HL Deb 21 February 1979 vol 398 cc1819-32

3.3 p.m.

Lord VERNON rose to call attention to the international parliamentary conference on population and development to be held in Colombo in August 1979; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, two weeks ago there was a debate in your Lordships' House on the International Year of the Child, introduced by my noble friend Lady Faithfull. It is, I think, appropriate that this debate should follow, because one can think of few factors which will affect children more in the immediate future than population growth. My noble friend on that occasion quoted ten principles adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1959 relating to the rights of the child: the right to adequate nutrition and medical care; the right to full opportunity for play and recreation, and so on. I shall not repeat them all. But I venture to assert that at least eight out of those ten principles will be prejudiced, if not completely nullified, so long as the population of the developing countries continues to grow at its present rate.

There are 4,000 million people in the world today as compared with 2,000 million in 1930. In 21 years' time, by the year 2,000, there are likely to be 6,000 million, and in the 20 years after that, because the increase breeds on itself, there will be perhaps 10,000 million. It has been called a population explosion, but really it is a series of explosions with each one double the size of the last—double the size, that is, unless we can take steps to stop it.

What can we do? Most people are agreed that birth rates will fall when living standards can be improved, and yet living standards cannot be improved while population growth continues at its present rate. The answer seems to be that we should tackle both aspects simultaneously. Some countries have already pointed the way. They were quick to realise that a higher quality of life for their people was dependent on curbing population growth. Japan has made dramatic progress; China, with its rigid discipline and dedication to family planning, has been able to reduce birth rates in the region of 40 per thousand to 22 per thousand, an incredible achievement, bearing in mind the scale of the country and its huge population of over 900 million. There have been similar encouraging developments in some of the small island states like Mauritius, Singapore, and others; but these are exceptions. Overall birth rates continue at a very high rate while mortality rates decline. To give a few examples: Kenya, with 15 million people, will double its population in 21 years; Bangladesh, with 85 million, already the most densely populated country on the face of the globe, will double in 26 years; India, with 635 million will double in 35 years, and so on.

When I attended an international conference in Berlin a short time ago we were told the story of the African water lily. This lily was so prolific that it doubled itself every day; it reproduced itself every day. It started growing in a certain large pond, after 29 days it had covered half the pond, and the farmer in question was interested to know how much longer it would take to cover the whole pond. He thought it would take quite a long time, but it does not take great intelligence to see that the whole of the pond would be covered on the 30th day; that is, in one more day. We have not yet reached the 29th day as regards the maximum numbers which the earth can support, but in the next few decades we shall approach very close to it.

When one considers that this massive increase is taking place almost exclusively in those countries which can least afford to cope with it—countries which are already suffering from chronic poverty, from malnutrition if not starvation, from disease and unemployment—and when one further considers the increasing urbanisation which is taking place in these countries, with illiterate peasants flocking to shanty towns which are springing up like mushrooms on the edge of the big cities, shanty towns where conditions are so appalling that an English slum is a palace by comparison, the problem which faces mankind is indeed alarming.

It is estimated that 45 per cent. of the youth of Mexico are unemployed; yet in 20 years' time there will be another 66 million people in Mexico. What sort of future will those people and their children have? And it is not just a question of the children. What about the unfortunate women who bear this endless succession of children? Should they not be given the opportunity to choose how many children they want and whether they wish to fulfil themselves in some way other than as perpetual breeding machines?

It was with this picture in mind that a working group of parliamentarians from the developed and developing countries, acting in conjunction with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, met in Tokyo in 1978. It is important to stress that the working group was concerned not just with population but with economic development and improving the quality of life in the developing world; the two aspects go hand in hand. It is really a question of timing. The delay of a single generation in achieving population stability in the world results in an increase in world population of 70 per cent.

The 1974 world conference in Bucharest on population had agreed upon some useful principles, but they were not enough. More positive action was urgently required and it was felt that that was more likely to be accepted in the developing countries if their parliamentarians could be directly interested in the problem. The International Parliamentary Conference on Population and Development, which will take place in Colombo later this year under the sponsorship of the IPU and in close co-operation with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, stems directly from the Tokyo meeting. But Colombo is envisaged not as an end but as a beginning, and it is hoped that there will be continuing international parliamentary conferences, regional meetings and so on. As the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, who is the chairman of the British Parliamentary group, will be speaking later in the debate, I shall say no more on that aspect, except to express the hope that when the Leader of the House replies he will be able to give, on behalf of Her Majesty's Government, every support and encouragement to the initiative which has been taken.

A word about the United Kingdom. We live in one world and the Western nations cannot isolate themselves. We may have a lower birth-rate than in the developing world but we consume a far higher proportion of the world's diminishing natural resources, a fact of which the developing nations are very conscious. Even looked at purely from a national point of view, I suggest that we should consider very carefully where we are going. There is a general misconception at present, encouraged by the media, that our population is falling. It is not. It is a roughly stable population; there is a change in the age structure with a decline in the school population, but it is still expected that owing to the number of women coming into their maximum reproductive period, the population of these islands will be several millions greater in a few years' time.

Many people believe that the social and economic problems facing us today, and, goodness knows!, they are enough, would be greatly eased if our population were smaller than it is. By "economic and social problems" I mean of course our high dependence on imported foodstuffs and the questions of unemployment, inadequate health and housing facilities, the low ratio of teachers to pupils in schools and many others. A population of 56 million may have been appropriate to the labour-intensive conditions which prevailed in our heyday as an imperial power in the 19th century, but they are hardly appropriate to the era of the silicon chip. There is not sufficient time for me to develop the arguments in favour of this proposition, but they are admirably set out in a booklet written by Professor Bernard Benjamin, published by the Birth Control Trust at a cost of 55p, entitled The Decline in the Birth-Rate: Towards a Better Quality of Life ", and I strongly commend it to the Government and noble Lords.

We are fortunate today in that the Leader of the House is also the Minister responsible for population policy, and I hope the debate will give him the opportunity to enlighten the House on the Government's thinking in this important field. I conclude by asking him two specific questions. First, according to the figures I have been given, of our total disbursements of £585 million on overseas aid in 1977, only £5.5 million, or under 1 per cent., was allocated for family planning purposes. I understand the commitment for 1978, although larger, still amounts to only 1.6 per cent. That is grotesquely inadequate, by any standards. It would be unrealistic in the present economic climate to ask for an increase in the total of disbursements, but surely a strong case can be made for stepping up the percentage of the total allocated to family planning. If we do not do so, much of our aid will be wasted. It would be like pouring money into a basket with a hole in the bottom.

My second question is closer to home. Do the Government welcome unreservedly the present decline in the birthrate in this country, and do they agree that the quality of life of everyone in these overcrowded islands would be enhanced if we could work gradually towards a reduced population. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

3.20 p.m.

Baroness ELLES

My Lords, we are grateful to my noble friend Lord Vernon for having introduced this short debate on a subject on which he is an expert and on which he speaks with much feeling and knowledge, and which is of course of vital concern to this country and to all other countries of the world. There are many aspects—economic, social, political, medical, moral, ethical—and each provides for contention, disagreement, deep feeling, and division; and in this short debate it is impossible to give due regard to all of them. As often happens regarding these very sensitive issues, lobbies and pressure groups are created, and it is often the ability of the group which leads to one conclusion rather than to others.

I must tell my noble friend that I shall not be following him in all aspects of his argument. However, I believe that we would all share agreement on the first paragraph of the Declaration of the Tokyo Planning Meeting of the International Working Group of Parliamentarians concerned with Population and Development, to which he referred, which reads as follows: In the interests of peace and humanity the world must recognise the urgent need to improve the quality of life for families in the developing countries, giving due attention both to rural areas and to the urban disadvantaged poor". I believe that none of your Lordships would disagree with that objective. However, one might take issue with the following paragraphs, though, on the other hand, some might agree with them. The second paragraph states: One of the greatest impediments to such an advance is the yearly addition of 80 million people to the world population …"; and it goes on in that vein.

There are some basic questions which need to be considered, if not satisfactorily and completely answered. The first is: how far should Governments interfere, directly or indirectly, in the control of their own population numbers? I leave aside from the consideration of this question the matter of immigration, which I consider to be a subject on its own; and so I shall not deal with immigration in considering population figures. We only have to recall what success we have had with the Select Committee on Science and Technology which dealt with the subject of population in 1969–70, to see the kind of results that emerge from considering population at parliamentarian and governmental level. The Select Committee made various policy proposals to the Government, some of which were supported and implemented by the Government, and which had been introduced originally by the birth control campaign in about 1967–68.

Using the population projections which now appear to be like fairy-tales, we can look at what the result has been—and this was a matter to which I referred in your Lordships' House in December 1972. The projection of 1960 estimated that up to the year 2,000 there would be 63 million people, but by 1964 the figure rose to 77 million. By 1968 it came down to 66 million. In 1976, according to the latest figure available per base projection, there was to be a population of 59 million in this country in 1980. At the moment the figure is about 55.7 million, with a declining birthrate; in fact we have got below replacement level of the population.

I do not say that these figures will be proved right or wrong in the end, even if it is at the end of the year 3,000, but the fact of the matter is that these projections as they stand have only one common denominator—that they are all wrong. Therefore, it seems to me that the kind of population policies which are based on population projections are neither helpful nor relevant to the problems which face either this country or the world as a whole.

Other European countries have also shown the danger of pursuing aggressive population control measures through national health organisations, when in fact the real danger which faces us is quite another matter. It is the low level of births, a declining population, and the consequence of a large elderly population to be maintained and supported by a decreasing number of young people. The Federal Republic of Germany now has a natural increase rate of minus 2.4 per cent., and many other countries are now trying to raise the birthrate in order to achieve a more balanced population.

Secondly—and this, I believe, is not only a political issue, but a very deep moral one—how far should developed countries interfere in the population policies of other countries, particularly developing countries? I personally believe that it is morally and politically indefensible and offensive to seek in any way to interfere in the population policies—whatever they may be—of developing countries. These countries—whether they be in Latin America, Africa, or Asia—must have the intrinsic right of deciding their own policies in accordance with their own philosophy, and their own cultural and economic needs. In Africa many countries are woefully underpopulated, and (heir social and economic development will make progress only with a larger population.

Let us take as an example Angola, which admittedly is one extreme. It has a land area of about 488,000 square miles, which is five times the size of the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 6 million people, which is 11 times less than that of the United Kingdom. Whether one has a successful economy has nothing to do with the size of the population. Hong Kong is at the other end of the scale. Hong Kong is one-thousandth of the size of Angola, but with a population practically the same (about 4.5 million) but it has a systematic increase in economic growth. So there is no immediate correlation between the size of population and wealth.

My noble friend rightly raised the question of China. I should like to refer to a very interesting conversation which I had with one of the most senior people in that country when I was there just under two years ago. I asked him about the population, and he told me that they had to feed between 800 million and 900 million people. I asked the Vice-Premier, "How do you know that you have so many people? What I have read in the West shows that it is impossible that so many people are living in your country." He replied, "No, no—we have that number." I asked, "When did you last have a census?" "Ah, we never have a census ", he said, "We have not had one." So I asked, "How do you know that you have so many people?" He replied, "Well, Lady Elles, I will let you into the secret. Every province sends in a list every year of the number of births, because that is what decides the rations they get for their food and their cotton, but they never send us the number of deaths." It may be that the figure of 800 million is somewhere near the truth, but certainly no one in China at Government level can confirm that.

The third point I wish to make in the short time at our disposal relates to the methods used by non-governmental organisations to influence population programmes, because these, too, are of interest. Support by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (a leading organisation in this field) for abortion, sterilisation, and so on, while acceptable to many members of that organisation, and indeed to others, has also had particular influence on some of the developing countries. Though, of course, one cannot put the blame on that particular organisation, one has only to think of the methods which were recently used in India on thousands of Indian citizens, either by force or by bribery, including free radios, et cetera, which were a total denial of human rights of the individual. Whatever the method was to force women to have sterilisation and to force men to have operations which denied them the chance of having children, it cannot have been, in any sense of the words, a recognition and honouring of the human rights of any individual. If there is to be choice in these matters, it surely must be a free one and in accordance with recent discussions on the demographic subjects at the Twentieth Conference of UNESCO. They were to the effect that the choice must be left to the couple; and this confirms the decision contained in the final resolution of the World Conference on Population at Bucharest, to which my noble friend referred.

Fourthly, I should like to refer very briefly to the agenda of the conference to be held in Colombo, which includes the very important item of "Human Rights"—two words which are very often abused and misused. I think it is worth recalling from time to time that surely the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to life; and it is not irrelevant to recall to our parliamentarians who go to Colombo—and, indeed, my noble friend has referred to this—that this is the United Nations International Year of the Child; and that they should read again, not only all the 10 articles of the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which was proclaimed universally by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1959, but also the preamble to that Declaration, which says: Whereas the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection before as well as after birth…". I hope that when the human rights item on the agenda at Colombo is discussed, this particular preamble and basic philosophy of United Nations member States at that time will be recalled.

My Lords, one further aspect of population control which concerns Governments and, therefore, of course, parliamentarians is, as my noble friend rightly said, the availability of natural resources to support the world population, whether it increases or decreases. In this part of the world, of course, it is very often those who say that we are over-populated who also complain of the food surpluses in the Community—they are often apt to be the same people—and seek to diminish the production of food supplies. I think there are really two main aspects of this question of shortage and surplus of natural resources which must be considered. First, it is not so much the availability of supply of resources as the availability at point of demand. There are vast quantities available. The world is rich in resources still undiscovered, and we need think only of the recent developments in marine biology and marine science to realise the immense potential of even the wealth under the sea. The question is how to get those resources to those who are short of food and need it for their families. Even if the conference turns its mind only to these vital questions of distribution, it will be making a major contribution to the solution of the problem of starvation.

Secondly, following on from the availability of these resources is, of course, the need for conservation, for recycling and for continued research into and development of new resources and new scientific discoveries for the maintenance and support of mankind. Who, 50 years ago, would have dreamed of nuclear energy being able to replace other, more well-known sources of energy of that time? There is surely also a real need, not for the elimination of populations but for balanced populations as between urban and rural parts of the country. Surely we have to assist in raising the economic and social development of rural areas. Here, the experience, both good and bad, of Western, developed nations should be put at the service of less developed countries, not to inflict upon them our theories but to use our experiences for the benefit of these countries, so that they learn from our mistakes just as much as from the things we have done well; and so that, through joint programmes, joint ventures and the training of nationals of less developed countries, they can adapt our knowledge and experience to their own local needs in the light of their own economic resources and cultural and social development.

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Vernon has today given us the opportunity to debate a subject which is fundamental to the wellbeing and prosperity of mankind, but let us remember that the world land mass is still only 5 per cent. inhabited. There are still vast areas of the world which are uninhabited; and let us remember once more, in the United Nations International Year of the Child, that surely the first consideration is to let them live.

3.35 p.m.

Lord RITCHIE-CALDER

My Lords, if the noble Lord, Lord Vernon, has friends like the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, he does not need enemies. I find—and I am serious—that, without reservation, in the 12 years I have been in this House I have never heard a speech with which I so profoundly disagree in every sense. I am not talking about the controversial element of it. The noble Baroness has been using arguments which are completely untenable on her own basis. She has been using the numbers game. She said, "Do not pay any attention to demography; it has always been wrong", and then she used demography to prove that she was absolutely right. That is nonsense—complete nonsense. What we are looking at in the world at the moment is unquestionably a situation which, if it goes on, will be totally and completely disastrous. Do not let us start to get sentimental and waste sympathy on all the people who are going to die of starvation; because, numerically, we are going to die of starvation. This is the situation which we are looking at in the world today and which is, beyond any equivocation, absolutely inescapable and must be faced. What we have been hearing in that speech is a complete denial of all the manifest truths.

I have been living with this situation—most of us have; some of us more inteligently than others, if I may boast a little—for some 30 years now, when it was quite clear that there was going to be human intervention in the best sense of the word. We were going to introduce the developments of modern medicine, which we did extremely effectively; and we were going to make available to developing countries the resources of science, which we did very effectively. We were going to get rid of a good deal of our (shall we say?) pharmaceutical surpluses in the process; nevertheless, we did it with the best of intentions. What we did was to release, by man-devised means, the population explosion. The population explosion is an inescapable truth. What we have done is in fact to inhibit the natural forces, if they are natural, because a lot of them are social neglect, and so forth; nevertheless, they were a corrective factor. We are in fact enabling people to live longer.

Let me give your Lordships one simple example. When the British Raj gave up India, the expectation of life of the average girl child born in India was 27 years. Today it is something like 50. It is almost irrelevant; we will not argue about detail. The fact is that that average Indian girl child is now living through her entire reproductive period; therefore she can go on having children. What we have done is not just to increase the population by virtue of the fact that we have expanded the span of life; we have increased, first of all, the number of people who are born and exist, and we have increased the potential number of people who can be born. I have never suggested, and I do not think any of my friends in the population movement have ever suggested for one moment, that a child who is born should be deprived of any of the resources we can make available. But what we can do is to say that the resources which will be available will be better available if there are fewer people. One of my arguments with the international population control people has been that we should not say, "Here is a starving child"; we should say, "Here is the child you want".

I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, and I was absolutely fascinated. I listened to that sort of argument in the Assembly of the World Health Organisation 30 years ago. And when we got to the Bucharest Conference on Population and the less developed countries were cocking a snook at us and saying, "Who are you to talk to us like that?"—they were right! They were using the same arguments as we in the developed countries (under constraints which I will not elaborate, constraints which were religious rather than political or economic) had been imposing on them and on their thinking.

What has now to be faced, beyond any argument, is a simple truth. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, on one thing: that it is no good doing this by exhortation. As Indira Gandhi has shown, to our distress, in the population movement, you cannot do it by force, by sterilisation, by compulsion or by bribery. You must get down to two people in bed. They are the people who decide whether they are going to have more children or not. How are you going to get to them? You are not going to get into bed with them. You must convince them—as we have failed to do in the past in most of the underdeveloped world—that, first of all, we can keep children alive; they do not now have to have children who die. That is the element of this question. You do not have to have 10 children on the historical record in order that five will be there to provide hands for work in your fields because you cannot afford a bullock or because you must in your old age be sustained in social security by your own family.

The aim must be to convince the people of the world of the fallacy of thinking that by having children merely as an ultimate social security their standard of life will somehow improve. There is no question about the fact that every new child born into an Indian family reduces the capacity of that family better to deal with the family that they have—whether educationally or in feeding them or anything else. We are not playing a great numbers game. Years ago in discussions about population, I stopped talking about 6,000 million people in the year 2,000. This, I think, is an underestimate; nevertheless, forget it! The 6,000 million more people is the order of it. We are going to double the population. But this does not mean anything. It does not mean a thing. Zeros become an anaesthetic. People cannot cope with that order of numbers.

What you do see is what actually happens in a family, or in a village, or a community when you see that the increase in population is degrading the whole of the population and the family, and is denying children the possibilities which we hope we can offer them. What we must do, first of all, is to get away from all the nonsense. We must make available the knowledge and the means by which people can control their population. I am not talking about methods that you can practise. There are religious bodies which practise celibacy and continence. This is demanding a lot of the total population of the world. You do not have to debate methods, whether continence or anything else: you must convince people of the fact that not just they themselves, but (let us take) the family, will be better off the smaller that family is. There is no escape. You can go on through all the figures, all the books, the statistics and so on. This is an elemental, simple truth. People cannot make available to their families what they have not got. Is it a great crime? Pope John said: Bring the children up with a human responsibility and in human dignity. But you cannot have human dignity in the degrading situation in which people today are forced to have their children, for there are too many children to bring up.

My Lords, we are going into this conference in Sri Lanka—to which I give my blessing. I hope that the parliamentarians of the world will learn one truth. What the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, has said is true: that it is no part of our job to dictate or to lecture to the people of the developing countries. We must say to them: "Here are the things that you and we desire; and not because we are going to get more benefit out of it than you are "—because it is a fact that we are not in a position, having disqualified ourselves over the last 30 years, to dictate to the developing countries how to conduct their policies. All that we can do is, I hope, to inspire them and give them hope for the future.