the consequences of their rapidly expanding populations. Yet this work never extends its analysis beyond Malthus. Instead, it remains stuck in a narrow understanding of population growth as the foundation of all ills in Africa and a naive belief that more family planning and fewer children will provide the cure.

Blaming “over”-population for food shortages, deforestation and soil erosion in Africa is common fare among neo-Malthusians who believe that all people are “polluters” taxing the environment, whether they are involved in Western-based industrial production or African small-scale agriculture. However, the notion of “demographic fatigue” goes even further. It blames over-population for two of the most devastating events in post-colonial Africa: the epidemic of HIV/AIDS and the Rwandan genocide. By simply inserting the AIDS pandemic and genocide into the simplistic framework that locates population as the root of all evils, Brown pretends to address these issues and promote their solution—family planning—while actually ignoring all historical, anthropological, economic and political facets that led to these crises. Promoting “demographic fatigue” as responsible for HIV/AIDS and genocide in Africa is not only wrong. It is irresponsible.

Drawing directly from Malthus’ identification of necessary “checks” on population growth, Brown describes how modern “checks” are imposed through food shortages, AIDS, ethnic conflict and water shortages. He goes on to predict that “either countries will get their act together, shifting quickly to smaller families, or death rates will rise from one or more of the stresses described above.”² One of the critical flaws in this prediction is that Brown fails to recognize that countries do not have children, individuals have children. By “getting their act together,” Brown is advocating for draconian population policies that would restrict the rights of individual women and families to determine the size of their families. This directly contradicts the Plan of Action of the Cairo Population Conference, in which the international community endorsed a voluntary, rights-based approach to family planning and population policy and criticized the use of coercion, incentives and targets. Not only are environmental justifications used to promote Brown’s radical backlash to Cairo, but fears of genocidal wars and fatal diseases. Only in such a “state of emergency” could Brown muster any sympathy for his outdated prescriptions. Brown’s solutions replace trust in the ability of individuals to make their own reproductive choices with calls for state control of fertility.

Brown claims: “Given the limits to the carrying capacity of each country’s land and water resources, every national government now needs a carefully articulated and adequately supported population policy, one that takes into account the country’s carrying capacity at whatever consumption level citizens decide on.”³ First, the assertion that national access to food resources is a simple calculation of arable land + water supply begs the political question of why rich countries and rich farmers have access to advanced agricultural inputs while others, including most African farmers, must produce without the aid of tractors, fertilizers and herbicides. Also, it is surprising that an “environmental” organization would fail to deal with the differing levels of environmental impact from food production by large-scale agribusiness as compared to the more labor-intensive production by African smallholders.

Second, agricultural trade is an important part of African economies, so why would “carrying capacity” be defined within national boundaries when international relations hold more responsibility for the actual provision of foodstuffs? Finally, how are citizens to decide on national consumption levels? Would this be determined in a strictly democratic arrangement of one person, one vote? What about the largest consumers of resources and polluters that are institutional such as the military or multinational corporations?

The notion of “demographic fatigue” never actually tackles the global problems of environmental degradation, or the international politics that legitimize dumping toxic waste resulting from Northern consumption patterns into African landfills. Instead, it is the usual problem of poor, African women having too many babies that is blamed for environmental degradation, war, and deadly disease. Why would African citizens restrict their consumption in Brown’s easy tradeoff between goods and children when environmentally-speaking, population problems are statistically located in the North? Blaming the victim with the explanation of “demographic fatigue” discourages serious analysis into both the causes of these crises and their solutions.

The claim that African overpopulation leads to environmental degradation is based on intuition and not on empirical evidence. In fact, a collection of case studies published in the early nineties found no clear relationship between levels of population and environmental decline.⁴ In direct contradiction to Malthus and notions of “demographic fatigue,” research from the Machakos District in Kenya showed that population increase could be compatible with environmental recovery when market opportunities were available.⁵ In spite of inconsistent evidence from Africa, Brown claims that countries like Nigeria “face an impossible challenge in trying to feed their future populations,” and he bases this conclusion on the amount of grainland per person.⁶ However, he fails to mention the amount of arable land that is being contaminated by the ongoing exploitation of the country’s mineral wealth by multinational corporations. Nigeria could easily import food supplies to fill its environmental gap if a small proportion of this surplus was put toward that goal.

The notion of “demographic fatigue” is based on the assumption that governments in African countries “are typically worn down and drained of financial resources by the consequences of rapid population growth.”⁷ It is not my intent to argue that there are no population problems in Africa, or that population growth in the context of limited economic opportunities has not had any detrimental effect on the development efforts of African governments. However, placing population growth as the main cause of the “fatigue” of African governments is a case of mis-placed emphasis in order to support interests that are more ideological than empirical. “Demographic fatigue” suggests that if Africa was less populated, then African states would be able to effectively manage complex crises such as HIV/AIDS and military conflict. African states have the experience of less than one generation to draw from, and came about geographically as a result of the competition between European colonial administrators, gaining independence with political systems grafted on groups of fragmented and disparate interests. The resulting states, delinked from any civil institutions of support, were often unstable and caught up in violent civil wars. However, most of these wars had a strong international component as African states served as pawns in the Cold War competition between East and West. The recession of the 1970s added insult to injury with decreasing world prices for primary products (the main exports supporting African economies), increasing costs of oil and imported goods, and insufficient aid flows. The desire to increase and legitimize state power during times of economic insecurity coincided with advice by development “experts” to invest in large-scale interventions that African countries could not afford. The resulting loans poured money into political regimes that often lacked accountability, transparency, and popular support and thus made a very few quite successfully corrupt, and left most of the continent’s citizens in poverty.

One international response to the chasm between rich and poor was to enforce new conditionalities on further loans to African governments. These structural adjustment programs designed to meet Western lenders’ definition of fiscal prudence have had devastating effects on the very segments of society that they were supposed to support. Resulting cuts in government deficit funding have led to increased school fees for Africa’s children and rising costs for even the most rudimentary health care. At the same time, the average per capita income in Africa has fallen by about 20% in the last quarter century. Most Africans are worse off now than they were at independence. In place of “demographic fatigue,” one could as easily blame “colonial fatigue,” “debt fatigue,” “geo-political fatigue,” “corruption fatigue,” or what I would suggest is the most compelling—”poverty fatigue.” Unfortunately for those who would promote reduced fertility as a solution to problems of global poverty, a continent full of fewer poor people does not necessarily lead to a continent of less poverty.

Why would “demographic fatigue” be chosen as the scapegoat for crises in contemporary Africa? One possible reason is that in desperation over grappling with the severity and complexity of these issues, an easy answer with deceptively straightforward logic is assumed to be better than messy, piecemeal approaches that do not lay the undivided blame for these problems clearly in the agency of Africans themselves.

Another explanation for the appeal of “demographic fatigue” is that there are more insidious, unspoken, and often-denied undertones that link “over-fecundity” with “savagery,” “backwardness,” unconstrained sexuality, and violence. As Haraway points out, “The blunt racist imagery of the warm, sordid, genital, fecund, and colored tropics [is] contrasted to the cold, hygienic, cerebral, reproductively conservative, and white North.”⁸

Third World women’s “over”-reproduction is blamed for a host of social, political and economic ills as a way of making sure that these remain “Their” problems and not “Our” problems. Indeed, the undercurrent of the description of “demographic fatigue” is that Africa’s problems must be confined within African borders. According to Brown, the “spreading conflicts” in Africa which are supposedly caused by “demographic fatigue” “could drive countless millions across national borders as they seek safety, putting pressure on industrial countries to admit them as political refugees.”⁹

“Demographic fatigue” is a re-cycled version of the same old calls for population control that were summarily rejected by the world community at the 1994 Cairo Conference. Promoting population as the cause of African crises and family planning as the solution contributes little to our understanding of these problems in contemporary Africa. Condoms can not stop the flow of weapons sent to supply ongoing military conflicts, and contraceptive pills do not cure disease.

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