ENVIRONMENT/POPULATION: 1994 U.N. prize winner shocks scholars

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jaya Dayal

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 9 1994 (IPS) - A decision by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) to give its highest award to Paul and Anne Ehrlich this year has shocked some international development watchers.

“How monstrous,” said a prominent Third World development expert, speaking on condition of anonymity.

UNEP will award the Ehrlichs and Indian agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan its 1994 Sasakawa Environment Prize at a formal ceremony in San Francisco Thursday.

But critics of the U.S. environmentalists are wondering just why the United Nations is rewarding the advocates of population control policies, especyally after the September International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).

Developing and industrialised countries at that meeting disavowed numbers-driven population policies in favour of programmes emphasising choice, education, economic security and improved participation of women in political processes.

Yet according to Elizabeth Dowdeswell, executive director of the Nairobi-based UNEP, the selection of the Ehrlichs as this year’s winners “could not have been more appropriate.”

Paul Ehrlich catapulted to fame in 1968 with the publication of ‘The Population Bomb’, which presented population growth in the South as a bomb that was about to go off with catastrophic consequences for the environment. The book included such sections as ‘Too Many People’, ‘Too Little Food’, and ‘A Dying Planet’.

Then in 1990, Ehrlich and his wife Anne published ‘The Population Explosion,’ which purports to describe, “from global warming to rain forest destruction, famine, and air and water pollution — why overpopulation is our number one environmental problem.” They propose a simple solution: “population control.”

“Rapid population growth in poor nations is an important reason they stay poor, and overpopulation in those nations will greatly increase their destructive impact on the environment as they struggle to develop,” say the Ehrlichs.

While they concede that consumption and technology must also share the blame for environmental crises, “first priority must be given to achieving population control” as a means of stopping further destruction.