(4 of 8)
In the Pincers. But though the whole world is capable of multiplying without disaster, individual nations—and individual families—find plenty to worry about. "If our population continues to increase as rapidly as it is doing." sighed Pakistan's Soldier-President Ayub Khan recently, "we will soon have nothing to eat and will all become cannibals." In tiny Formosa, where a population of 10,000,000 is increasing by about 1,000 per day, former Peking University Chancellor Chiang Monlin warns: "Here it is like someone breathing into a small paper bag; something will burst." Complains India's Nehru: "You cannot rest. The population is increasing. They want more food, more clothing, more houses, more education—more and more." Implicit in Nehru's plaint is the central fact about the population explosion: as a rule, "overpopulation" is simply a way of talking about too many poor people. Poverty-stricken India's rate of population growth—an estimated 2% a year—is little higher than that of the prosperous U.S. (1.8%). Even in those poorer nations where natural increase rates (births minus deaths) run a whopping 3% a year, people are generally eating better than ever before in their history. But as part of what is often called the worldwide "revolution of expectations," they are demanding to eat —and live—still better.
The political consequences of the revolution of expectations, and the increasing numerical preponderance of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, inspire much of the nervous U.S. and European punditry about overpopulation. Already, the argument goes, the Afro-Asian nations in the U.N. (about to be bolstered further by newly created African states) form a political bloc outweighing the West; in time, unless pacified with rapid economic help, they are apt to turn more violently against the West. "Europe," says an Italian economist, "will soon be between black and yellow pincers, and that will be the end of us." France's Charles de Gaulle is convinced that Russia will one day be driven into the arms of the West by the expansion of "the yellow multitude that is China."
All this has the Sunday supplement flavor of William Randolph Hearst's obsession with "the yellow peril." Peking and Moscow may well fall out one day—but probably not over geography. The peoples of Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa have so far been too busy squabbling among themselves to gang up on anybody else. And in an H-bomb world, large population is no longer everything in military terms.
The altruism of those Westerners who want Asians to practice birth control is not always conceded. They are greeted with suspicion and hostility when they say they want to protect the health of mothers and give children a better start in life (though Asian peasant women who already have three or four children often covertly seek out ways to prevent further pregnancies). In Indonesia a few years ago. a woman doctor who tried to propagandize for contraception was charged by the press with trying to reimpose Western imperialism by the roundabout means of limiting Indonesia's population. In Jamaica the city wall of Kingston still bears the bitter scrawl: BIRTH CONTROL—A PLAN TO KILL NEGROES.