'UNDP has no clothes*'
(its arguments are too easily seen through)
A dialogue with Richard Jolly lately, UNDP's Senior Adviser in New York
presently, Professor Sir Richard Jolly at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex
This page was written in 1997 after a celebrated discussion that Richard and I had in New York. For 24 hours it was on the web. Richard wanted it removed. It is now time to put it back there. "The great success in reducing poverty in the 20th century shows that eradicating poverty in the first decades of the next century is feasible. This may seem an extraordinary ambition, but it is well within our grasp. .. About three quarters of the world's poorest people live in the rural areas, dependant on agricultural activities. For these people pro-poor growth means raising agricultural productivity and incomes...".
UNDP's Human Development report 1997
...on the minute plots that so many of the rural poor now have, and their high fertility, which means that their children are going to have even less?
We argue that agricultural poverty, especially ultrapoverty, can only be relieved by disentrapment...
'A clash of paradigms*' UNDP - the 'United Nations Development Programme is the UN's senior programme. It is therefore fitting that 'benign uproar' should start with Richard Jolly, who is Senior adviser to its Administrator (director), James Gustave Speth. In this web-page Richard defends the current paradigm - that entrapment does not exist - against ourselves who argue that it does. Richard and I have been friends ever since blissful days at Makerere* in the 1960s - since when we have come to uphold radically different paradigms, and followed different paths, Richard to senior positions in the UN, and myself wherever...The unfortunate Richard is in a tight spot. He has to be loyal to his chief - therefore he cannot defect. We have therefore said to him: "Why don't you go to James Gustave Speth, and say 'I have got these terrible fellows King and Elliott round my neck - over to you, they have all the arguments, you are the boss - you deal with them". Loyally, he has not done this, but has born the brunt himself.
James Gustave Speth, being a US citizen, would, of course, be in an even tighter spot. He would have to 'shift paradigms', and defect from the current 'population policy lockstep'. He would provoke much 'benign uproar' within the UN system, and if we are correct in our major hypothesis, he would also incur the great displeasure of the US State department. Therefore he too cannot defect.
Should we repeat Richard's arguments? He has has never given us permission to do so. We have however shown them to him and he has not replied - so far. We think we should - in all love and in all charity, especially for the world - and, above all, for Africa. He is, after all, Senior Adviser to the UN senior programme. We think the world should debate UNDP's arguments and he has set them out for us. If you think that his arguments are 'somewhat thin' - Our main bone of contention with UNDP is that it expects to increase agricultural productivity sufficiently to get rural families out of poverty, when land-holdings are already so tiny in many places that this is impossible. UNDP assumes it is possible. These are the trapped communities where carrying capacity is being exceeded, and there is no hope of migration - and no hope of adequate economic development fast enough to prevent starvation and slaughter. This crucial problem is fudged over. Its scale is awesome- probably much of a continent - and more.Lady M. "You are very interested in the weakness of UNDP's arguments. What do you think are the weaknesses in yours?"Lady M. "Then who is to blame?"MHK. "Our main weakness is that we have no systematic study of the extent and severity of entrapment. We have solid data for Rwanda and Malawi, and we have the - private - opinion of Africa's greatest demographer that much of it is trapped. The fact that we don't have systematic data is because the Hardinian taboo prevents any agency financing the necessary research - we have sought funds for a systematic survey many times".
Lady M. "Do you think Richard is to blame for sticking to the old paradigm, and doing his best to paste over the ever widening cracks* in it?"
MHK. "Of course not? In our second paper, Legitimate double think we argued that "...Unfortunately the political tensions surrounding entrapment are at present so great that aid agency executives must not be pressed to recognize entrapment...", and that "...Consequently we are faced with a period of legitimate double-think This is legitimate because we have to recognize it, and double-think because we have to accept that the agencies cannot yet do so" - that is until they had been at least partly resolved by open discussion, especially in academia. That was five years ago. Until you, dear Lady M, came on the scene and we opened this website, the Hardinian taboo had been as tight as ever. Entrapment has barely ever been discussed - not even after the Rwandan débâcle!!!*".
MHK. "I would lay the blame fairly and squarely on the shoulders of Richard Horton editor of The Lancet for not opening up the debate on entrapment in Rwanda when he was pressed to do so, and on those of its ombudsman, Tom Sherwood. It is high time that The Lancet had an editor who had the courage to debate the world's major dilemmas. I also discussed entrapment with Paul Demeny of the Population and Development Review, which has never mentioned entrapment. He had all sorts of almost equally far-fetched arguments as to why it did not exist. But I could see that his tongue was in both cheeks!* His journal is a publication of The Population Council which is firmly in the population policy lockstep, so he is not a free agent. The editor of The Lancet should however be in nobody's pocket*, and therefore in a position to debate anything he likes"."Discussion with Richard Jolly took place over a pizza in downtown New York in December 1997. He summarized his arguments some days later. I have scanned this in in its original bold type. Lady M also has a few things to say. Our discussion proceeds as follows. The better bits are marked with '+' signs. If you later you click 'discussion' you will be brought back here. If you click next, argument, you can skip quickly from one argument to another".
Lady M. "Much of your disagreement with Richard Jolly stems from the fact that he fails to accept that your ideas have developed in the eight years since you wrote that first paper, Health is a Sustainable State. He is obsessed with the 'doctor lets sick children die', dilemma, whereas you now regard it as only one of several, and not a major one".
MHK. "Our ideas have indeed developed. This outline should not be regarded as final, since we hope that our understanding will continue to develop".
(a) We now have a formal definition of entrapment, which includes the idea of area, carrying capacity, migration, and the economy, etc.(b) We focus sharply on fertility, and see 1-child families as the major solution. These are only possible in the context of a UN program for a 1-child world.
(c) We have explored the relationship of entrapment to the general notion of the recently named 'Hardinian taboo'- the taboo which we humans place on solving our population problems.
(d) We have explored the many foundations of the Hardinian taboo [now called its Demons].
(e) During the eight years in which we have been studying entrapment, the focus of our attention has shifted from one of its problems to another. Their present focus is on the role of the US State Department keeping demographic entrapment taboo, in a 'population policy lockstep', presumably so as to minimize criticism of its own resource consumption. The crux of this is that the State Department is actively preventing humanity from solving its greatest problem - population. We expect that this is where the focus of our interest will remain, since it appears to be 'the heart of the matter'.
(f) We have become aware that the high status of 'the child' in contemporary Western liberalism is a recent phenomenon, and is not held by all cultures.
(g) We have examined the entrapment of Rwanda and suggested remedies.
(h) Whereas the concept of entrapment and its name, neither of which were invented by us, leads to the notion of the 'trap shutting', we now feel that this gives the wrong impression since it implies a finality, to what is a gradual process punctured by periodic disasters - as in Rwanda.
(i) We are struck by the enormous size of the problem, and how entrapment has ramifications into almost every aspect of the human condition.
Our ideas remain the same in that:
(a) The conflict between the child and the community, which we preoccupied us in the first paper, remains. We see it as only one of several major dilemmas. It is of marginal importance in mild entrapment, but of much greater importance in severe entrapment, especially when fertility is high, as in Rwanda.(b) We hold that because public health measures for the control of childhood mortality exist, they don't - in theory - necessarily have to be applied, because they can make the condition of the community worse - marginally so in mild entrapment, severely so if entrapment is grave. In practice the dilemmas of this position are apt to be exaggerated, since under field conditions the range of possible options is limited. This is the 'doctor lets sick children die' dilemma, for which see Fred Sai's statement below.
(c) We have never said that not doing everything possible to prevent child mortality was either an adequate, or a desirable method of population control.
(d) We have never suggested that entrapment was a final process in which nothing can be done for a community, and maintain this view. We have outlined a programme for Rwanda.
'A retirement hobby'
Richard Jolly . "Didn't I hear you referring to 'disentrapment' as your "...retirement 'hobby' ..."? next argumentMHK. "Don't get too high-minded, but since you have opened up the subject, I had better tell you what I really think disentrapment is. It is what Ben, a Tunisian student in a supermarket checkout here said it is after he had browsed this website. It is - un travail sacré - a sacred task, which is why we have used this phrase as our opening quote. After all, according to Jack Caldwell, Africa's most eminent demographer, most of the continent is trapped - in effect proceeding in much the same direction as Rwanda. What more travail sacré could one have than trying to disentrap it? To the extent that I am 'retired', and unpaid, apart from a very occasional lecture fee, it is indeed a rather expensive hobby. I have recently been telling people here in Geneva - 'C'est mon travail sacré'. This goes down very well!"
"I have had such a huge number of seemingly miraculous escapes from death, whereas so many of my friends have died, that I sometimes wonder if the Almighty has not specifically preserved me for this task. I sometimes feel myself sub specie aeternitatis.* 'He' is somewhere over there, 'He' and I look down on the world and are sad. One day we will meet".
Richard Jolly. Do you really "...propose that children should be left to die as a means of population control...?" This caused UNICEF, especially, enormous grief...!!!? next argumentMHK. "Charles' argument is the really important one here".
Charles. "In practice the important decision is: Where to put the marginal resources? These are the available funds which are not yet committed to something else. If a country is in the process of entrapment, do you put them into child survival? Or into family planning? Or into socio-economic development? I argue that that it makes no sense whatever to put them into child survival, but that it is an open question about how you would split them between family planning and socio-economic development. I agree that: (1) Socio-economic development usually (but by no means always) reduces fertility. (2) Socio-economic development may, at times, have a greater effect in reducing fertility than family planning. (3) Reductions in child mortality have often, but not always been followed by reductions in fertility. The point is that they act slowly and unpredictably. The countries we are most concerned about are those in which that link seems to be weakest. In these countries, therefore, it seems an illogical and perverse allocation decision to put resources into reducing child mortality when there are better options for reducing fertility available".
Charles. "I really think we have to nail the 'letting sick children die' nonsense much more firmly. It is not an issue of letting children die. It is, as I have said above, an issue of where you put resources at the margin in order, in the longer term, to save children".
Charles. "The point is not that children are not valuable and valued, but that the idea that they have a pre-eminent claim on a community's resources is both Western and relatively modern. This ties in with the allocation of marginal resources argument. It is a peculiarly modern Western notion that marginal resources should automatically go to children. We should not let our own cultural preconceptions dominate our strategic thinking about other people's cultures, where those preconceptions may not be shared. See also. This really says it all, so you may want to skip the next bit".
MHK. "Let me put this problem in context. Health is a sustainable state was the first paper in the series. It opened up many of the dilemmas of entrapment, without exploring any of them adequately. I felt that I had entered a darkened room. What has since been termed 'the Hardinian taboo', had kept the light out of that room - and for most people still does. This paper was my first attempt to pull back the curtains of the taboo and let in the light. I saw one horror after another. The first horror that I came across was the conflict between the interests of the child and that of the community, which was the major theme of our first two papers (Health is a sustainable State, and Legitimate Double think. Public health and paediatrics could hardly have a greater dilemma. I now see this particular dilemma as merely one of several, particularly: (1) the human rights implications of entrapment, and (2) its implications for Northern lifestyles and employment. Charles and I now feel that we have let much light into the room. Although we have not explored its many details, we do think that we now see the general outline of demographic entrapment clearly, and feel that we have at least outlined its major dilemmas".
Entrapment restated
"As I have said before, entrapment is the consequence of an unfavourable conjunction of the following six major variables. It picks out these critical six from among many others, which help to determine whether or not a particular community will proceed to starvation and slaughter. The others include weather changes, particularly droughts, debt and terms of trade, etc. Whether or not it is valid and useful to pick out these critical six variables, when there are so many others is arguable. We argue that it is, and that it is a critically necessary way to look meaningfully at the world, and how it can be helped - with due consideration for the others. We argue, for example, that although it is vital to abolish debt, this would not by itself cure entrapment. The six variables are":
"The common way to avoid considering entrapment is to consider only some of these six major variables, expecting that those which have not been considered will come to the rescue, before starvation or slaughter intervene".
- A circumscribed area of land
- The carrying capacity of that land
- The population, in that area of land particularly projections of future population as determined by: births (fertility), and deaths (mortality).
- Migration
- The economy, particularly as a means of producing exports which can be exchanged for the necessary imports, particularly food.
- Time, most critically 'the ticking of the population clock'.
"We argue that while everything possible should be done to modify all these six variables favourably (and others), the critical ones are fertility and mortality. Either fertility will come down or mortality will go up".
"When writing this first paper (Health is a Sustainable State) I was still gravely clouded by the Hardinian taboo myself. What has since become so obvious, even banal, is the need to reduce fertility to the point of 1-child families, and for a UN directed global program for a 1-child world. At that time this was still tabooed in my own mind, which remained clouded by human rights problems and by the general antipathy to 'the Chinese solution'".
"Hence I was left with the need to focus on mortality. I pictured in my mind the very poorest subgroup in Calcutta, where I imagined one more mouth to feed would be less for someone else. At that time we had not formally defined entrapment with the concept of carrying capacity being exceeded in a specific area, etc. So my idea of entrapment was still vague. However the notion which I had then of there being particular conditions under which "one more mouth to feed is less for someone else" still holds. It is particularly clear at the country level in Rwanda, which we argue is tightly trapped"."This is not to say that everyone in Rwanda is trapped - the elite can usually migrate. Similarly in less severely trapped communities there will be very disadvantaged subgroups, at the poorest end of the social spectrum, where 'one more mouth to feed is less for someone else', whereas this will not be the case for the better off. This was my imagined subgroup in Calcutta".
"What I did not see at the time was that, for a less severely trapped community, as in India as a whole, which we think is trapped, not doing everything possible to reduce child mortality (letting sick children die) does very little to control population growth for the community as a whole. This has to be attempted with a 1-child policy. Letting sick children die is therefor not an effective method of population control under conditions of moderate entrapment. However, for severely disadvantaged high fertility subgroups and families within that community, where one more child mouth to feed is less for someone else, child survival programmes would appear to be able to make the condition of those families and subgroups worse. The critical argument here is of course Charles' marginal resources argument".
"As to whether India is or is not trapped, we argue that it is, in that it can just feed itself now if the monsoon is good, but its population is set to about double and water is now a greater constraint than land".
"Health is a sustainable state was written before the Rwandan genocide. There, keeping all the average mother's children alive (8.5 in 1994, now only 6.7), by whatever means, including oral rehydration fluid, really would mean less to eat for someone else, or a corresponding increase in the propensity for slaughter, which we argue is strongly driven by population pressure. Letting sick children die under conditions of severe entrapment is a more effective means of population control, than under lesser conditions of entrapment, but it is by no means either an adequate or a desirable one. It may however be an inevitable one"."In Rwanda, we argued for a crash demographic transition to 1-child families, which would have required the lifting of the Hardinian taboo and the recognition of entrapment by academia, the UN agencies, academia and the Catholic church, and by the community, accompanied by massive development aid tied to locally agree objectives. We also argued that the dialogue should at least have been opened, which it never has been. [Note I have since been able to open the 1-child dialogue see]. The Hardinian taboo had fallen on The Lancet which rejected our paper on Rwanda (An open letter to Carol Bellamy)".
"Is this a satisfactory answer? I argue that in the first paper, Health is a Sustainable State I understood entrapment situation incompletely rather than having got it totally wrong, and that the second paper Legitimate double think amplified our position and completed it on this point. In that paper we argued that, since there are only dilemmas when there is some choice of action, the dilemmas are: (1) Where you spend the money - on family planning or on child survival? This is Charles' marginal resources argument above. (2) Who does the deciding - 'them' the community, or us, 'the agency'".
"Assuming that one had massive aid for Rwanda, where would one spend it, knowing that the more children one kept alive, the tighter the 1-child programme would have to be? And knowing also that, as the result of demographic momentum, even if all females from then on had 1-child only, the population would continue to increase substantially. So it might have to be a programme for 0.5 children (or less). There is a real conflict here between the interests of the child and the community. I argue that just because methods for child survival exist, they don't always have to be applied - because under certain circumstances, of which Rwanda is one, keeping them alive would make the condition of the community worse. Using Charles' argument, this would be a bad use of marginal resources".
"In practice the dilemma would be more theoretical than real, because there would not be the funds to do everything possible for child care, so the dilemma would not be so stark. The dilemma would however remain - How much to spend on family planning, how much on other aspects of development, and how much on child care? (Charles' marginal resources argument yet again). A further factor which would make the dilemma more theoretical than practical is that, 'on the ground', it would be heavily influenced by 'practical politics' locally, in what was demographically optimum would take second place. Incidentally, what the community decide - after the options have been adequately made clear to them - must be taken as final".
Lady M. "I am going to add a question of my own. "Don't you think that you should so change society that children born should be assured of food, schooling, and a job etc.?"
"Fred Sai (see below) remarked that, if children are to be kept alive it must be for a life worth living. For the children in the Indian subgroup that I have just mentioned it is all but impossible. For the nearly seven children of the average Rwandan mother, it is quite impossible. Much as though one would like to promote development rapidly, it cannot be changed fast enough, to cope with such high fertility. In the reality, the present conditions of the trapped appear to be getting worse, not better. For a total fertility of nearly seven, there is an impossible way to go to give every Rwandan child a decent life".
Lady M. "Don't you think that you had better come clean and admit that you 'got it wrong' in your first paper?"
MHK. "No, I would say that I (inevitably) got it incomplete. Whatever may or may not be the case for the conflict between the interests of the child and subgroups in the community in India, it is rock hard in Rwanda. There is also Charles' marginal resources argument - yet once more!"
.The status of the child
Lady M. "Isn't there something almost sacred about the high status of 'the child', with you people these days, so that not to do everything for the child is somehow unthinkable? In the 19th century you English sent your children down the mines?"MHK. "Indeed there is. Legitimate double think was also concerned with the high status of 'the child' in the current state of late Western liberalism, and with the notion that if we can somehow 'get things right with the child' ('paediolatry'), things will somehow come right with everything else. It is of course much more difficult than this".
"Charles did a very good section on this. Unfortunately, 'the child' is not 'above ecology' above the constraints of population numbers, territory, food, migration, etc. He is not an ecological absolute - he is determined by these factors and must take his place among them".
Richard Jolly. "...Of course I am aware that this drastic proposal was more in early versions of your hobby and less in your later ones - and perhaps you have now dropped it entirely. If you have abandoned such a drastic and counterproductive recommendation, I hope you will publicly acknowledge this somewhere soon..." next argument
MHK. "I think that there really is a conflict between the interests of the child and the community. I explain it here, and I think that in our second paper, Legitimate double-think, we explain our present views as a series of ethical stages in the conflict between the child and the community, as the community progresses towards ever more severe entrapment".
Richard Jolly. Don't you think that "the very proposal (that children should be left to die) would have an extremely nasty appeal to some people in your richer countries... a racist appeal?" next argumentMHK. "The fact that the world's races are trapped unequally is an unfortunate accident of history. Knowing that they are trapped and proceeding to starvation and slaughter, without doing anything to help them, even to the point of not opening the dialogue, is surely much more 'racist' than trying to think the problem through -and do all we possibly can to help them".
Richard Jolly. "...Don't you think that the recognition of entrapment which depends on encouraging a "we and them" view of the world, they have their problems (which we don't) and they must think the unthinkable, the drastic action of letting sick children die..." next argument
MHK. "'They' do indeed have problems which 'we' don't. We don't want them to recognize their problems, because if they do, they will insist that we alter our lifestyle. By keeping the Hardinian taboo firmly in place we prevent them from recognizing their problems - and questioning our lifestyle. We also prevent them from recognizing that there is a conflict between the interests of their children, and their communities - which they should think through, and we should do everything possible to help them with".
"Paradoxically, it is not recognizing entrapment which encourages a we/them attitude. After all it was The Lancet's ombudsman, Tom Sherwood, who in supporting Richard Horton, the editor, that it need not debate the dilemmas of entrapment, referred to it as a mere 'third world dilemma' [1]- implicitly as 'their' business, not 'ours'. We argue strongly that it is our business - the very reverse of your 'we-them' argument".
Motives, publicity Richard Jolly. I feel that you sometimes use "...what I feel are disingenuous (having secret motives, insincere, OED) disclaimers "Oh how it pains me to draw attention to such terrible dilemmas..." Next argumentMHK. "Motives are always difficult. I argue that if as a practitioner in tropical public health, one comes across something like entrapment (actually there is nothing like it) then one is morally bound to 'dig', to try to tease it out. If one finds horrible dilemmas, then one has to point them out. Quite honestly I do find them excruciating".
` Richard Jolly."The truth is that I feel that you (and Charles ?) Are in some bizarre way attracted to its promotion, precisely because it is so shocking (but also because it guarantees some publicity, or at least it did so initially)". next argument
MHK. "...attracted to its promotion". "We regard the 'entrapment/Northern lifestyle/ US State Department/ population problem' as We are therefore inevitably attracted to its promotion in the sense that seeing it, we have to try to do something about it".
MHK. "...because it guarantees some publicity..." "Initially, I never thought about publicity. If one writes something one likes to put it in a journal which is read, hence The Lancet (before the Hardinian taboo had fallen upon it!). My first experience of publicity was the assistant editor of The Lancet, Imogen Evans, ringing me up the day before its publication saying "Do you realize what the media are going to do to you?" I had not previously thought about it, but I said "Yes" grimly. The following day the phone started going before 9 am and I was 'on the media' all day, ending up on Sky television. The Times and the Guardian ran banner headlines "Doctor says Let sick children die". It was the most horrible day of my life. But media interest quickly passed. All I got from the vice-chancellor was a grimace, which says much for the academic freedom of this splendid university - the University of Leeds, of which I have the honour of still being a Research Fellow".
"What had happened was that, in the editorial that accompanied the paper the The Lancet had printed the key phrase from the paper without discussing the dilemmas. The editorial was all that most journalists read. Retrospectively, I think I was 'set up' by The Lancet, but I was far too scared at the time to accuse them of any such thing".
"The publicity that the paper got was rather useful, and it did at least start a wide debate. The pity is that the account of entrapment that the paper gave was - inevitably at that stage - incomplete".
"Now we really do want publicity. If one's objective really is to lift the Hardinian taboo and so modify southern fertility and northern lifestyles - to achieve behaviour change globally - then one has to have publicity. So we are not in the least ashamed about it. However as soon as the taboo starts to lift, and there is nothing that can be better done by someone else, I shall retire to the contented obscurity of my workshop".
"Shocking thoughts" Richard Jolly. It seems to me that "...as I hope Charles will agree, not every shocking thought must be thought, let alone promoted..." next argumentMHK. "We hold that, shocking or not, academia and the UN agencies must face reality and think it. The reality is that there are situations of severe entrapment in which one more child mouth to feed is less for someone else, and with it an increased propensity for slaughter. If the response to reality requires widespread action, then that reality has to be promoted".
Richard Jolly."...nor are the many who object to be treated as secretly agreeing, but being unwilling to admit the point in public..." next argument
MHK. "Most people have never heard of entrapment and remain in blissful ignorance. Many who have heard of it, assume that one or more of the six variables above (commonly economic development), will solve the problem and prevent starvation and slaughter when there is no reasonable hope of it doing so, as in Rwanda or Malawi. Many people know perfectly well what is going to happen, as does The Lancet's ombudsman, Tom Sherwood, who considers it a mere 'third world dilemma', and by implication no concern of 'ours'. Some are strongly in our camp and want to see entrapment recognized and minimized. How many there are in each of these groups we have no means of knowing".
"We should not forget that, if population policy is 'marching in lockstep', it requires great moral courage on the part of established demographers, and aid agency executives, especially senior ones, to break ranks and change sides, especially if they are in strong institutional positions. It is much easier for us non-demographers to do so, but our voices are correspondingly weaker. Our correspondence would indicate that there are many who agree with us, and that their main difficulty is in finding some means of expressing themselves".
Richard Jolly . "...in the eight or ten years or so in which you have been promoting these ideas, I cannot think of one person, not one, who even remotely has indicated to me that they think you are right but dare not admit it in public..." next argument
MHK. "In that case you had better come and have a look into my files, and read my email. If one has strong opinions and is eminent and in a position of power, it is the very unusual person indeed who will face opprobrium* - and a bitter argument - by openly disagreeing and saying what he really thinks, since he stands to lose much by doing so. I would prefer, and indeed should not, name names, since this would, among other things, alter political (power) relationships, and you would know who was 'us' and who was 'them' - in quite other ways in which this idiom is used elsewhere in this paper. How do you think one of your subordinates would fare if he agreed with us?"
"Ask Jack Caldwell, Africa's most eminent demographer, he will tell you - privately - that most of that continent is trapped".
"I will make two more exceptions. Both are 'above politics;' and both happen to be African. Needless to say, I was initially somewhat anxious as to what they might say".
"Fred Sai said in effect: "What is all the fuss about, we have always been letting children die" - in the sense that in not helping them when we could was to have let them die. Any frivolous expense, even on a cup of coffee, lets children die, when the money to buy it might have been given to Oxfam for its child survival programmes".
"Ransome Kuti recounted how, as Minister of Health, he had taken his President round a Nigerian village overflowing with children. The President had remarked "What on earth are we going to do with all these children?" A Nigerian President asked that question and his minister of health repeated it. Jim Grant of UNICEF could never have done either. If Jack Caldwell is right, these are the children of a trapped community destined for starvation and slaughter. If not these children, then their children. Ransome Kuti did not specifically agree, but he was at least open and questioning - and delighted to see me". [I shall have to get both their permission to quote them.]
"It would be a very exceptional demographer who - openly - sided with two non-demographers and said that they were right, and who broke ranks in the 'population policy lockstep'. It is a matter of 'not one of us', and especially of 'not invented by one of us'".
Richard Jolly. "...what I mostly disagree with is this sense of imminent doom, the trap about to shut (having already shut in some places or countries). It is this aspect of entrapment, indeed the very word, which then leads on to face the terrible dilemmas, to think the unthinkable, to consider one appalling act, rather than to take and encourage widespread action on a number of fronts..." next argumentMHK. "...indeed the very word [entrapment]..." "We did not invent the term 'entrapment', it goes back to Nelson and Liebenstein in the 1950s, if not earlier. It is the technical term and one has to use it. I had to use my own private term for it for a year until I was told what the agreed technical term was".
MHK. "...the trap having already shut in some places and countries...". "When I first studied entrapment, I did indeed use the term 'trap shutting'. I now think that the process of shutting is drawn out with particular episodes, as for example, the Rwandan genocide, and that there is no final act of shutting. Since we already have the term 'trap' it is natural to think of it shutting. If we are to think of it trap shutting, we must think of this being a slow, jerky and episodic process".
"The use of the term 'trap shutting' it has the further disadvantage of encouraging people to think that nothing can be done. In fact much can be done - see below for our programme for Rwanda".
MHK. "...rather than to take and encourage widespread action on a number of fronts..." This is exactly what we do propose - even for Rwanda. The core of our proposals is that there has to be reduction in fertility to 1-child only, as part of a UN programme for a 1-child world. The community - and the government, and the UN, and the catholic church - have to see that, if starvation and slaughter is to be avoided, it has to be by means of 1-child families, accompanied by a massive programme of social development. Services have to be provided to make sure that one child survives. It is much better that the remaining five or six children should not be born. If they are born there is no way in which they can be provided with a life worth living.
Richard Jolly. "...I think that you have being ahistorical, by ignoring those who have forecast doom on different occasions during the last two centuries, beginning with Malthus..." next argumentMHK. "The fact that the doomsters* are always said to have been wrong in the past does not guarantee, that they always have been wrong, or that they always will be wrong. They were right in Rwanda, which the Belgians had long considered trapped. When I confronted the demographers at Cairo with this, they all said 'Very difficult'. None would admit that the Belgians had been right".
"Globally, I find it very difficult to be optimistic now that the rate of increase of global grain yield, which has been falling since the 1960s when it was about 3%, is now less than that of population increase which is now 1.48%, especially with the demands of China being what they are expected to be".
"I see little point in raking over older authors. I am much more interested in what is happing now, which is why I am about to visit Malawi".
Machakos
Richard Jolly. "...the ahistoric emphasis on population growth in your concept of 'demographic entrapment'. You consistently ignore cases like Machakos, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Mauritius, or at the more developed end Singapore, even the Netherlands...." next argumentMHK. "The Machakos area of Kenya. The admirable book 'More people, less erosion' by Tiffen and Mortimore [2] compares an area of Kenya in the 1930s when the colonial administration were very worried by the condition of the people and their land, with its condition in the late 1980s - 50 years later".
This is what it was like in the 1930s:
"... The Machakos Reserve is an appalling example of a larger area of land which has been subjected to uncoordinated and practically uncontrolled development by natives whose multiplication and the increase of whose stock has been permitted, free from the checks of war, and largely from those of disease under benevolent British rule..." [!!]
"...Every phase of misuse of land is vividly and poignantly displayed in this reserve, the inhabitants of which are rapidly drifting into a state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to a parching desert of rocks, stones and sand (Colin Maher 1937)...".
"By the late 1980s there had been enormous improvement. This improvement is often used to support the theses: (1) That land scarcity is no constraint to population growth. (2) That the experience of Machakos, which is almost a suburb of Nairobi, is widely replicable elsewhere. (3) That because of the Machakos experience entrapment does not and cannot exist. On the contrary, we argue that Machakos is itself now severely trapped".
"Tiffen and Mortimore show that, even in Machakos, increased population has mostly been supported by increased area cultivated, and there is now a severe land constraint. Unfortunately, the authors do not discuss how future population is to be accommodated, since with the Kenyan total fertility of 4.85, the population of the area will certainly double, and may well then double again. With the recent re-election of President Maui for a further term, industry is reported to be closing down, so that Nairobi is becoming a ghost town - with even fewer opportunities for employment, for those who would like to move out of Machakos".
"This is what they say":
Page 5. "...the changes that occurred over half a century. During that period... the population of the District grew fivefold, ....while the area cultivated grew from about 15% of the Reserve in 1930, to between 50% and 80% in 1978..." - that is by nearly as much.
Page 17. "...All places are unique, and perhaps few more so than Machakos, with its special combination of dryness, bimodal rainfall, altitude, relatively good access to major cities (Nairobi and Mombassa), and cultural characteristics..."
Page 26. They are creditably honest about the weakness of some of their data, on which the title of their book "...less erosion" depends. "...For the soil, the most critical variable in our analysis, the database is weakest..."
Page 44 "...In 1990, the population density in Muisuni was 518/km2. Leaders were worried by the tiny farms which children were inheriting, and by the increasing joblessness among the young, despite huge parental investment in school fees..."
Page 62."... There is no free land for occupation. As farm sizes fall, the urgency of enabling children to qualify for non-farm jobs increases, and high educational costs are forcing people to think of family limitation. In the complete absence of free land for development, one of the traditional Akamba options has been eliminated. Income generation must now come from still greater intensification on an already small farm in a difficult farming environment [our bold type], or the development of new occupations in the processing and servicing sectors of the economy..."
Page 74. "According to the Department of Agriculture's estimates, the cultivated area grew from 56,000 ha in 1930 to 313, 000 ha (23% of the District [as distinct from the study area]) in the 1980s, a rate of growth closely comparable to that of the population..." [our bold type]..."
Charles Elliott. "You miss an important point here. As Tiffen recognizes, Machakos survived because it was economically and politically well-connected to Nairobi. It got more agricultural extension (instruction and technical help for its farmers) and more remittences* than is usual in rural Kenya. It therefore had a much better chance of escaping entrapment than comparable areas which did not get political patronage or economic inflows - but even these did not prevent entrapment (see below). For me this is the knock-down argument" .
MHK. "I can only conclude that, considering the limited emigration and employment opportunities for its projected population, and the condition of the rest of Kenya, far from Machakos showing that entrapment cannot exist, Machakos
Why are Singapore, etc. not trapped
MHK. Papua New Guinea. "Glen Mola, its newly appointed Professor of Reproductive Health, told me that his first objective is to keep New Guinea out of the demographic trap. So it must at least be a possibility!"MHK. Fiji. [to follow]MHK. "Mauritius. In the 1950s this tiny island appeared to be demographically trapped with a rapidly growing population and a miserable, and largely agricultural population. It was disentrapped by rapid economic development and rapidly falling fertility. There was much in its favour: (1) It had long contact with the West and an old established educated minority. (2) It had a useful minority of Indians and Chinese with links to their parent countries, and who enabled it to build up an internationally competitive textile sector. (3) It was small - about a million. (4) As an island it had good communications. None of these things apply, for example to Rwanda, 1500 km from the Indian Ocean and 2000 km from the Atlantic".
MHK. "Singapore and even the Netherlands. High population densities are no problem - provided there is an economy to match it. The problem is agricultural communities exceeding the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems, and their opportunities for migration, and - unlike Singapore and the Netherlands - the ability of their economies to produce the necessary exports of goods and services which can be exchanged for food and other necessities. The difficulty is sufficient economic development (especially in communities where what little there is deteriorating) - in time -before starvation and slaughter intervene - or already have supervened, as in Rwanda. We discussed this in answering Paul Demeny's question - "Why cannot Malawi do a Malaysia?" under the heading of the 'starting line taboo' A more explicit but less happy term is the 'iron age taboo'. [I now use the latter term] An agricultural community which has only had a written language and the wheel for less than 100 years cannot be expected to have an economic take-off which is sufficiently rapid to compensate for a total fertility of six or seven".
Richard Jolly. "...The essential reason why your analysis of demographic entrapment becomes ahistorical and misleading, is because very rapidly you exclude all the other things that historically have accounted for the ability of a wide variety of countries to increase the total carrying capacity of their land - increased productivity, improved seeds, land reclamation, non-agricultural forms of productive employment, migration to the towns, international trade. And in parallel most countries have expanded education, expanded health services, and often encouraged and supported family planning and reproductive health services..." next argument
MHK. "What worries us is":
(a) Not the successes but the failures - and especially the 'disconnectedness' - the communities, which because their economies show no sign of developing, are cut off from international trade. The 44 least developed countries with 10% of the world's people, many of whom are presumably trapped, now have only 0.3% of world trade - and even this tiny proportion is falling [3]. As Caldwell's says for at least two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa's 36 states, the possibility of 'interacting demographic and economic transitions is pretty bleak...'
(b) The limits to increased agricultural productivity in tightly trapped communities, and at the global level, the falling rate of global grain yield increase.
(c) The fact that in many areas water is now an even greater constraint than land.
(d) The appalling human conditions and unsustainability of so many tropical towns, especially the very large ones to which the migrants from rural areas come.
Richard Jolly."...The net result is not that demographic pressures have disappeared - but that human development and living standards have risen, not as much as wanted, but usually significantly. Look in UNDP's Human Development Report for 1997 for evidence and for a summary of the setbacks. Along with this, fertility rates have fallen, very rapidly in most parts of the world, except sub-Saharan Africa and some countries of the Middle East. And where development has suffered severe setbacks, including conflict, the cause are many...." next argument
MHK. "...sub-Saharan Africa..." "This is exactly what we are interested in. The oil rich Middle-East, does not have a foreign exchange problem, and can therefore import what it likes".
"UNDP report that three quarters of the world's poorest are rural, and that relieving their poverty requires that agricultural poverty and incomes be raised. The problem is that agricultural incomes in trapped communities in the context of present tiny land holdings which are continually falling as the result of their high fertility. Here are examples, supposedly from two extremes, Machakos - one of your 'success' stories - and Rwanda".
Machakos. "There is a now complete lack of free land for development, people are worried about the tiny farms that their children are inheriting. In the recent past population increase has about paralleled cultivated area increase, but there is no more land to cultivate".
Rwanda. "In 1984 57% of the population were on less than a hectare and 25% on less than half a hectare, to feed an average family of five. In the early 1990s land fragmentation was such that the average Rwandan household farmed at least 5 tiny plots growing 14 crops in any of 50 different rotations, on ever steeper slopes. To argue that, under such circumstances, rural poverty can be eliminated by increasing agricultural productivity, is at best totally unrealistic. In Ruhondo in the Ruhengeri prefecture there are 820 people to the square kilometre, or a family of 5 on 1.6 ha - 0.3 ha per person - a patch of land only 35 metres square, and halving itself about every 25 years!" See
Lady M. "UNDP's Human Development Report for 1997 (HDR 1997) aims to eliminate poverty, and speaks about 'ultrapoverty'. How do 'ultra poverty' and your idea of entrapment relate to one another?"MHK. "UNDP defines 'ultrapoverty' as a situation in which, even if a household uses 80% of its income, it cannot purchase 80% of its energy requirements. We see rural ultrapoverty and entrapment as largely overlapping. UNDP will get nowhere with ultrapoverty, especially rural ultrapoverty, unless it also tackles entrapment".
"Entrapment would also appear to influence urban ultrapoverty in that in Blantyre, for example, the entrapment of Malawi as a whole would make the urban poverty of Blantyre worse".
Richard Jolly. "...In summary: demographic pressures have many times been overcome; when they are linked to economic difficulty and decline, they are only one among a number of causes; very rapid population growth is only one of a number of problems to be tackled; though early action is often better than later action, there is no evidence that there is a definable point when some mythical trap shuts and beyond which there is no longer hope, nothing can be done except watch people in famine or conflict. Indeed, if entrapment is a reality, why have we not seen a clear case of it so far?" next argument
MHK. "...demographic pressures have many times overcome..." We are concerned with where they have not been overcome (Rwanda), and are apparently not being overcome - most of Africa - according to Jack Caldwell, its most eminent demographer".
MHK. "... very rapid population growth is only one of a number of problems to be tackled.." "Exactly. What worries me is how it is to be tackled radically enough to prevent starvation and slaughter in Rwanda and Malawi".
MHK. "...there is no longer a mythical point at which ... there is no longer hope". "We have never said that there is a point at which there is no longer hope. There is always hope That hope has to be 1-child families in the context of a global programme for a 1-child world - combined with massive development aid locally, which we pressed for in Rwanda".
MHK "...Indeed, if entrapment is a reality, why have we not seen a clear case of it so far?" Rwanda and Malawi are very clear cases. [Also North Kivu]The reason why UNDP has not 'seen' them is, of course that entrapment is that (1) UNDP is locked into the 'population policy lockstep, (2) entrapment is taboo- nobody will research or fund it".
Richard Jolly. "...And on conflict, please note that the far too widespread conflict in Africa has in no way been restricted to the high population density countries. For historical treatments of this, see some of the recent studies, including "The Prevention of Deadly Conflict', the careful interagency study on Rwanda and perhaps even Roland Oliver's, The Africa Experience". next argument
MHK. "...widespread conflict in Africa has in no way been restricted to the high population density countries..." "There are many causes of conflict which we see as a complex 'black box'. Insupportable population pressure in an agricultural community is merely one of them - and a particularly powerful one".
MHK. "...the careful interagency study on Rwanda ..." [4] "This notes 'extreme population pressures', and that in many areas population growth has outstripped growth of agricultural production, with every available patch of land cultivated"."I quote":
"...In the beginning of the 1990s half Rwanda's farming was done on slopes of more than 10% inclination, where rainfall often washed away both soil and crops. In turn for an increasing part of the peasantry this translated into deeper malnutrition and poverty...". [4]
"I quote again":
"...many observers...link the tragedy to high population pressures and increasing competition for means of survival. Thus in the words of Prunier (1995): [5] The decision to kill was of course made by politicians, for political reasons. But at least part of the reason why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file peasants (...) was the feeling that there were too many people on too little land, and that with a few less there would be more for the survivors..." (Prunier, 1995) [I am still looking for the other two references - Roland Oliver and 'The prevention of Deadly conflict']
Richard Jolly. "...A broader analysis of problems, causes and solutions would of course lead on to the need for active development efforts by many groups within the country and beyond, including by the international community. Action to tackle debt, to better direct aid, to open industrial country markets to agricultural imports from developing countries, even to improve commodity prices are all part of this. And all need to be part of our analysis, recommendations and campaigning..."
MHK. "Exactly, we are all for all of these. The problem is that they are not enough - by themselves - for the disentrapment of severely trapped communities, and is misleading to pretend that they are".
next argument discussion
Richard Jolly. "...But because of the idea of demographic entrapment, all these other vital things seem to slip from the picture - and the listener or the reader is left with the idea that one thing above all others is needed and before long will be too late. I do disagree strongly with this..." next argumentMHK. "We cannot deal adequately with the whole development scene - we deal with our particular patch it - because nobody else is doing so. Elsewhere on this website we have for example, called for massive development aid in Rwanda , for "...development aid, now grossly deficient". and for the abolition of debt, and better terms of trade, etc.?"
Richard Jolly. "Almost all the other things can be happily discussed and debated. Child survival and development, the importance of family planning versus less direct ways to slow population growth, the difference between slow population growth, which often seems to have been a force for economic growth and rapid population growth (above 2 per cent) which does seem to be a strongly negative factor. But, as on Tuesday evening over pizza, the hobby seems to get in the way of discussing these important and interesting points". next argument
MHK. "population growth ...strongly negative factor..." "In Rwanda and Malawi it is not merely strongly negative - it is catastrophic. What does UNDP intend to do about it - let catastrophe take place or continue? We argue that the only hope for Rwanda is to attempt a crash demographic transition to 1-child families in the context of a global programme for a 1-child world".
'Human solidarity'
Richard Jolly. "Please share this with Charles. I still find it almost impossible to believe he shares demographic entrapment - as opposed to concern with demographic pressures among many other development problems. And certainly, in his tutorials and sermons, I hope he emphasizes the need for a commitment to human solidarity and greater international and national equity and more equal income distribution". next argumentMHK. "...human solidarity and greater international and national equity and more equal income distribution..." "Here is Charles's piece from our open letter to Carol Bellamy, so we know where he stands":
"...You [Carol Belamy] will have to the specialist agencies move from their present rather narrow multisectoral modernization roles - more health, more education, more agricultural output - to a much more critical awareness of what is implied by a gentle mutually dependant world; a world which makes the long run survival of the whole globe - humanity and all other living things - possible...".
'Stark naked'
Lady M. "As to 'no clothes', I think UNDP is stark naked! "
Charles Elliott. "I am overcome with "...dismay, fury, and incredulity..."
MHK. "Let Richard'sarguments speak for themselves..."
Lady M (aside).Do you thinkRichard actually believes them????
MHK (aside).SSShhh.... Good question. The trouble is that having persuaded himself with them for so long, I think that he now actually does partly believe them!!
Richard Jolly (who has not overheard the above aside). Just imagine that you were right. What difference would it make to what we are already doing in health, education, and family planning, etc. ?
MHK. It would immenselyto the scale and theurgency of what UNDP and the other agencies are already doing in these things.
As I said in the Preface.
May posterity - and the Almighty - shower countless blessings upon her (Allison Jolly)... ...and indeed upon them both!
...and indeed upon us all - and especially upon the trapped...