It
is a tragic measure of how far the world has changed — and the infinite
capacity of modern man for taking offence — that there are no two
subjects that can get you more swiftly into political trouble than
motherhood and apple pie. The last time I
tentatively suggested that there was something to be said in favour of
apple pie, I caused a frenzy of hatred in the healthy-eating lobby. It
reached such a pitch that journalists were actually pelting me with
pies, and demanding a retraction, and an apology, and a formal
denunciation of the role of apple pie in causing obesity. As
for motherhood — the fertility of the human race — we are getting to
the point where you simply can't discuss it, and we are thereby
refusing to say anything sensible about the biggest single challenge
facing the Earth; and no, whatever it may now be conventional to say,
that single biggest challenge is not global warming. That is a
secondary challenge. The primary challenge facing our species is the
reproduction of our species itself. Depending
on how fast you read, the population of the planet is growing with
every word that skitters beneath your eyeball. There are more than
211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of
Germany every year. As someone who has now been
travelling around the world for decades, I see this change, and I feel
it. You can smell it in the traffic jams of the Middle East. You can
see it as you fly over Africa at night, and you see mile after mile of
fires burning red in the dark, as the scrub is removed to make way for
human beings. You can see it in the satellite
pictures of nocturnal Europe, with the whole place lit up like a
fairground. You can see it in the crazy dentition of the Shanghai
skyline, where new skyscrapers are going up round the clock. You
can see it as you fly over Mexico City, a vast checkerboard of
smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to the
other; and when you look down on what we are doing to the planet, you
have a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating
like bacilli in a Petri dish. The world's
population is now 6.7 billion, roughly double what it was when I was
born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in
my lifetime. The UN last year revised its
forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be 9.2 billion people by
2050, and I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this
impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat
the issue with the seriousness it deserves. How
the hell can we witter on about tackling global warming, and reducing
consumption, when we are continuing to add so relentlessly to the
number of consumers? The answer is politics, and political cowardice. There
was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when people such as my father,
Stanley, were becoming interested in demography, and the UN would hold
giant conferences on the subject, and it was perfectly respectable to
talk about saving the planet by reducing the growth in the number of
human beings. But over the years, the argument
changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became
forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of
overall human fertility — global motherhood — has become more or less
banned. We seem to have given up on population
control, and all sorts of explanations are offered for the surrender.
Some say Indira Gandhi gave it all a bad name, by her demented plan to
sterilise Indian men with the lure of a transistor radio. Some
attribute our complacency to the Green Revolution, which seemed to
prove Malthus wrong. It became the received wisdom that the world's
population could rise to umpteen billions, as mankind learnt to make
several ears of corn grow where one had grown before. And
then, in recent years, the idea of global population control has been
more or less stifled by a pincer movement from the Right and the Left.
American Right-wingers disapprove of anything that sounds like birth
control, and so George W. Bush withholds the tiny contribution America
makes to the UN Fund for Population Activities, regardless of the
impact on the health of women in developing countries. As
for the Left, they dislike suggestions of population control because
they seem to smack of colonialism and imperialism and telling the Third
World what to do; and so we have reached the absurd position in which
humanity bleats about the destruction of the environment, and yet there
is not a peep in any communiqué from any summit of the EU, G8 or UN
about the population growth that is causing that destruction. The
debate is surely now unavoidable. Look at food prices, driven ever
higher by population growth in India and China. Look at the insatiable
Chinese desire for meat, which has pushed the cost of feed so high that
Vladimir Putin has been obliged to institute price controls in the
doomed fashion of Diocletian or Edward Heath. Even
in Britain, chicken farmers are finding that the cost of chickenfeed is
no longer exactly chickenfeed, and, though the food crisis may once
again be solved by the wit of man, the damage to the environment may be
irreversible. It is time we had a grown-up
discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country
and on this planet. Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the
most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant
suburbia? This is not, repeat not, an argument
about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where
people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants
add hugely to the economy. This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race. All
the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world
poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to
birth control. Isn't it time politicians stopped being so timid, and
started talking about the real number one issue? Boris Johnson is MP for Henley |