URBAN AND RURAL DEFINITIONS

Source: US Census Bureau

http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urdef.txt

Released: Oct. 1995

URBAN AND RURAL

The Census Bureau defines "urban" for the 1990 census as comprising all territory, population, and housing units in urbanized areas and in places of 2,500 or more persons outside urbanized areas. More specifically, "urban" consists of territory, persons, and housing units in:

1. Places of 2,500 or more persons incorporated as cities, villages, boroughs (except in Alaska and New York), and towns (except in the six New England States, New York, and Wisconsin), but excluding the rural portions of "extended cities."

2. Census designated places of 2,500 or more persons.

3. Other territory, incorporated or unincorporated, included in urbanized areas.

Territory, population, and housing units not classified as urban constitute "rural." In the 100-percent data products, "rural" is divided into "places of less than 2,500" and "not in places." The "not in places" category comprises "rural" outside incorporated and census designated places and the rural portions of extended cities. In many data products, the term "other rural" is used; "other rural" is a residual category specific to the classification of the rural in each data product.

In the sample data products, rural population and housing units are subdivided into "rural farm" and "rural nonfarm." "Rural farm" comprises all rural households and housing units on farms (places from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were sold in 1989); "rural nonfarm" comprises the remaining rural.

The urban and rural classification cuts across the other hierarchies; for example, there is generally both urban and rural territory within both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. In censuses prior to 1950, "urban" comprised all territory, persons, and housing units in incorporated places of 2,500 or more persons, and in areas (usually minor civil divisions) classified as urban under special rules relating to population size and density. The definition of urban that restricted itself to incorporated places having 2,500 or more persons excluded many large, densely settled areas merely because they were not incorporated. Prior to the 1950 census, the Census Bureau attempted to avoid some of the more obvious omissions by classifying selected areas as "urban under special rules." Even with these rules, however, many large, closely built-up areas were excluded from the urban category.

To improve its measure of urban territory, population, and housing units, the Census Bureau adopted the concept of the urbanized area and delineated boundaries for unincorporated places (now, census designated places) for the 1950 census.

Urban was defined as territory, persons, and housing units in urbanized areas and, outside urbanized areas, in all places, incorporated or unincorporated, that had 2,500 or more persons.

With the following three exceptions, the 1950 census definition of urban has continued substantially unchanged. First, in the 1960 census (but not in the 1970, 1980, or 1990 censuses), certain towns in the New England States, townships in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and Arlington County, Virginia, were designated as urban. However, most of these "special rule" areas would have been classified as urban anyway because they were included in an urbanized area or in an unincorporated place of 2,500 or more persons. Second, "extended cities" were identified for the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses. Extended cities primarily affect the figures for urban and rural territory (area), but have very little effect on the urban and rural population and housing units at the national and State levels--although for some individual counties and urbanized areas, the effects have been more evident.

Third, changes since the 1970 census in the criteria for defining urbanized areas have permitted these areas to be defined around smaller centers.

Documentation of the urbanized area and extended city criteria is available from the Chief, Geography Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC 20233.

Extended City

Since the 1960 census, there has been a trend in some States toward the extension of city boundaries to include territory that is essentially rural in character. The classification of all the population and living quarters of such places as urban would include in the urban designation territory, persons, and housing units whose environment is primarily rural. For the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses, the Census Bureau identified as rural such territory and its population and housing units for each extended city whose closely settled area was located in an urbanized area.

For the 1990 census, this classification also has been applied to certain places outside urbanized areas. In summary presentations by size of place, the urban portion of an extended city is classified by the population of the entire place; the rural portion is included in "other rural."

URBANIZED AREA (UA)

The Census Bureau delineates urbanized areas (UA's) to provide a better separation of urban and rural territory, population, and housing in the vicinity of large places. A UA comprises one or more places ("central place") and the adjacent densely settled surrounding territory ("urban fringe") that together have a minimum of 50,000 persons. The urban fringe generally consists of contiguous territory having a density of at least 1,000 persons per square mile. The urban fringe also includes outlying territory of such density if it was connected to the core of the contiguous area by road and is within 1 ½ road miles of that core, or within 5 road miles of the core but separated by water or other undevelopable territory. Other territory with a population density of fewer than 1,000 people per square mile is included in the urban fringe if it eliminates an enclave or closes an indentation in the boundary of the urbanized area. The population density is determined by (1) outside of a place, one or more contiguous census blocks with a population density of at least 1,000 persons per square mile or (2) inclusion of a place containing census blocks that have at least 50 percent of the population of the place and a density of at least 1,000 persons per square mile. The complete criteria are available from the Chief, Geography Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC 20233.

1. Cities and the Environment

URBAN GROWTH PATTERNS

Between 1990 and 2025, the number of people who live in urban areas is expected to double to more than 5 billion people (11). Almost all of this growth--a staggering 90 percent--will occur in the countries of the developing world (12). (See Figure 1.1.)

In the developed world, the most rapid urban growth took place over a century ago. By 1995, more than 70 percent of the population in both Europe and North America was living in urban areas (13). Urban growth continues, although at a much slower rate on average than in previous decades. Much of the population shift now under way involves movement away from concentrated urban centers to vast, sprawling metropolitan regions or to small- and intermediate-size cities. Some of the most rapidly growing cities are in the southwestern United States--but because this growth is fueled largely by urban-to-urban migration, it does not affect the overall level of urbanization.

In the developing world, Latin America and the Caribbean constitute the most urbanized region--with more than 70 percent of its population living in urban areas in 1995 (14). Rapid urban growth is continuing especially in small- and intermediate-size cities (15). By contrast, Africa and Asia are now only about 30 to 35 percent urban (16). It is in these regions that the most explosive growth is under way, at roughly 4 percent per year. This trend is projected to continue for several decades.

Both Asia and Africa are expected to be about 54 percent urban by 2025 (17). (See Figure 1.2.)

In some respects, the patterns of urban growth in developing countries today are not much different from what occurred a century ago in Europe and North America. Many of the forces driving urbanization today are the same--chief among them the shift of jobs from agriculture to industry and services and the concentration of economic opportunities in urban areas. And although cities of the developing world are growing at least twice as fast today as those of the developed world, these rates are not unprecedented. A number of European and U.S. cities sustained very rapid growth in the early 20th Century, as fast as that now under way in the developing countries (18).

What is unprecedented now, however, is the absolute scale of the change, in terms of the number of countries undergoing rapid urbanization, the number of cities worldwide that are growing rapidly, and the sheer number of people involved (19). Roughly 150,000 people are added to the urban population of developing countries every day (20). Because of the huge population base in developing countries, even a relatively slow rate of urban growth can mean an enormous increase in absolute numbers. Given the huge size of the world's population, even at these somewhat reduced rates of growth the urban population will continue to increase dramatically, slowing down significantly only well into the 21st Century (21).

Although rates of growth vary dramatically from region to region and city to city, growth is generally most pronounced in two contexts: in the poorest regions and in those regions that are undergoing rapid economic growth. Each has vastly different implications for the urban environment and quality of life. In the least developed countries, urban growth rates are among the highest in the world, at nearly 5 percent per year (22). Between 1990 and 1995, some of these countries--Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Nepal, and Afghanistan, to cite a few--were experiencing even higher urban growth rates--more than 7 percent per year (23). Local governments are often strapped for cash and do not have the resources to provide even the most basic environmental services for their residents. In 1994, some 30 percent of African urban residents were not served by municipal water services in any form (24). (See Box 1.1.)

Growth rates are also extremely high in the rapidly industrializing cities, located mostly in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Cities in these regions offer several advantages over rural villages, having both more numerous job opportunities and superior infrastructure and living conditions. Even so, infrastructure facilities, such as road networks and wastewater treatment plants, lag far behind what is needed. The result is congested city streets, mounting air and water pollution, and other citywide problems. In addition, although many urban dwellers in these wealthier cities live in comfortable dwellings with piped water and weekly garbage pickups, vast numbers of poor people still live in illegal settlements with conditions nearly as dismal as those in the poorest cities. Thus, residents of these cities face the "worst of both worlds" : the environmental problems associated with economic growth and the yet unsolved problems of sanitation (25). (See Box 1.2.)

The rapid growth rates of many cities in developing countries, combined with their huge population bases, are pushing cities to unprecedented sizes. In contrast to earlier in the century, most of the world's giant urban agglomerations are now and will continue to be in the developing world. One commonly used metric for measuring urban growth is the "megacity," defined as a city with a population exceeding 8 million. In 1950, just two such megacities existed: New York, with a population of 12.3 million, and London, with 8.7 million (26). By 1990, there were 21 megacities, 16 of them in the developing world (27). In 2015, there will be 33 megacities, 27 in the developing world (28).

Any such rankings and comparisons, however, must be approached with caution, because the population of a given city depends on how its boundaries are chosen--for instance, whether the historic city boundary or the boundaries of the extended metropolitan region are used (29). (See Box 1.3.)

Table 1.1 shows the world's 25 largest cities and their recent growth rates. With a few notable exceptions, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Lagos, Nigeria, the annual growth rates of many of these were relatively modest during the early 1990s, although it is unclear how much of this apparent slowdown is due to the dispersion of the population to areas right outside official boundaries (30).

Many intermediate-size cities may actually be growing faster on average than the largest cities, at rates well over 5 percent per year. As a result, there is a proliferation of what have been called "million cities" (with populations of between 1 million and 10 million)(31). (See Table 1.2.) By 2015, there will be 516 of these cities, compared with only 270 in 1990. Small cities, home to more than half of the world's urban dwellers in 1990, are also experiencing extremely rapid population growth (32). These cities are often especially affected by inadequate investment in environmental infrastructure or services, because many countries direct their resources to the larger urban centers.

Some of the most rapid urban growth is occurring in distinct parts of cities--either within the official urban area or on the periphery. The urban fringe of Jakarta, Indonesia, for instance, is growing much faster than the city itself--in some areas at nearly 18 percent per year (33). Spontaneous, or squatter, settlements in particular tend to grow much faster than the rest of the city. These settlements can swell to huge proportions--becoming cities unto themselves. These "unintended" cities, as they have been called, may be technically within the boundaries of a metropolitan area but are beyond the service domain or taxation reach of the local government (34).

Along with population growth have come changes in the physical dimensions of cities as they sprawl into wider regions. Sometimes called "extended metropolitan regions" or "functional urban regions," these include smaller urban centers and even rural areas outside of the urban core whose populations and activities are clearly part of the functioning of the city (35).

This phenomenon of urban sprawl has been especially manifest in the United States. The traditional downtown has been replaced by urban regions such as Silicon Valley in California, where enterprises are concentrated along major roads and highways, transforming the urban landscape into a string of "100-mile cities." In the developing world, many cities remain compact because infrastructure and labor are still concentrated in city centers and transportation and communications systems are less developed (36). Yet cities such as Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Jakarta, and Bombay are all experiencing increasing decentralization. While some expansion results from the suburbanization of high-income groups, a large share can be attributed to attempts by low-income groups to escape the high land prices in the city's core. The speed of this decentralization and its spatial configuration vary greatly from city to city (37).

Sprawl is not concomitant with rapid population growth, however, although it may seem that way in North America. Whereas Bangkok, Thailand, Manila, Philippines, and Jakarta have spread like cities in North America, Shanghai, China, and Seoul, Republic of Korea, remain much more compact. The densities in parts of Shanghai and Calcutta, India, range between 800 and 1,000 people per hectare, and in Bangkok and Seoul between 300 and 400, as compared with 70 or even fewer in most North American cities (38). As is discussed in Chapter 3, "Urban Impacts on Natural Resources," urban form has important environmental implications.

WHAT FUELS URBAN GROWTH?

Cities are growing because they provide, on average, greater social and economic benefits than do rural areas. (See Table 1.3.) The higher capital investment caused by urbanization brings health and social benefits that could be achieved in rural areas only at far greater costs. The data are sparse and not always reliable, but access to drinking water, sanitation, health services, and educational opportunities is often dramatically higher in urban areas overall than in rural areas. As a result, life expectancy is usually significantly higher and infant mortality significantly lower in urban areas overall than in rural areas (39) (40). These benefits, however, often do not extend to the poorest groups within a city, as is described below.

Urbanization and Economic Growth

The steady increase in the level of urbanization worldwide since the 1950s also reflects, to a large degree, the enormous changes in the nature and scale of economic activity worldwide. Urban growth is inextricably linked with economic growth, although it is not entirely clear which fuels which. Aggregate and per capita incomes tend to be higher in more urbanized regions of the world (41). Cities provide a natural locus for economic growth. Commerce and industry concentrate in cities because of the economies of scale they offer. "Cities are extraordinarily efficient," notes one commentator. They "optimize the use of human and mechanical energy, they allow for fast, cheap transportation, they provide flexible, highly productive labor markets. They facilitate a diffusion of products, ideas, and human resources between urban, suburban, exurban, and rural spaces" (42). In a self-perpetuating cycle, commerce and industry in turn attract the ancillary services needed to support them. Such interdependencies give urban areas aear competitive advantage for industry and commerce; few industries can survive elsewhere (43).

The efficiency inherent in urban areas translates into major gains in productivity. In developing countries, urban areas produce as much as 60 percent of total gross national product with just one third of the population (44). These economies of agglomeration, as they are often called, are especally important when a city's economic base rests on manufacturing. Yet cities have held their allure, even flourished, when the economic base shifts from manufacturing to services such as finance and banking, as it has in much of the developed world. Despite predictions that cities would be rendered obsolete by advances in global telecommunications, for instance, the opposite has happened.

Indeed, many scholars argue that such economic changes are giving rise to a new class of "world cities" that are the nerve centers of an increasingly global economy (45). And it is not just New York, Paris, Tokyo, Los Angeles, or other powerhouses of the developed world that dominate this global scene. Cities as diverse as Berlin, Sao Paulo, Beijing, Bangkok, Mexico City, and Budapest, Hungary, are emerging as world powers in their own right. Transformed into "transnational spaces for economic activity" (46), these world cities have more in common with each other than with cities within their regions or nations.

While these trends can bring enormous prosperity to certain locales, they also increase social and economic inequities. Globalism's sweep is far from uniform. As Barcelona, Spain, and Singapore flourish, other cities, especially old industrial or port cities such as Detroit and Liverpool, United Kingdom, are left further and further behind. Disparities also increase among cities in the same country. Sao Paulo, for instance, has emerged as a major business and financial center at the expense of Rio de Janeiro, once the most important city in Brazil (47). Within cities as well, globalism exacerbates inequalities, as the disparities widen among the incomes of high- and low-wage workers.

The environmental implications of these economic changes are significant. As cities compete with one another to attract manufacturing and other services, the bargaining chips are sometimes cheap labor and lax environmental concerns. Thus, globalization may well lead to greater environmental deterioration and aggravate existing inequities of income and access to basic services (48).

Migration and Natural Population Increase

In addition to economic activity, major demographic forces underlie urban growth. In the earlier waves of industrialization, rapid urban growth was largely fueled by rural-to-urban migration. In the developing world today, however, the natural increase of the urban population is at least as important as migration (49). The high rate of natural increase in these cities, however, does tend to follow migration, because most migrants are of reproductive age. Another contributor to urban growth is the reclassification of city boundaries, which can result in dramatic changes in urban size (50).

The importance of migration varies considerably by region, and migration flows in all directions, not just rural to urban. In some countries, rural-to-rural flows may be of a larger scale than rural to urban (51). What is often overlooked is the role of migration in the growth of cities in the developed world, where fertility rates are relatively low. In the United States, much of urban change now under way stems from the movement of people from one city to another (52).

Figures on rural-to-urban migration are notoriously difficult to pin down, but it is believed to account for between 40 and 60 percent of annual urban population growth in the developing world (53). Migration is expected to be a major factor in the coming years in regions with large rural populations, especially those where rural poverty is rampant, as in Africa and parts of Asia.

Despite the dual role of natural increase and migration, many countries still tend to view urban growth as a "problem" of migration alone. Concerned about burgeoning populations, a number of governments in both the developed and the developing world have adopted policies to restrict the flow of migrants to cities.

Few policies, however, have met with success.

Throughout the developing world, the factors driving rural-to-urban migration are complex. Migrants are not only pulled toward cities by the prospect of jobs and higher incomes, they are also pushed out of rural areas by such factors as poverty, lack of land, declining agricultural work, war, and famine. The favelas (squatter settlements) of Rio cannot be understood without reference to the latifundia land system in rural Brazil, which is characterized by large landholdings concentrated in the hands of a few. In many instances, the decision to move to an urban area is part of a complex household survival strategy, in which families minimize risk by placing members in different labor markets (54). Nor is migration always permanent; many migrants circulate between urban areas and their rural home (55).

Considerable diversity also exists among migrants themselves, for instance, in their age and education (56). Various studies suggest that the vast majority of migrants feel that relocation to the city has improved their situation, even if not as much as they might have hoped (57). In New Delhi, India, a survey of poor migrants from rural areas found that their incomes were 2.5 times greater than they had been in the village, primarily because they could find about twice as many days of work in the city (58). Other migrants, however, are unable to find work or are forced to take ill-paying or hazardous jobs. Unable to generate enough income to meet their basic needs for food and shelter, they join the ranks of the urban poor.

Employment Opportunities

Unemployment is a significant problem in most cities in developing countries, because the formal economies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are unable to absorb the enormous influx of workers. Given the urbanization rates these cities are now experiencing, the demand for new jobs will be intense: Starting in 1990, it is estimated that an additional 35 million jobs per year will be required to provide employment to all new labor force participants (59). As a result, a substantial number of the developing world's urban poor make their living through subsistence activities or informal jobs--namely, production and exchange outside of the formal market. These jobs run the gamut from providing services such as garbage collection and domestic help, to providing goods such as food and building materials in small stores, to small-scale clothing manufacturing. Informal jobs make up an estimated 75 percent of urban employment in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and between 30 and 50 percent in Latin America (60) (61).

Debate on the role of the so-called informal sector in national economies is rampant (62) (63). Until recently, informal jobs have been viewed as disconnected from the "real" economy of a city, yet evidence suggests that informal jobs are well integrated and contribute directly to the urban economy as a whole (64). In addition, seemingly informal jobs often have direct ties to a city's formal enterprises. For instance, scavengers in Hanoi, Viet Nam, obtain and clean chicken bones that end up in pharmacies in Italy as high-priced calcium supplements (65).

With some exceptions, however, informal jobs tend to pay less well than formal ones and offer little security or benefits. In Latin America, incomes from informal jobs were on average at least 40 percent below those earned in formal employment; in the 13 countries studied, the average income received by those employed in informal jobs was well below official poverty lines (66).

Source: http://www.wri.org/wr-96-97/ud_txt3.html

The world's urban population is growing fast. Within a few years - and certainly by 2005 - for the first time in human history, half the 6.5 billion people of our planet will be living in towns and cities. That is huge change. In 1950, only 29 per cent of the world's population of 2.5 billion were urban dwellers. And 83 per cent of the developing world's people were still living on the land. If the UN projections are to be believed (and they are fallible, see below) by 2025 over 60 per cent of the world's 8.3 billion global citizens will be living in towns and cities.While attention is often focused on the world's biggest megacities such as Sao Paulo and Bombay, they contain only a relatively small proportion of all urban dwellers. Today, only about 15 per cent of urban dwellers live in cities with more than 5 million people, while over 60 per cent live in towns and cities of one million or fewer. Nor is the proportion likely to change dramatically. The UN projects that by 2025 18 per cent of the urban total will be in cities with over 5 million people. In fact, the speed of growth in most megacities slowed during the 1980s, so that some of the early projections have had to be drastically revised. In the early 1970s, for example, the UN projected that Mexico City would grow to over 31 million by the year 2000. The latest (1994) estimate now expects that figure to be 16.4 million. Others cities where estimates for end of century numbers have had to be scaled down include Rio de Janiero (from 19.4 to 10.6 million), Calcutta (19.7 to 12.7), Cairo (16.4 to 10.7) and Seoul (18.7 to 12.3). Other projections have proved more accurate, as in the case of Bombay, which is still expected to house over 18 million people by the year 2000.Overall the picture is a mixed one. Some of the 30,000 urban centres in the South grew very fast in the 1980s, some grew rapidly and many grew slowly or not at all. In general, the greatest growth took place where economic activity was most buoyant, as in China. According to David Satterthwaite, it is no accident that 199 of the world's 281 million-plus cities are found in the world's 25 largest economies. What is unprecedented, is the number of countries which are rapidly urbanizing and the number of cities that are growing rapidly. Many of today's million-plus cities have seen numbers grow tenfold in 40 years. These include places such as Amman, Curitiba, Dar es Salaam, Dhaka, Khartoum, Lagos, Nairobi and Seoul. Also without precedent is the appearance of the huge agglomerations, never experienced before. In 1940, only New York and London had more than 5 million people. By 1990 there were 30 cities with over 5 million people of which 22 had over 8 million. Ten of these larger megacities are in Asia, which is projected to add a further nine by 2025. Whether megacities continue to grow, or to decentralize away from the dominant city into larger regional urban groupings, depends on many and varied factors, including the development of modern communication and transport systems.

Migration

Shockingly little is known, with certainty, about urban migration, though some estimates are that it may account for between 40 and 60 per cent of annual urban population growth. Migration is clearly more significant in rapidly industrializing regions such as Asia and parts of Africa. China, for example, may see 200 million more rural labourers looking for work in the cities over the next decade. In other regions that have largely completed the urban transition, such as Latin America, Europe and North America, it is less significant.Migration across borders to urban centres is a growing phenomena. For example, as transport links improve and economic barriers fall the migration north into Mexico and the United States is increasing. The recent civil war in El Salvador prompted nearly a fifth of the population to leave the country, mostly to the United States.Though many migrants work in the informal sector, with low pay and little security, surveys suggest that the move to the city does improve their situation. One survey in New Delhi found that poor migrants from the countryside found their income was more than twice what they could earn in the village. Urbanization has also had a generally positive effect on the access to reproductive health care, the importance of which for the health of mothers and infants cannot be overstressed (see page 00). It has played a key role in assisting the decline in the average family size in developing countries from over six children in the 1950s to under four today.Along with education, income and health care, the decline in birth rates correlates closely with urbanization. Despite all the environmental hazards, life expectancy is significantly longer and infant mortality significantly lower in urban areas, as against rural ones. Surveys in 17 countries showed that children under two had a 25 per cent better chance of survival by living in town rather than in the country.At the same time, the relative concentration of the poor in towns and cities is increasing. By the year 2000, UN estimates suggest that half the world's poorest people, or some 420 million, will be living in urban settlements. Graph: Urban population (billions) 1950-2025

At the same time, the relative concentration of the poor in towns and cities is increasing. By the year 2000, UN estimates suggest that half the world's poorest people, or some 420 million, will be living in urban settlements. This represents an institutional as well as a political challenge in dealing with rapid social, economic and demographic change.This article has been prepared with the generous assistance of Robert Livernash, Senior Editor at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington and David Satterthwaite, Director of the Human Settlements Programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. It is partly drawn from World Resources 1996-97, published by WRI.

Source: http://mthwww.uwc.edu/wwwmahes/courses/geog/malthus/sen_NYR.htm

AMARTYA SEN

September 22, 1994Few issues today are as divisive as what is called the "world population problem." With the approach this autumn of the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, organized by the United Nations, these divisions among experts are receiving enormous attention and generating considerable heat. There is a danger that in the confrontation between apocalyptic pessimism, on the one hand, and a dismissive smugness, on the other, a genuine understanding of the nature of the population problem may be lost.1Visions of impending doom have been increasingly aired in recent years, often presenting the population problem as a "bomb" that has been planted and is about to "go off." These catastrophic images have encouraged a tendency to search for emergency solutions which treat the people involved not as reasonable beings, allies facing a common problem, but as impulsive and uncontrolled sources of great social harm, in need of strong discipline. Such views have received serious attention in public discussions, not just in sensational headlines in the popular press, but also in seriously argued and widely read books. One of the most influential examples was Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, the first three sections of which were headed "Too Many People," "Too Little Food," and "A Dying Planet."2 A more recent example of a chilling diagnosis of imminent calamity is Garrett Hardin's Living within Limits.3 The arguments on which these pessimistic visions are based deserve serious scrutiny.If the propensity to foresee impending disaster from overpopulation is strong in some circles, so is the tendency, in others, to dismiss all worries about population size. Just as alarmism builds on the recognition of a real problem and then magnifies it, complacency may also start off from a reasonable belief about the history of population problems and fail to see how they may have changed by now. It is often pointed out, for example, that the world has coped well enough with fast increases in population in the past, even though alarmists had expected otherwise. Malthus anticipated terrible disasters resulting from population growth and a consequent imbalance in "the proportion between the natural increase of population and food."4 At a time when there were fewer than a billion people, he was quite convinced that "the period when the number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived." However, since Malthus first published his famous Essay on Population in 1798, the world population has grown nearly six times larger, while food output and consumption per person are considerably higher now, and there has been an unprecedented increase both in life expectancies and in general living standards.5 The fact that Malthus was mistaken in his diagnosis as well as his prognosis two hundred years ago does not, however, indicate that contemporary fears about population growth must be similarly erroneous. The increase in the world population has vastly accelerated over the last century. It took the world population millions of years to reach the first billion, then 123 years to get to the second, 33 years to the third, 14 years to the fourth, 13 years to the fifth billion, with a sixth billion to come, according to one UN projection, in another 11 years.6 During the last decade, between 1980 and 1990, the number of people on earth grew by about 923 million, an increase nearly the size of the total world population in Malthus's time. Whatever may be the proper response to alarmism about the future, complacency based on past success is no response at all.

Immigration and Population

One current worry concerns the regional distribution of the increase in world population, about 90 percent of which is taking place in the developing countries. The percentage rate of population growth is fastest in Africa—3.1 percent per year over the last decade. But most of the large increases in population occur in regions other than Africa. The largest absolute increases in numbers are taking place in Asia, which is where most of the world's poorer people live, even though the rate of increase in population has been slowing significantly there. Of the worldwide increase of 923 million people in the 1980s, well over half occurred in Asia—517 million in fact (including 146 million in China and 166 million in India).Beyond concerns about the well-being of these poor countries themselves, a more self-regarding worry causes panic in the richer countries of the world and has much to do with the current anxiety in the West about the "world population problem." This is founded on the belief that destitution caused by fast population growth in the third world is responsible for the severe pressure to emigrate to the developed countries of Europe and North America. In this view, people impoverished by overpopulation in the "South" flee to the "North." Some have claimed to find empirical support for this thesis in the fact that pressure to emigrate from the South has accelerated in recent decades, along with a rapid increase in the population there.There are two distinct questions here: first, how great a threat of intolerable immigration pressure does the North face from the South, and second, is that pressure closely related to population growth in the South, rather than to other social and economic factors? There are reasons to doubt that population growth is the major force behind migratory pressures, and I shall concentrate here on that question. But I should note in passing that immigration is now severely controlled in Europe and North America, and insofar as Europe is concerned, most of the current immigrants from the third world are not "primary" immigrants but dependent relatives—mainly spouses and young children—of those who had come and settled earlier. The United States remains relatively more open to fresh immigration, but the requirements of "labor certification" as a necessary part of the immigration procedure tend to guarantee that the new entrants are relatively better educated and more skilled. There are, however, sizable flows of illegal immigrants, especially to the United States and to a lesser extent to southern Europe, though the numbers are hard to estimate.What causes the current pressures to emigrate? The "job-worthy" people who get through the immigration process are hardly to be seen as impoverished and destitute migrants created by the sheer pressure of population. Even the illegal immigrants who manage to evade the rigors of border control are typically not starving wretches but those who can make use of work prospects in the North. The explanation for the increased migratory pressure over the decades owes more to the dynamism of international capitalism than to just the growing size of the population of the third world countries. The immigrants have allies in potential employers, and this applies as much to illegal farm laborers in California as to the legally authorized "guest workers" in automobile factories in Germany. The economic incentive to emigrate to the North from the poorer Southern economies may well depend on differences in real income. But this gap is very large anyway, and even if it is presumed that population growth in the South is increasing the disparity with the North—a thesis I shall presently consider—it seems unlikely that this incentive would significantly change if the Northern income level were, say, twenty times that of the Southern as opposed to twenty-five times.The growing demand for immigration to the North from the South is related to the "shrinking" of the world (through revolutions in communication and transport), reduction in economic obstacles to labor movements (despite the increase in political barriers), and the growing reach and absorptive power of international capitalism (even as domestic politics in the North has turned more inward-looking and nationalistic). To try to explain the increase in immigration pressure by the growth rate of total population in the third world is to close one's eyes to the deep changes that have occurred—and are occurring—in the world in which we live, and the rapid internationalization of its cultures and economies that accompanies these changes.

A closely related issue concerns what is perceived as a growing "imbalance" in the division of the world population, with a rapidly rising share belonging to the third world. That fear translates into worries of various kinds in the North, especially the sense of being overrun by the South. Many Northerners fear being engulfed by people from Asia and Africa, whose share of the world population increased from 63.7 percent in 1950 to 71.2 percent by 1990, and is expected, according to the estimates of the United Nations, to rise to 78.5 percent by 2050 AD. It is easy to understand the fears of relatively well-off people at the thought of being surrounded by a fast growing and increasingly impoverished Southern population. As I shall argue, the thesis of growing impoverishment does not stand up to much scrutiny; but it is important to address first the psychologically tense issue of racial balance in the world (even though racial composition as a consideration has only as much importance as we choose to give it). Here it is worth recollecting that the third world is right now going through the same kind of demo-graphic shift—a rapid expansion of population for a temporary but long stretch—that Europe and North America experienced during their industrial revolution. In 1650 the share of Asia and Africa in the world population is estimated to have been 78.4 percent, and it stayed around there even in 1750.7 With the industrial revolution, the share of Asia and Africa diminished because of the rapid rise of population in Europe and North America; for example, during the nineteenth century while the inhabitants of Asia and Africa grew by about 4 percent per decade or less, the population of "the area of European settlement" grew by around 10 percent every decade.Even now the combined share of Asia and Africa (71.2 percent) is considerably below what its share was in 1650 or 1750. If the United Nations' prediction that this share will rise to 78.5 percent by 2050 comes true, then the Asians and the Africans would return to being proportionately almost exactly as numerous as they were before the European industrial revolution. There is, of course, nothing sacrosanct about the distributions of population in the past; but the sense of a growing "imbalance" in the world, based only on recent trends, ignores history and implicitly presumes that the expansion of Europeans earlier on was natural, whereas the same process happening now to other populations unnaturally disturbs the "balance."

Other worries involving the relation of population growth to food supplies, income levels, and the environment reflect more serious matters.8 Before I take up those questions, a brief comment on the distinction between two rival approaches to dealing with the population problem may be useful. One involves voluntary choice and a collaborative solution, and the other overrides voluntarism through legal or economic coercion. Alarmist views of impending crises tend to produce a willingness to consider forceful measures for coercing people to have fewer children in the third world. Imposing birth control on unwilling people is no longer rejected as readily as it was until quite recently, and some activists have pointed to the ambiguities that exist in determining what is or is not "coercion."9 Those who are willing to consider—or at least not fully reject—programs that would use some measure of force to reduce population growth often point to the success of China's "one child policy" in cutting down the national birth rate. Force can also take an indirect form, as when economic opportunities are changed so radically by government regulations that people are left with very little choice except to behave in ways the government would approve. In China's case, the government may refuse to offer housing to families with too many children—thus penalizing the children as well as the dissenting adults.In India the policy of compulsory birth control that was initiated during the "emergency period" declared by Mrs. Gandhi in the 1970s was decisively rejected by the voters in the general election in which it—along with civil rights—was a major issue. Even so, some public health clinics in the northern states (such as Uttar Pradesh) insist, in practice, on sterilization before providing normal medical attention to women and men beyond a certain age. The pressures to move in that direction seem to be strong, and they are reinforced by the rhetoric of "the population bomb." I shall call this general approach the "override" view, since the family's personal decisions are overridden by some agency outside the family—typically by the government of the country in question (whether or not it has been pressed to do so by "outside" agencies, such as international organizations and pressure groups). In fact, overriding is not limited to an explicit use of legal coercion or economic compulsion, since people's own choices can also be effectively overridden by simply not offering them the opportunities for jobs or welfare that they can expect to get from a responsible government. Override can take many different forms and can be of varying intensity (with the Chinese "one child policy" being something of an extreme case of a more general approach).A central issue here is the increasingly vocal demand by some activists concerned with population growth that the highest "priority" should be given in third world countries to family planning over other public commitments. This demand goes much beyond supporting family planning as a part of development. In fact, proposals for shifting international aid away from development in general to family planning in particular have lately been increasingly frequent. Such policies fit into the general approach of "override" as well, since they try to rely on manipulating people's choices through offering them only some opportunities (the means of family planning) while denying others, no matter what they would have themselves preferred. Insofar as they would have the effect of reducing health care and educational services, such shifts in public commitments will not only add to the misery of human lives, they may also have, I shall argue, exactly the opposite effect on family planning than the one intended, since education and health care have a significant part in the voluntary reduction of the birth rate.The "override" approach contrasts with another, the "collaborative" approach, that relies not on legal or economic restrictions but on rational decisions of women and men, based on expanded choices and enhanced security, and encouraged by open dialogue and extensive public discussions. The difference between the two approaches does not lie in government's activism in the first case as opposed to passivity in the second. Even if solutions are sought through the decisions and actions of people themselves, the chance to take reasoned decisions with more knowledge and a greater sense of personal security can be increased by public policies, for example, through expanding educational facilities, health care, and economic well-being, along with providing better access to family planning. The central political and ethical issue concerning the "override" approach does not lie in its insistence on the need for public policy but in the ways it significantly reduces the choices open to parents.

Thomas Robert Malthus forcefully argued for a version of the "override" view. In fact, it was precisely this preference that distinguished Malthus from Condorcet, the eighteenth-century French mathematician and social scientist from whom Malthus had actually derived the analysis of how population could outgrow the means of living. The debate between Condorcet and Malthus in some ways marks the origin of the distinction between the "collaborative" and the "override" approaches, which still compete for attention.10 In his Essay on Population, published in 1798, Malthus quoted—extensively and with approval—Condorcet's discussion, in 1795, of the possibility of overpopulation. However, true to the Enlightenment tradition, Condorcet was confident that this problem would be solved by reasoned human action: through increases in productivity, through better conservation and prevention of waste, and through education (especially female education) which would contribute to reducing the birth rate.11 Voluntary family planning would be encouraged, in Condorcet's analysis, by increased understanding that if people "have a duty toward those who are not yet born, that duty is not to give them existence but to give them happiness." They would see the value of limiting family size "rather than foolishly... encumber the world with useless and wretched beings."12Even though Malthus borrowed from Condorcet his diagnosis of the possibility of overpopulation, he refused to accept Condorcet's solution. Indeed, Malthus's essay on population was partly a criticism of Condorcet's enlightenment reasoning, and even the full title of Malthus's famous essay specifically mentioned Condorcet. Malthus argued that there is no reason whatever to suppose that anything beside the difficulty of procuring in adequate plenty the necessaries of life should either indispose this greater number of persons to marry early, or disable them from rearing in health the largest families.13 Malthus thus opposed public relief of poverty: he saw the "poor laws" in particular as contributing greatly to population growth.14Malthus was not sure that any public policy would work, and whether "overriding" would in fact be possible: "The perpetual tendency in the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the great general laws of animated nature which we can have no reason to expect will change."15 But insofar as any solution would be possible, it could not come from voluntary decisions of the people involved, or acting from a position of strength and economic security. It must come from overriding their preferences through the compulsions of economic necessity, since their poverty was the only thing that could "indispose the greater number of persons to marry early, or disable them from rearing in health the largest families."

Development and Increased Choice

The distinction between the "collaborative" approach and the "override" approach thus tends to correspond closely to the contrast between, on the one hand, treating economic and social development as the way to solve the population problem and, on the other, expecting little from development and using, instead, legal and economic pressures to reduce birth rates. Among recent writers, those such as Gerard Piel16 who have persuasively emphasized our ability to solve problems through reasoned decisions and actions have tended—like Condorcet—to find the solution of the population problem in economic and social development. They advocate a broadly collaborative approach, in which governments and citizens would together produce economic and social conditions favoring slower population growth. In contrast, those who have been thoroughly skeptical of reasoned human action to limit population growth have tended to go in the direction of "override" in one form or another, rather than concentrate on development and voluntarism.Has development, in fact, done much to reduce population growth? There can be little doubt that economic and social development, in general, has been associated with major reductions in birth rates and the emergence of smaller families as the norm. This is a pattern that was, of course, clearly observed in Europe and North America as they underwent industrialization, but that experience has been repeated in many other parts of the world. In particular, conditions of economic security and affluence, wider availability of contraceptive methods, expansion of education (particularly female education), and lower mortality rates have had—and are currently having—quite substantial effects in reducing birth rates in different parts of the world.17 The rate of world population growth is certainly declining, and even over the last two decades its percentage growth rate has fallen from 2.2 percent per year between 1970 and 1980 to 1.7 percent between 1980 and 1992. This rate is expected to go steadily down until the size of the world's population becomes nearly stationary.18There are important regional differences in demographic behavior; for example, the population growth rate in India peaked at 2.2 percent a year (in the 1970s) and has since started to diminish, whereas most Latin American countries peaked at much higher rates before coming down sharply, while many countries in Africa currently have growth rates between 3 and 4 percent, with an average for sub-Saharan Africa of 3.1 percent. Similarly, the different factors have varied in their respective influence from region to region. But there can be little dispute that economic and social development tends to reduce fertility rates. The regions of the third world that lag most in achieving economic and social development, such as many countries in Africa, are, in general, also the ones that have failed to reduce birth rates significantly. Malthus's fear that economic and social development could only encourage people to have more children has certainly proved to be radically wrong, and so have all the painful policy implications drawn from it.This raises the following question: in view of the clear connection between development and lower fertility, why isn't the dispute over how to deal with population growth fully resolved already? Why don't we reinterpret the population problem simply as a problem of underdevelopment and seek a solution by encouraging economic and social development (even if we reject the oversimple slogan "development is the most reliable contraceptive")? In the long run, this may indeed be exactly the right approach. The problem is more complex, however, because a "contraceptive" that is "reliable" in the long run may not act fast enough to meet the present threat. Even though development may dependably work to stabilize population if it is given enough time, there may not be, it is argued, time enough to give. The death rate often falls very fast with more widely available health care, better sanitation, and improved nutrition, while the birth rate may fall rather slowly. Much growth of population may meanwhile occur.This is exactly the point at which apocalyptic prophecies add force to the "override" view. One claim, then, that needs examination is that the world is facing an imminent crisis, one so urgent that development is just too slow a process to deal with it. We must try right now, the argument goes, to cut down population growth by drastic and forceful means if necessary. The second claim that also needs scrutiny is the actual feasibility of adequately reducing population growth through these drastic means, without fostering social and economic development.

Population and Income

It is sometimes argued that signs of an imminent crisis can be found in the growing impoverishment of the South, with falling income per capita accompanying high population growth. In general, there is little evidence for this. As a matter of fact, the average population of "low-income" countries (as defined by the World Bank) has been not only enjoying a rising gross national product (GNP) per head, but a growth rate of GNP per capita(3.9 percent per year for 1980-1992) that is much faster than those for the "high-income" countries (2.4 percent) and for the "middle-income" ones (0 percent).19The growth of per capita GNP of the population of low-income countries would have been even higher had it not been for the negative growth rates of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, one region in which a number of countries have been experiencing economic decline. But the main culprit causing this state of affairs is the terrible failure of economic production in sub-Saharan Africa (connected particularly with political disruption, including wars and military rule), rather than population growth, which is only a subsidiary factor. Sub-Saharan Africa does have high population growth, but its economic stagnation has contributed much more to the fall in its per-capita income.With its average population growth rate of 3.1 percent per year, had sub-Saharan Africa suddenly matched China's low population growth of 1.4 percent (the lowest among the low-income countries), it would have gained roughly 1.7 percent in per-capita GNP growth. The real income per person would still have fallen, even with that minimal population growth, for many countries in the region. The growth of GNP per capita is minus 1.9 percent for Ethiopia, minus 1.8 percent for Togo, minus 3.6 percent for Mozambique, minus 4.3 percent for Niger, minus 4.7 percent for Ivory Coast, not to mention Somalia, Sudan, and Angola, where the political disruption has been so serious that no reliable GNP estimates even exist. A lower population growth rate could have reduced the magnitude of the fall in per capita GNP, but the main roots of Africa's economic decline lie elsewhere. The complex political factors underlying the troubles of Africa include, among other things, the subversion of democracy and the rise of combative military rulers, often encouraged by the cold war (with Africa providing "client states"—from Somalia and Ethiopia to Angola and Zaire—for the superpowers, particularly from the 1960s onward). The explanation of sub-Saharan Africa's problems has to be sought in these political troubles, which affect economic stability, agricultural and industrial incentives, public health arrangements, and social services—even family planning and population policy.20There is indeed a very powerful case for reducing the rate of growth of population in Africa, but this problem cannot be dissociated from the rest of the continent's woes. Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other developing regions in economic security, in health care, in life expectancy, in basic education, and in political and economic stability. It should be no great surprise that it lags behind in family planning as well. To dissociate the task of population control from the politics and economics of Africa would be a great mistake and would seriously mislead public policy.

Population and Food

Malthus's exact thesis cannot, however, be disputed by quoting statistics of income per capita, for he was concerned specifically with food supply per capita, and he had concentrated on "the proportion between the natural increase of population and food." Many modern commentators, including Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin, have said much about this, too. When Ehrlich says, in his Population Bomb, "too little food," he does not mean "too little income," but specifically a growing shortage of food.Is population beginning to outrun food production?

Even though such an impression is often given in public discussions, there is, in fact, no serious evidence that this is happening. While there are some year-to-year fluctuations in the growth of food output (typically inducing, whenever things slacken a bit, some excited remarks by those who anticipate an impending doom), the worldwide trend of food output per person has been firmly upward. Not only over the two centuries since Malthus's time, but also during recent decades, the rise in food output has been significantly and consistently outpacing the expansion of world population.21 But the total food supply in the world as a whole is not the only issue. What about the regional distribution of food? If it were to turn out that the rising ratio of food to population is mainly caused by increased production in richer countries (for example, if it appeared that US wheat output was feeding the third world, in which much of the population expansion is taking place), then the neo-Malthusian fears about "too many people" and "too little food" may have some plausibility. Is this what is happening?In fact, with one substantial exception, exactly the opposite is true. The largest increases in the production of food—not just in the aggregate but also per person—are actually taking place in the third world, particularly in the region that is having the largest absolute increases in the world population, that is, in Asia. The many millions of people who are added to the populations of India and China may be constantly cited by the terrorized—and terrorizing—advocates of the apocalyptic view, but it is precisely in these countries that the most rapid rates of growth in food output per capita are to be observed. For example, between the three-year averages of 1979-1981 and 1991-1993, food production per head in the world moved up by 3 percent, while it went up by only 2 percent in Europe and went down by nearly 5 percent in North America. In contrast, per capita food production jumped up by 22 percent in Asia generally, including 23 percent in India and 39 percent in China.22 (See Table 1.)During the same period, however, food production per capita went down by 6 percent in Africa, and even the absolute size of food output fell in some countries (such as Malawi and Somalia). Of course, many countries in the world—from Syria, Italy, and Sweden to Botswana in Africa—have had declining food production per head without experiencing hunger or starvation since their economies have prospered and grown; when the means are available, food can be easily bought in the international market if it is necessary to do so. For many countries in sub-Saharan Africa the problem arises from the fact that the decline in food production is an integral part of the story of overall economic decline, which I have discussed earlier.Difficulties of food production in sub-Saharan Africa, like other problems of the national economy, are not only linked to wars, dictatorships, and political chaos. In addition, there is some evidence that climatic shifts have had unfavorable effects on parts of that continent. While some of the climatic problems may be caused partly by increases in human settlement and environmental neglect, that neglect is not unrelated to the political and economic chaos that has characterized sub-Saharan Africa during the last few decades. The food problem of Africa must be seen as one part of a wider political and economic problem of the region.23

The Price of Food

To return to "the balance between food and population," the rising food production per capita in the world as a whole, and in the third world in general, contradicts some of the pessimism that characterized the gloomy predictions of the past. Prophecies of imminent disaster during the last few decades have not proved any more accurate than Malthus's prognostication nearly two hundred years ago. As for new prophecies of doom, they cannot, of course, be contradicted until the future arrives. There was no way of refuting the theses of W. Paddock and P. Paddock's popular book Famine—1975!, published in 1968, which predicted a terrible cataclysm for the world as a whole by 1975 (writing off India, in particular, as a basket case), until 1975 actually arrived. The new prophets have learned not to attach specific dates to the crises they foresee, and past failures do not seem to have reduced the popular appetite for this creative genre. However, after noting the rather dismal forecastiing record of doom-sayers, we must also accept the general methodological point that present trends in output do not necessarily tell us much about the prospects of further expansion in the future. It could, for example, be argued that maintaining growth in food production may require proportionately increasing investments of capital, drawing them away from other kinds of production. This would tend to make food progressively more expensive if there are "diminishing returns" in shifting resources from other fields into food production. And, ultimately, further expansion of food production may become so expensive that it would be hard to maintain the trend of increasing food production without reducing other outputs drastically.But is food production really getting more and more expensive? There is, in fact, no evidence for that conclusion either. In fact, quite the contrary. Not only is food generally much cheaper to buy today, in constant dollars, than it was in Malthus's time, but it also has become cheaper during recent decades. As a matter of fact, there have been increasing complaints among food exporters, especially in the third world, that food prices have fallen in relation to other commodities. For example, in 1992 a United Nations report recorded a 38 percent fall in the relative prices of "basic foods" over the last decade.24 This is entirely in line with the trend, during the last three decades, toward declining relative prices of particular food items, in relation to the prices of manufactured goods. The World Bank's adjusted estimates of the prices of particular food crops, between 1953-1955 and 1983-1985, show similarly steep declines for such staples as rice (42 percent), wheat (57 percent), sorghum (39 percent), and maize (37 percent).25Not only is food getting less expensive, but we also have to bear in mind that the current increase in food production (substantial and well ahead of population growth, as it is) is itself being kept in check by the difficulties in selling food profitably, as the relative prices of food have fallen. Those neo-Malthusians who concede that food production is now growing faster than population often point out that it is growing "only a little faster than population," and they are inclined to interpret this as evidence that we are reaching the limits of what we can produce to keep pace with population growth. But that is surely the wrong conclusion to draw in view of the falling relative prices of food, and the current difficulties in selling food, since it ignores the effects of economic incentives that govern production. When we take into account the persistent cheapening of food prices, we have good grounds to suggest that food output is being held back by a lack of effective demand in the market. The imaginary crisis in food production, contradicted as it is by the upward trends of total and regional food output per head, is thus further debunked by an analysis of the economic incentives to produce more food.

Deprived Lives and Slums

I have examined the alleged "food problem" associated with population growth in some detail because it has received so much attention both in the traditional Malthusian literature and in the recent writings of neo-Malthusians. In concentrating on his claim that growing populations would not have enough food, Malthus differed from Condorcet's broader presentation of the population question. Condorcet's own emphasis was on the possibility of "a continual diminution of happiness" as a result of population growth, a diminution that could occur in many different ways—not just through the deprivation of food, but through a decline in living conditions generally. That more extensive worry can remain even when Malthus's analysis of the food supply is rejected.Indeed, average income and food production per head can go on increasing even as the wretchedly deprived living conditions of particular sections of the population get worse, as they have in many parts of the third world. The living conditions of backward regions and deprived classes can decline even when a country's economic growth is very rapid on the average. Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s provided an extreme example of this. The sense that there are just "too many people" around often arises from seeing the desperate lives of people in the large and rapidly growing urban slums—bidonvilles—in poor countries, sobering reminders that we should not take too much comfort from aggregate statistics of economic progress. But in an essay addressed mainly to the population problem, what we have to ask is not whether things are just fine in the third world (they obviously are not), but whether population growth is the root cause of the deprivations that people suffer. The question is whether the particular instances of deep poverty we observe derive mainly from population growth rather than from other factors that lead to unshared prosperity and persistent and possibly growing inequality. The tendency to see in population growth an explanation for every calamity that afflicts poor people is now fairly well established in some circles, and the message that gets transmitted constantly is the opposite of the old picture postcard: "Wish you weren't here."To see in population growth the main reason for the growth of overcrowded and very poor slums in large cities, for example, is not empirically convincing. It does not help to explain why the slums of Calcutta and Bombay have grown worse at a faster rate than those of Karachi and Islamabad (India's population growth rate is 2.1 percent per year, Pakistan's 3.1), or why Jakarta has deteriorated faster than Ankara or Istanbul (Indonesian population growth is 1.8 percent, Turkey's 2.3), or why the slums of Mexico City have become worse more rapidly than those of San José (Mexico's population growth rate is 2.0, Costa Rica's 2.8), or why Harlem can seem more and more deprived when compared with the poorer districts of Singapore (US population growth rate is 1.0, Singapore's is 1.8). Many causal factors affect the degree of deprivation in particular parts of a country—rural as well as urban—and to try to see them all as resulting from overpopulation is the negation of social analysis.This is not to deny that population growth may well have an effect on deprivation, but only to insist that any investigation of the effects of population growth must be part of the analysis of economic and political processes, including the effects of other variables. It is the isolationist view of population growth that should be rejected.

Threats to the Environment

In his concern about "a continual diminution of happiness" from population growth, Condorcet was a pioneer in considering the possibility that natural raw materials might be used up, thereby making living conditions worse. In his characteristically rationalist solution, which relied partly on voluntary and reasoned measures to reduce the birth rate, Condorcet also envisaged the development of less improvident technology: "The manufacture of articles will be achieved with less wastage in raw materials and will make better use of them."26The effects of a growing population on the environment could be a good deal more serious than the food problems that have received so much attention in the literature inspired by Malthus. If the environment is damaged by population pressures this obviously affects the kind of life we lead, and the possibilities of a "diminution in happiness" can be quite considerable. In dealing with this problem, we have to distinguish once again between the long and the short run. The short-run picture tends to be dominated by the fact that the per-capita consumption of food, fuel, and other goods by people in third world countries is often relatively low; consequently the impact of population growth in these countries is not, in relative terms, so damaging to the global environment. But the problems of the local environment can, of course, be serious in many developing economies. They vary from the "neighborhood pollution" created by unregulated industries to the pressure of denser populations on rural resources such as fields and woods.27 (The Indian authorities had to close down several factories in and around Agra, since the facade of the Taj Mahal was turning pale as a result of chemical pollution from local factories.) But it remains true that one additional American typically has a larger negative impact on the ozone layer, global warmth, and other elements of the earth's environment than dozens of Indians and Zimbabweans put together. Those who argue for the immediate need for forceful population control in the third world to preserve the global environment must first recognize this elementary fact. This does not imply, as is sometimes suggested, that as far as the global environment is concerned, population growth in the third world is nothing to worry about. The long-run impact on the global environment of population growth in the developing countries can be expected to be large. As the Indians and the Zimbabweans develop economically, they too will consume a great deal more, and they will pose, in the future, a threat to the earth's environment similar to that of people in the rich countries today. The long-run threat of population to the environment is a real one.

Women's Deprivation and Power

Since reducing the birth rate can be slow, this and other long-run problems should be addressed right now. Solutions will no doubt have to be found in the two directions to which, as it happens, Condorcet pointed: (1) developing new technology and new behavior patterns that would waste little and pollute less, and (2) fostering social and economic changes that would gradually bring down the growth rate of population.On reducing birth rates, Condorcet's own solution not only included enhancing economic opportunity and security, but also stressed the importance of education, particularly female education. A better-educated population could have a more informed discussion of the kind of life we have reason to value; in particular it would reject the drudgery of a life of continuous child bearing and rearing that is routinely forced on many third world women. That drudgery, in some ways, is the most immediately adverse consequence of high fertility rates.Central to reducing birth rates,then, is a close connection between women's well-being and their power to make their own decisions and bring about changes in the fertility pattern. Women in many third world countries are deprived by high birth frequency of the freedom to do other things in life, not to mention the medical dangers of repeated pregnancy and high maternal mortality, which are both characteristic of many developing countries. It is thus not surprising that reductions in birth rates have been typically associated with improvement of women's status and their ability to make their voices heard—often the result of expanded opportunities for schooling and political activity.28There is nothing particularly exotic about declines in the birth rate occurring through a process of voluntary rational assessment, of which Condorcet spoke. It is what people do when they have some basic education, know about family planning methods and have access to them, do not readily accept a life of persistent drudgery, and are not deeply anxious about their economic security. It is also what they do when they are not forced by high infant and child mortality rates to be so worried that no child will survive to support them in their old age that they try to have many children. In country after country the birth rate has come down with more female education, the reduction of mortality rates, the expansion of economic means and security, and greater public discussion of ways of living.

Development versus Coercion

There is little doubt that this process of social and economic change will over time cut down the birth rate. Indeed the growth rate of world population is already firmly declining—it came down from 2.2 percent in the 1970s to 1.7 percent between 1980 and 1992. Had imminent cataclysm been threatening, we might have had good reason to reject such gradual progress and consider more drastic means of population control, as some have advocated. But that apocalyptic view is empirically baseless. There is no imminent emergency that calls for a breathless response. What is called for is systematic support for people's own decisions to reduce family size through expanding education and health care, and through economic and social development.It is often asked where the money needed for expanding education, health care, etc., would be found. Education, health services, and many other means of improving the quality of life are typically highly labor-intensive and are thus relatively inexpensive in poor countries (because of low wages).29 While poor countries have less money to spend, they also need less money to provide these services. For this reason many poor countries have indeed been able to expand educational and health services widely without waiting to become prosperous through the process of economic growth. Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand are good examples, and there are many others. While the impact of these social services on the quality and length of life have been much studied, they are also major means of reducing the birth rate.By contrast with such open and voluntary developments, coercive methods, such as the "one child policy" in some regions, have been tried in China, particularly since the reforms of 1979. Many commentators have pointed out that by 1992 the Chinese birth rate has fallen to 19 per 1,000, compared with 29 per 1,000 in India, and 37 per 1,000 for the average of poor countries other than China and India. China's total fertility rate (reflecting the numbrr of children born per woman) is now at "the replacement level" of 2.0, compared with India's 3.6 and the weighted average of 4.9 for low-income countries other than China and India.30 Hasn't China shown the way to "solve" the population problem in other developing countries as well?

China's Population Policies

The difficulties with this "solution" are of several kinds. First, if freedom is valued at all, the lack of freedom associated with this approach must be seen to be a social loss in itself. The importance of reproductive freedom has been persuasively emphasized by women's groups throughout the world.31 The loss of freedom is often dismissed on the grounds that because of cultural differences, authoritarian policies that would not be tolerated in the West are acceptable to Asians. While we often hear references to "despotic" Oriental traditions, such arguments are no more convincing than a claim that compulsion in the West is justified by the traditions of the Spanish Inquisition or of the Nazi concentration camps. Frequent references are also made to the emphasis on discipline in the "Confucian tradition"; but that is not the only tradition in the "East," nor is it easy to assess the implications of that tradition for modern Asia (even if we were able to show that discipline is more important for Confucius than it is for, say, Plato or Saint Augustine).Only a democratic expression of opinion could reveal whether citizens would find a compulsory system acceptable. While such a test has not occurred in China, one did in fact take place in India during "the emergency period" in the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi's government imposed compulsory birth control and suspended various legal freedoms. In the general elections that followed, the politicians favoring the policy of coercion were overwhelmingly defeated. Furthermore, family planning experts in India have observed how the briefly applied programs of compulsory sterilization tended to discredit voluntary birth control programs generally, since people became deeply suspicious of the entire movement to control fertility.Second, apart from the fundamental issue of whether people are willing to accept compulsory birth control, its specific consequences must also be considered. Insofar as coercion is effective, it works by making people do things they would not freely do. The social consequences of such compulsion, including the ways in which an unwilling population tends to react when it is coerced, can be appalling. For example, the demands of a "one-child family" can lead to the neglect—or worse—of a second child, thereby increasing the infant mortality rate. Moreover, in a country with a strong preference for male children—a preference shared by China and many other countries in Asia and North Africa—a policy of allowing only one child per family can easily lead to the fatal neglect of a female child. There is much evidence that this is fairly widespread in China, with very adverse effects on infant mortality rates. There are reports that female children have been severely neglected as well as suggestions that female infanticide occurs with considerable frequency. Such consequences are hard to tolerate morally, and perhaps politically also, in the long run.Third, what is also not clear is exactly how much additional reduction in the birth rate has been achieved through these coercive methods. Many of China's longstanding social and economic programs have been valuable in reducing fertility, including those that have expanded education for women as well as men, made health care more generally available, provided more job opportunities for women, and stimulated rapid economic growth. These factors would themselves have reduced the birth rates, and it is not clear how much "extra lowering" of fertility rates has been achieved in China through compulsion. For example, we can determine whether many of the countries that match (or outmatch) China in life expectancy, female literacy rates, and female participation in the labor force actually have a higher fertility rate than China. Of all the countries in the world for which data are given in the World Development Report 1994, there are only three such countries: Jamaica (2.7), Thailand (2.2), and Sweden (2.1)—and the fertility rates of two of these are close to China's (2.0). Thus the additional contribution of coercion to reducing fertility in China is by no means clear, since compulsion was superimposed on a society that was already reducing its birth rate and in which education and jobs outside the home were available to large numbers of women. In some regions of China the compulsory program needed little enforcement, whereas in other—more backward—regions, it had to be applied with much severity, with terrible consequences in infant mortality and discrimination against female children. While China may get too much credit for its authoritarian measures, it gets far too little credit for the other, more collaborative and participatory, policies it has followed, which have themselves helped to cut down the birth rate.

China and India

A useful contrast can be drawn between China and India, the two most populous countries in the world. If we look only at the national averages, it is easy to see that China with its low fertility rate of 2.0 has achieved much more than India has with its average fertility rate of 3.6. To what extent this contrast can be attributed to the effectiveness of the coercive policies used in China is not clear, since we would expect the fertility rate to be much lower in China in view of its higher percentage of female literacy (almost twice as high), higher life expectancy (almost ten years more), larger female involvement (by three quarters) in the labor force, and so on. But India is a country of great diversity, whose different states have very unequal achievements in literacy, health care, and economic and social development. Most states in India are far behind the Chinese provinces in educational achievement (with the exception of Tibet, which has the lowest literacy rate of any Chinese or Indian state), and the same applies to other factors that affect fertility. However, the state of Kerala in southern India provides an interesting comparison with China, since it too has high levels of basic education, health care, and so on. Kerala is a state within a country, but with its 29 million people, it is larger than most countries in the world (including Canada). Kerala's birth rate of 18 per 1,000 is actually lower than China's 19 per 1,000, and its fertility rate is 1.8 for 1991, compared with China's 2.0 for 1992. These low rates have been achieved without any state coercion.32The roots of Kerala's success are to be found in the kinds of social progress Condorcet hoped for, including among others, a high female literacy rate (86 percent, which is substantially higher than China's 68 percent). The rural literacy rate is in fact higher in Kerala—for women as well as men—than in every single province in China. Male and female life expectancies at birth in China are respectively 67 and 71 years; the provisional 1991 figures for men and women in Kerala are 71 and 74 years. Women have been active in Kerala's economic and political life for a long time. A high proportion do skilled and semi-skilled work and a large number have taken part in educational movements.33 It is perhaps of symbolic importance that the first public pronouncement of the need for widespread elementary education in any part of India was made in 1817 by Rani Gouri Parvathi Bai, the young queen of the princely state of Travancore, which makes up a substantial part of modern Kerala. For a long time public discussions in Kerala have centered on women's rights and the undesirability of couples marrying when very young.This political process has been voluntary and collaborative, rather than coercive, and the adverse reactions that have been observed in China, such as infant mortality, have not occurred in Kerala. Kerala's low fertility rate has been achieved along with an infant mortality rate of 16.5 per 1,000 live births (17 for boys and 16 for girls), compared with China's 31 (28 for boys and 33 for girls). And as a result of greater gender equality in Kerala, women have not suffered from higher mortality rates than men in Kerala, as they have in the rest of India and in China. Even the ratio of females to males in the total population in Kerala (above 1.03) is quite close to that of the current ratios in Europe and America (reflecting the usual pattern of lower female mortality whenever women and men receive similar care).

By contrast, the average female to male ratio in China is 0.94 and in India as a whole 0.93.34 Anyone drawn to the Chinese experience of compulsory birth control must take note of these facts. The temptation to use the "override" approach arises at least partly from impatience with the allegedly slow process of fertility reduction through collaborative, rather than coercive, attempts. Yet Kerala's birth rate has fallen from 44 per 1,000 in the 1950s to 18 by 1991—not a sluggish decline. Nor is Kerala unique in this respect. Other societies, such as those of Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Thailand, which have relied on expanding education and reducing mortality rates—instead of on coercion—have also achieved sharp declines in fertility and birth rates.It is also interesting to compare the time required for reducing fertility in China with that in the two states in India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which have done most to encourage voluntary and collaborative reduction in birth rates (even though Tamil Nadu is well behind Kerala in each respect).35 Table 2 shows the fertility rates both in 1979, when the one-child policy and related programs were introduced in China, and in 1991. Despite China's one-child policy and other coercive measures, its fertility rate seems to have fallen much less sharply than those of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The "override" view is very hard to defend on the basis of the Chinese experience, the only systematic and sustained attempt to impose such a policy that has so far been made.

Family Planning

Even those who do not advocate legal or economic coercion sometimes suggest a variant of the "override" approach—the view, which has been getting increasing support, that the highest priority should be given simply to family planning, even if this means diverting resources from education and health care as well as other activities associated with development. We often hear claims that enormous declines in birth rates have been accomplished through making family planning services available, without waiting for improvements in education and health care. The experience of Bangladesh is sometimes cited as an example of such success. Indeed, even though the female literacy rate in Bangladesh is only around 22 percent and life expectancy at birth no higher than 55 years, fertility rates have been substantially reduced there through the greater availability of family planning services, including counseling.36 We have to examine carefully what lessons can, in fact, be drawn from this evidence.First, it is certainly significant that Bangladesh has been able to cut its fertility rate from 7.0 to 4.5 during the short period between 1975 and 1990, an achievement that discredits the view that people will not voluntarily embrace family planning in the poorest countries. But we have to ask further whether family planning efforts may themselves be sufficient to make fertility come down to really low levels, without providing for female education and the other features of a fuller collaborative approach. The fertility rate of 4.5 in Bangladesh is still quite high—considerably higher than even India's average rate of 3.6. To begin stabilizing the population, the fertility rates would have to come down closer to the "replacement level" of 2.0, as has happened in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and in many other places outside the Indian subcontinent. Female education and the other social developments connected with lowering the birth rate would still be much needed.Contrasts between the records of Indian states offer some substantial lessons here. While Kerala, and to a smaller extent Tamil Nadu, have surged ahead in achieving radically reduced fertility rates, other states in India in the so-called "northern heartland" (such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan), have very low levels of education, especially female education, and of general health care (often combined with pressure on the poor to accept birth control measures, including sterilization, as a qualifying condition for medical attention and other public services). These states all have high fertility rates—between 4.4 and 5.1. The regional contrasts within India strongly argue for the collaborative approach, including active and educated participation of women.The threat of an impending population crisis tempts many international observers to suggest that priority be given to family planning arrangements in the third world countries over other commitments such as education and health care, a redirection of public efforts that is often recommended by policy-makers and at international conferences. Not only will this shift have negative effects on people's well-being and reduce their freedoms, it can also be self-defeating if the goal is to stabilize population.The appeal of such slogans as "family planning first" rests partly on misconceptions about what is needed to reduce fertility rates, but also on mistaken beliefs about the excessive costs of social development, including education and health care. As has been discussed, both these activities are highly labor intensive, and thus relatively inexpensive even in very poor economies. In fact, Kerala, India's star performer in expanding education and reducing both death rates and birth rates, is among the poorer Indian states. Its domestically produced income is quite low—lower indeed in per capita terms than even the Indian average—even if this is somewhat deceptive, for the greatest expansion of Kerala's earnings derives from citizens who work outside the state. Kerala's ability to finance adequately both educational expansion and health coverage depends on both activities being labor-intensive; they can be made available even in a low-income economy when there is the political will to use them. Despite its economic backwardness, an issue which Kerala will undoubtedly have to address before long (perhaps by reducing bureaucratic controls over agriculture and industry, which have stagnated), its level of social development has been remarkable, and that has turned out to be crucial in reducing fertility rates. Kerala's fertility rate of 1.8 not only compares well with China's 2.0, but also with the US's and Sweden's 2.1, Canada's 1.9, and Britain's and France's 1.8.The population problem is serious, certainly, but neither because of "the proportion between the natural increase of population and food" nor because of some mpending apocalypse. There are reasons for worry about the long-term effects of population growth on the environment; and there are strong reasons for concern about the adverse effects of high birth rates on the quality of life, especially of women. With greater opportunities for education (especially female education), reduction of mortality rates (especially of children), improvement in economic security (especially in old age), and greater participation of women in employment and in political action, fast reductions in birth rates can be expected to result through the decisions and actions of those whose lives depend on them.This is happening right now in many parts of the world, and the result has been a considerable slowing down of world population growth. The best way of dealing with the population problem is to help to spread these processes elsewhere. In contrast, the emergency mentality based on false beliefs in imminent cataclysms leads to breathless responses that are deeply counterproductive, preventing the development of rational and sustainable family planning. Coercive policies of forced birth control involve terrible social sacrifices, and there is little evidence that they are more effective in reducing birth rates than serious programs of collaborative action.

1 This paper draws on my lecture arranged by the "Eminent Citizens Committee for Cairo '94" at the United Nations in New York on April 18, 1994, and also on research supported by the National Science Foundation.2 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine, 1968). More recently Paul Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich have written The Population Explosion (Simon and Schuster, 1990).3 Garrett Hardin, Living within Limits (Oxford University Press, 1993).4 Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J. Johnson, 1798), Chapter 8; in the Penguin classics edition, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1982), p. 123.5 See Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth (Yale University Press, 1966).6 Note by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to the Preparatory Committee for the International Conference on Population and Development, Third Session, A/Conf.171/PC/5, February 18, 1994, p. 30.7 Philip Morris Hauser's estimates are presented in the National Academy of Sciences publication Rapid Population Growth: Consequences and Policy Implications, Vol. 1 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). See also Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth, Chapter 2.8 For an important collection of papers on these and related issues see Sir Francis Graham-Smith, F.R.S., editor, Population—The Complex Reality: A Report of the Population Summit of the World's Scientific Academies, issued by the Royal Society and published in the US by North American Press, Golden, Colorado. See also D. Gale Johnson and Ronald D. Lee, editors, Population Growth and Economic Development, Issues and Evidence (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).9 Garrett Hardin, Living within Limits, p. 274.10 Paul Kennedy, who has discussed important problems in the distinctly "social" aspects of population growth, has pointed out that this debate "has, in one form or another, been with us since then," and "it is even more pertinent today than when Malthus composed his Essay," in Preparing for the Twenty-first Century (Random House, 1993), pp. 5-6.11 On the importance of "enlightenment" traditions in Condorcet's thinking, see Emma Rothschild, "Condorcet and the Conflict of Values," forthcoming in The Historical Journal.12 Marie Jean Antoine Nicholas de Caritat Marquis de Condorcet's Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain, Xe Epoque (1795). English translation by June Barraclough, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955), pp. 187-192.13 T.R. Malthus, A Summary View of the Principle of Population (London: John Murray, 1830); in the Penguin classics edition (1982), p. 243; italics added.14 On practical policies, including criticism of poverty relief and charitable hospitals, advocated for Britain by Malthus and his followers, see William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Norton, 1989).15 Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapter 17; in the Penguin classics edition, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 198-199. Malthus showed some signs of weakening in this belief as he grew older.16 Gerard Piel, Only One World: Our Own to Make and to Keep (Freeman, 1992).17 For discussions of these empirical connections, see R.A. Easterlin, editor, Population and Economic Change in Developing Countries (University of Chicago Press, 1980); T.P. Schultz, Economics of Population (Addison-Wesley, 1981); J.C. Caldwell, Theory of Fertility Decline (Academic Press, 1982); E. King and M.A. Hill, editors, Women's Education in Developing Countries (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Nancy Birdsall, "Economic Approaches to Population Growth" in The Handbook of Development Economics, edited by H.B. Chenery and T.N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1988); Robert Cassen, et. al., Population and Development: Old Debates, New Conclusions (New Brunswick: Overseas Development Council/Transaction Publishers, 1994).18 World Bank, World Development Report 1994 (Oxford University Press, 1994), Table 25, pp. 210-211.19 World Bank, World Development Report 1994, Table 2.20 These issues are discussed in my joint book with Jean Drèze, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford University Press, 1989), and the three volumes edited by us, The Political Economy of Hunger (Oxford University Press, 1990), and also in my paper "Economic Regress: Concepts and Features," Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1993 (World Bank, 1994).21 This is confirmed by, among other statistics, the food production figures regularly presented by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (see the FAO Quarterly Bulletin of Statistics, and also the FAO Monthly Bulletins).22 For a more detailed picture and references to data sources, see my "Population and Reasoned Agency: Food, Fertility and Economic Development," in Population, Economic Development, and the Environment, edited by Kerstin Lindahl-Kiessling and Hans Landberg (Oxford University Press, 1994); see also the other contributions in this volume. The data presented here have been slightly updated from later publications of the FAO.23 On this see my Poverty and Famines (Oxford University Press, 1981).24 See UNCTAD VIII, Analytical Report by the UNCTAD Secretariat to the Conference (United Nations, 1992), Table V-S, p. 235. The period covered is between 1979-1981 to 1988-1990. These figures and related ones are discussed in greater detail in my paper "Population and Reasoned Agency," cited earlier.25 World Bank, Price Prospects for Major Primary Commodities, Vol. II (World Bank, March 1993), Annex Tables 6, 12, and 18.26 Condorcet, Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain; in the 1968 reprint, p. 187.27 The importance of "local" environmental issues is stressed and particularly explored by Partha Dasgupta in An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Oxford University Press, 1993).28 In a forthcoming monograph by Jean Drèze and myself tentatively called "India: Economic Development and Social Opportunities," we discuss the importance of women's political agency in rectifying some of the more serious lapses in Indian economic and social performance—not just pertaining to the deprivation of women themselves.29 See Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford University Press, 1989), which also investigates the remarkable success of some poor countries in providing widespread educational and health services.30 World Bank, World Development Report 1994, p. 212; and Sample Registration System: Fertility and Mortality Indicators 1991 (New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, 1993).31 See the discussions, and the literature cited, in Gita Sen, Adrienne German, and Lincoln Chen, editors, Population Policies Reconsidered: Health, Empowerment, and Rights (Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies/International Women's Health Coalition, 1994).32 On the actual processes involved, see T.N. Krishnan, "Demographic Transition in Kerala: Facts and Factors," in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 11 (1976), and P.N. Mari Bhat and S. I. Rajan, "Demographic Transition in Kerala Revisited," in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 25 (1990).33 See, for example, Robin Jeffrey, "Culture and Governments: How Women Made Kerala Literate," in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 60 (1987).34 On this see my "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing," New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990; Ansley J. Coale, "Excess Female Mortality and the Balance of the Sexes: An Estimate of the Number of 'Missing Females'," Population and Development Review, No. 17 (1991); Amartya Sen, "Missing Women," British Medical Journal, No. 304 (March 1992); Stephan Klasen, "'Missing Women' Reconsidered," World Development, forthcoming.35 Tamil Nadu has benefited from an active and efficient voluntary program of family planning, but these efforts have been helped by favorable social conditions as well, such as a high literacy rate (the second highest among the sixteen major states), a high rate of female participation in work outside the home (the third highest), a relatively low infant mortality rate (the third lowest), and a traditionally higher age of marriage. See also T.V. Antony, "The Family Planning Programme—Lessons from Tamil Nadu's Experience," Indian Journal of Social Science, Volume 5 (1992).36 World Bank and Population Reference Bureau, Success in a Challenging Environment: Fertility Decline in Bangladesh (World Bank, 1993).

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jun/consume.htm

by Mark Sagoff

Discussions of the future of the planet are dominated by those who believe that an expanding world economy will use up natural resources and those who see no reasons, environmental or otherwise, to limit economic growth.

Neither side has it right

In 1994, when delegates from around the world gathered in Cairo for the International Conference on Population and Development, representatives from developing countries protested that a baby born in the United States will consume during its lifetime twenty times as much of the world's resources as an African or an Indian baby. The problem for the world's environment, they argued, is overconsumption in the North, not overpopulation in the South.

Consumption in industrialized nations "has led to overexploitation of the resources of developing countries," a speaker from Kenya declared. A delegate from Antigua reproached the wealthiest 20 percent of the world's population for consuming 80 percent of the goods and services produced from the earth's resources.

Do we consume too much? To some, the answer is self-evident. If there is only so much food, timber, petroleum, and other material to go around, the more we consume, the less must be available for others. The global economy cannot grow indefinitely on a finite planet. As populations increase and economies expand, natural resources must be depleted; prices will rise, and humanity -- especially the poor and future generations at all income levels -- will suffer as a result.

Other reasons to suppose we consume too much are less often stated though also widely believed. Of these the simplest – a lesson we learn from our parents and from literature since the Old Testament -- may be the best: although we must satisfy

basic needs, a good life is not one devoted to amassing material possessions; what we own comes to own us, keeping us from fulfilling commitments that give meaning to life, such as those to family, friends, and faith. The appreciation of nature also deepens our lives. As we consume more, however, we are more likely to transform the natural world, so that less of it will remain for us to appreciate.

 The reasons for protecting nature are often religious or moral. As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin points out, many Americans believe that we have an obligation to protect species which goes beyond our own well-being; we "think we should admire and protect them because they are important in themselves, and not just if or because we or others want or enjoy them." In a recent survey Americans from various walks of life agreed by large majorities with the statement "Because God created the natural world, it is wrong to abuse it." The anthropologists who conducted this survey concluded that "divine creation is the closest concept American culture provides to express the sacredness of nature." During the nineteenth century preservationists forthrightly gave ethical and spiritual reasons for protecting the natural world.

John Muir condemned the "temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism" who "instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty dollar." This was not a call for better cost-benefit analysis: Muir described nature not as a commodity but as a companion. Nature is sacred, Muir held, whether or not resources are scarce.

Philosophers such as Emerson and Thoreau thought of nature as full of divinity. Walt Whitman celebrated a leaf of grass as no less than the journeywork of the stars: "After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on,"he wrote in Specimen Days, and "found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear -- what remains? Nature remains." These philosophers thought of nature as a refuge from economic activity, not as a resource for it.

Today those who wish to protect the natural environment rarely offer ethical or spiritual reasons for the policies they favor. Instead they say we are running out of resources or causing the collapse of ecosystems on which we depend. Predictions of resource scarcity appear objective and scientific, whereas pronouncements that nature is sacred or that greed is bad appear judgmental or even embarrassing in a secular society. Prudential and economic arguments, moreover, have succeeded better than moral or spiritual ones in swaying public policy.

These prudential and economic arguments are not likely to succeed much longer. It is simply wrong to believe that nature sets physical limits to economic growth -- that is, to prosperity and the production and consumption of goods and services on which it is based. The idea that increasing consumption will inevitably lead to depletion and scarcity, as plausible as it may seem, is mistaken both in principle and in fact. It is based on four misconceptions.

 Misconception No. 1: We Are Running Out of Raw Materials

In the 1970s Paul Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford University, predicted that global shortages would soon send prices for food, fresh water, energy, metals, paper, and other materials sharply higher. "It seems certain," Paul and Anne Ehrlich wrote in The End of Affluence (1974), "that energy shortages will be with us for the rest of the century, and that before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity in which many things besides energy will be in short supply."

Crucial materials would near depletion during the 1980s, Ehrlich predicted, pushing prices out of reach. "Starvation among people will be accompanied by starvation of industries for the materials they require." Things have not turned out as Ehrlich expected. In the early 1990s real prices for food overall fell. Raw materials -- including energy resources -- are generally more abundant and less expensive today than they were twenty years ago. When Ehrlich wrote, economically recoverable world reserves of petroleum stood at 640 billion barrels. Since that time reserves have increased by more than 50 percent, reaching more than 1,000 billion barrels in 1989. They have held steady in spite of rising consumption. The pre-tax real price of gasoline was lower during this decade than at any other time since 1947.

The World Energy Council announced in 1992 that "fears of imminent [resource] exhaustion that were widely held 20 years ago are now considered to have been unfounded." The World Resources Institute, in a 1994-1995 report, referred to "the frequently expressed concern that high levels of consumption will lead to resource depletion and to physical shortages that might limit growth or development opportunity." Examining the evidence, however, the institute said that "the world is not yet running out of most nonrenewable resources and is not likely to, at least in the next few decades." A 1988 report from the Office of Technology Assessment concluded, "The nation's future has probably never been less constrained by the cost of natural resources."

It is reasonable to expect that as raw materials become less expensive, they will be more rapidly depleted. This expectation is also mistaken. From 1980 to 1990, for example, while the prices of resource-based commodities declined (the price of rubber by 40 percent, cement by 40 percent, and coal by almost 50 percent), reserves of most raw materials increased.

Economists offer three explanations. First, with regard to subsoil resources, the world becomes ever more adept at discovering new reserves and exploiting old ones. Exploring for oil, for example, used to be a hit-or-miss proposition, resulting in a lot of dry holes. Today oil companies can use seismic waves to help them create precise computer images of the earth. New methods of extraction -- for example, using bacteria to leach metals from low-grade ores – greatly increase resource recovery. Reserves of resources "are actually functions of technology," one analyst has written. "The more advanced the technology, the more reserves become known and recoverable."

Second, plentiful resources can be used in place of those that become scarce. Analysts speak of an Age of Substitutability and point, for example, to nanotubes, tiny cylinders of carbon whose molecular structure forms fibers a hundred times as strong as steel, at one sixth the weight. As technologies that use more-abundant resources substitute for those needing less-abundant ones -- for example, ceramics in place of tungsten, fiber optics in place of copper wire, aluminum cans in place of tin ones -- the demand for and the price of the less-abundant resources decline.

One can easily find earlier instances of substitution. During the early nineteenth century whale oil was the preferred fuel for household illumination. A dwindling supply prompted innovations in the lighting industry, including the invention of gas and kerosene lamps and Edison's carbon-filament electric bulb. Whale oil has substitutes, such as electricity and petroleum-based lubricants. Whales are irreplaceable.

Third, the more we learn about materials, the more efficiently we use them. The progress from candles to carbon-filament to tungsten incandescent lamps, for example, decreased the energy required for and the cost of a unit of household lighting by many times. Compact fluorescent lights are four times as efficient as today's incandescent bulbs and last ten to twenty times as long. Comparable energy savings are available in other appliances: for example, refrigerators sold in 1993 were 23 percent more efficient than those sold in 1990 and 65 percent more efficient than those sold in 1980, saving consumers billions in electric bills.

Amory Lovins, the director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has described in these pages a new generation of ultralight automobiles that could deliver the safety and muscle of today's cars but with far better mileage -- four times as much in prototypes and ten times as much in projected models (see "Reinventing the Wheels," January, 1995, Atlantic). Since in today's cars only 15 to 20 percent of the fuel's energy reaches the wheels (the rest is lost in the engine and the transmission), and since materials lighter and stronger than steel are available or on the way, no expert questions the feasibility of the high-mileage vehicles Lovins describes.

Computers and cameras are examples of consumer goods getting lighter and smaller as they get better. The game-maker Sega is marketing a hand-held children's game, called Saturn, that has more computing power than the 1976 Cray supercomputer, which the United States tried to keep out of the hands of the Soviets. Improvements that extend the useful life of objects also save resources. Platinum spark plugs in today's cars last for 100,000 miles, as do "fill-for-life" transmission fluids. On average, cars bought in 1993 have a useful life more than 40 percent longer than those bought in 1970.As lighter materials replace heavier ones, the U.S. economy continues to shed weight. Our per capita consumption of raw materials such as forestry products and metals has, measured by weight, declined steadily over the past twenty years. A recent World Resources Institute study measured the "materials intensity" of our economy -- that is, "the total material input and the hidden or indirect material flows, including deliberate landscape alterations" required for each dollar's worth of economic output. "The result shows a clearly declining pattern of materials intensity, supporting the conclusion that economic activity is growing somewhat more rapidly than natural resource use." Of course, we should do better. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an association of the world's industrialized nations, has proposed that its members strive as a long-range goal to decrease their materials intensity by a factor of ten.

Communications also illustrates the trend toward lighter, smaller, less materials-intensive technology. Just as telegraph cables replaced frigates in transmitting messages across the Atlantic and carried more information faster, glass fibers and microwaves have replaced cables -- each new technology using less materials but providing greater capacity for sending and receiving information. Areas not yet wired for telephones (in the former Soviet Union, for example) are expected to leapfrog directly into cellular communications. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics, says that if the future is like the past, "there will be prolonged and substantial reductions in natural-resource requirements per unit of real output." He asks, "Why shouldn't the productivity of most natural resources rise more or less steadily through time, like the productivity oflabor?"

Misconception No. 2:

We Are Running Out of Food and Timber

THE United Nations projects that the global population, currently 5.7 billion, will peak at about 10 billion in the next century and then stabilize or even decline. Can the earth feed that many people? Even if food crops increase sufficiently, other renewable resources, including many fisheries and forests, are already under pressure. Should we expect fish stocks to collapse or forests to disappear?

The world already produces enough cereals and oilseeds to feed 10 billion people a vegetarian diet adequate in protein and calories. If, however, the idea is to feed 10 billion people not healthful vegetarian diets but the kind of meat-laden meals that Americans eat, the production of grains and oilseeds may have to triple -- primarily to feed livestock. Is anything like this kind of productivity in the cards?

Maybe. From 1961 to 1994 global production of food doubled. Global output of grain rose from about 630 million tons in 1950 to about 1.8 billion tons in 1992, largely as a result of greater yields. Developing countries from 1974 to 1994 increased wheat yields per acre by almost 100 percent, corn yields by 72 percent, and rice yields by 52 percent. "The generation of farmers on the land in 1950 was the first in history to double the production of food," the Worldwatch Institute has reported. "By 1984, they had outstripped population growth enough to raise per capita grain output an unprecedented 40 percent."

From a two-year period ending in 1981 to a two-year period ending in 1990 the real prices of basic foods fell 38 percent on world markets, according to a 1992 United Nations report. Prices for food have continually decreased since the end of the eighteenth century, when Thomas Malthus argued that rapid population growth must lead to mass starvation by exceeding the carrying capacity of the earth. Farmers worldwide could double the acreage in production, but this should not be necessary. Better seeds, more irrigation, multi-cropping, and additional use of fertilizer could greatly increase agricultural yields in the developing world, which are now generally only half those in the industrialized countries. It is biologically possible to raise yields of rice to about seven tons per acre -- about four times the current average in the developing world. Super strains of cassava, a potato-like root crop eaten by millions of Africans, promise to increase yields tenfold. American farmers can also do better. In a good year, such as 1994, Iowa corn growers average about 3.5 tons per acre, but farmers more than double that yield in National Corn Growers Association competitions.

In drier parts of the world the scarcity of fresh water presents the greatest challenge to agriculture. But the problem is regional, not global. Fortunately, as Lester Brown, of the Worldwatch Institute, points out, "there are vast opportunities for increasing water efficiency" in arid regions, ranging from installing better water-delivery systems to planting drought-resistant crops. He adds, "Scientists can help push back the physical frontiers of cropping by developing varieties that are more drought resistant, salt tolerant, and early maturing. The payoff on the first two could be particularly high."

As if in response, Novartis Seeds has announced a program to develop water-efficient and salt-tolerant crops, including genetically engineered varieties of wheat. Researchers in Mexico have announced the development of drought-resistant corn that can boost yields by a third. Biotechnologists are converting annual crops into perennial ones, eliminating the need for yearly planting. They also hope to enable cereal crops to fix their own nitrogen, as legumes do, minimizing the need for fertilizer (genetically engineered nitrogen-fixing bacteria have already been test-marketed to farmers). Commercial varieties of crops such as corn, tomatoes, and potatoes which have been genetically engineered to be resistant to pests and diseases have been approved for field testing in the United States; several are now being sold and planted. A new breed of rice, 25 percent more productive than any currently in use, suggests that the Gene Revolution can take over where the Green Revolution left off. Biotechnology, as the historian Paul Kennedy has written, introduces "an entirely new stage in humankind's attempts to produce more crops and plants."

Biotechnology cannot, however, address the major causes of famine: poverty, trade barriers, corruption, mismanagement, ethnic antagonism, anarchy, war, and male-dominated societies that deprive women of food. Local land depletion, itself a consequence of poverty and institutional failure, is also a factor.

Those who are too poor to use sound farming practices are compelled to overexploit the resources on which they depend. As the economist Partha Dasgupta has written, "Population growth, poverty and degradation of local resources often fuel one another." The amount of food in world trade is constrained less by the resource base than by the maldistribution of wealth.

Analysts who believe that the world is running out of resources often argue that famines occur not as a result of political or economic conditions but because there are "too many people."

Unfortunately, as the economist Amartya Sen has pointed out, public officials who think in Malthusian terms assume that when absolute levels of food supplies are adequate, famine will not occur. This conviction diverts attention from the actual causes of famine, which has occurred in places where food output kept pace with population growth but people were too destitute to buy it.

We would have run out of food long ago had we tried to supply ourselves entirely by hunting and gathering. Likewise, if we depend on nature's gifts, we will exhaust many of the world's important fisheries. Fortunately, we are learning to cultivate fish as we do other crops. Genetic engineers have designed fish for better flavor and color as well as for faster growth, improved disease resistance, and other traits. Two farmed species -- silver carp and grass carp -- already rank among the ten most-consumed fish worldwide. A specially bred tilapia, known as the "aquatic chicken," takes six months to grow to a harvestable size of about one and a half pounds.

Aquaculture produced more than 16 million tons of fish in 1993; capacity has expanded over the past decade at an annual rate of 10 percent by quantity and 14 percent by value. In 1993 fish farms produced 22 percent of all food fish consumed in the world and 90 percent of all oysters sold. The World Bank reports that aquaculture could provide 40 percent of all fish consumed and more than half the value of fish harvested within the next fifteen years.

Salmon ranching and farming provide examples of the growing efficiency of aquacultural production. Norwegian salmon farms alone produce 400 million pounds a year. A biotech firm in Waltham, Massachusetts, has applied for government approval to commercialize salmon genetically engineered to grow four to six times as fast as their naturally occurring cousins. As a 1994 article in Sierra magazine noted, "There is so much salmon currently available that the supply exceeds demand, and prices to fishermen have fallen dramatically."

For those who lament the decline of natural fisheries and the human communities that grew up with them, the successes of aquaculture may offer no consolation. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, overfishing in combination with dams and habitat destruction has reduced the wild salmon population by 80 percent. Wild salmon -- but not their bio-engineered aquacultural cousins -- contribute to the cultural identity and sense of place of the Northwest. When wild salmon disappear, so will some of the region's history, character, and pride. What is true of wild salmon is also true of whales, dolphins, and other magnificent creatures -- as they lose their economic importance, their aesthetic and moral worth becomes all the more evident. Economic considerations pull in one direction, moral considerations in the other. This conflict colors all our battles over the environment.

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming, which is changing the fishing industry, has taken place more slowly in forestry. Still there is no sign of a timber famine. In the United States forests now provide the largest harvests in history, and there is more forested U.S. area today than there was in 1920.

Bill McKibben has observed in these pages that the eastern United States, which loggers and farmers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly denuded of trees, has become reforested during this century (see "An Explosion of Green," April, 1995, Atlantic). One reason is that farms reverted to woods. Another is that machinery replaced animals; each draft animal required two or three cleared acres for pasture. Natural reforestation is likely to continue as biotechnology makes areas used for logging more productive. According to Roger Sedjo, a respected forestry expert, advances in tree farming, if implemented widely, would permit the world to meet its entire demand for industrial wood using just 200 million acres of plantations -- an area equal to only five percent of current forest land. As less land is required for commercial tree production, more natural forests may be protected -- as they should be, for aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual reasons.

Often natural resources are so plentiful and therefore inexpensive that they undercut the necessary transition to technological alternatives. If the U.S. government did not protect wild forests from commercial exploitation, the timber industry would have little incentive to invest in tree plantations, where it can multiply yields by a factor of ten and take advantage of the results of genetic research. Only by investing in plantation silviculture can North American forestry fend off price competition from rapidly developing tree plantations in the Southern Hemisphere. Biotechnology-based silviculture can in the near future be expected to underprice "extractive" forestry worldwide. In this decade China will plant about 150 million acres of trees; India now plants four times the area it harvests commercially.

The expansion of fish and tree farming confirms the belief held by Peter Drucker and other management experts that our economy depends far more on the progress of technology than on the exploitation of nature. Although raw materials will always be necessary, knowledge has become the essential factor in the production of goods and services. "Where there is effective management," Drucker has written, "that is, application of knowledge to knowledge, we can always obtain the other resources." If we assume, along with Drucker and others, that resource scarcities do not exist or are easily averted, it is hard to see how economic theory, which after all concerns scarcity, provides the conceptual basis for valuing the environment. The reasons to preserve nature are ethical more often than they are economic.

Misconception No. 3: We AreRunning Out of Energy

PROBABLY the most persistent worries about resource scarcity concern energy. "The supply of fuels and other natural resources is becoming the limiting factor constraining the rate of economic growth," a group of experts proclaimed in 1986. They predicted the exhaustion of domestic oil and gas supplies by 2020 and, within a few decades, "major energy shortages as well as food shortages in the world."

Contrary to these expectations, no global shortages of hydrocarbon fuels are in sight. "One sees no immediate danger of 'running out' of energy in a global sense," writes John P. Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard University. According to Holdren, reserves of oil and natural gas will last seventy to a hundred years if exploited at 1990 rates. (This does not take into account huge deposits of oil shale, heavy oils, and gas from unconventional sources.) He concludes that "running out of energy resources in any global sense is not what the energy problem is all about." The global energy problem has less to do with depleting resources than with controlling pollutants. Scientists generally agree that gases, principally carbon dioxide, emitted in the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels can build up in and warm the atmosphere by trapping sunlight. Since carbon dioxide enhances photosynthetic activity, plants to some extent absorb the carbon dioxide we produce. In 1995 researchers reported in Science that vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere in 1992 and 1993 converted into trees and other plant tissue 3.5 billion tons of carbon -- more than half the carbon produced by the burning of hydrocarbon fuels worldwide.

However successful this and other feedback mechanisms may be in slowing the processes of global warming, a broad scientific consensus, reflected in a 1992 international treaty, has emerged for stabilizing and then decreasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases. This goal is well within the technological reach of the United States and other industrialized countries. Amory Lovins, among others, has described commercially available technologies that can "support present or greatly expanded worldwide economic activity while stabilizing global climate -- and saving money." He observes that "even very large expansions in population and industrial activity need not be energy-constrained."

Lovins and other environmentalists contend that pollution-free energy from largely untapped sources is available in amounts exceeding our needs. Geothermal energy -- which makes use of heat from the earth's core -- is theoretically accessible through drilling technology in the United States in amounts thousands of times as great as the amount of energy contained in domestic coal reserves. Tidal energy is also promising. Analysts who study solar power generally agree with Lester Brown, of the Worldwatch Institute, that "technologies are ready to begin building a world energy system largely powered by solar resources." In the future these and other renewable energy sources may be harnessed to the nation's system of storing and delivering electricity.

Last year Joseph Romm and Charles Curtis described in these pages advances in photovoltaic cells (which convert sunlight into electricity), fuel cells (which convert the hydrogen in fuels directly to electricity and heat, producing virtually no pollution), and wind power ("Mideast Oil Forever?" April, 1996, Atlantic). According to these authors, genetically engineered organisms used to ferment organic matter could, with further research and development, bring down the costs of ethanol and other environmentally friendly "biofuels" to make them competitive with gasoline.

Environmentalists who, like Amory Lovins, believe that our economy can grow and still reduce greenhouse gases emphasize not only that we should be able to move to renewable forms of energy but also that we can use fossil fuels more efficiently. Some improvements are already evident. In developed countries the energy intensity of production – the amount of fuel burned per dollar of economic output – has been decreasing by about two percent a year.

From 1973 to 1986, for example, energy consumption in the United States remained virtually flat while economic production grew by almost 40 percent. Compared with Germany or Japan, this is a poor showing. The Japanese, who tax fuel more heavily than we do, use only half as much energy as the United States per unit of economic output. (Japanese environmental regulations are also generally stricter than ours; if anything, this has improved the competitiveness of Japanese industry.) The United States still wastes hundreds of billions of dollars annually in energy inefficiency. By becoming as energy-efficient as Japan, the United States could expand its economy and become more competitive internationally.

If so many opportunities exist for saving energy and curtailing pollution, why have we not seized them? One reason is that low fossil-fuel prices remove incentives for fuel efficiency and for converting to other energy sources. Another reason is that government subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy amounted to many billions of dollars a year during the 1980s, whereas support for renewables dwindled to $114 million in 1989, a time when it had been proposed for near elimination.

"Lemon socialism," a vast array of subsidies and barriers to trade, protects politically favored technologies, however inefficient, dangerous, filthy, or obsolete. "At heart, the major obstacles standing in the way [of a renewable-energy economy] are not technical in nature," the energy consultant Michael Brower has written, "but concern the laws, regulations, incentives, public attitudes, and other factors that make up the energy market."

In response to problems of climate change, the World Bank and other international organizations have recognized the importance of transferring advanced energy technologies to the developing world. Plainly, this will take a large investment of capital, particularly in education. Yet the "alternative for developing countries," according to José Goldemberg, a former Environment Minister of Brazil, "would be to remain at a dismally low level of development which . . . would aggravate the problems of sustainability."

Technology transfer can hasten sound economic development worldwide. Many environmentalists, however, argue that economies cannot expand without exceeding the physical limits nature sets -- for example, with respect to energy. These environmentalists, who regard increasing affluence as a principal cause of environmental degradation, call for economic retrenchment and retraction -- a small economy for a small earth. With Paul Ehrlich, they reject "the hope that development can greatly increase the size of the economic pie and pull many more people out of poverty." This hope is "basically a humane idea," Ehrlich has written, "made insane by the constraints nature places on human activity."

In developing countries, however, a no-growth economy "will deprive entire populations of access to better living conditions and lead to even more deforestation and land degradation," as Goldemberg warns. Moreover, citizens of developed countries are likely to resist an energy policy that they associate with poverty, discomfort, sacrifice, and pain. Technological pessimism, then, may not be the best option for environmentalists. It is certainly not the only one.

Misconception No. 4:

The North Exploits the South

ILLIAM Reilly, when he served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Bush Administration, encountered a persistent criticism at international meetings on the environment. "The problem for the world's environment is your consumption, not our population," delegates from the developing world told him. Some of these delegates later took Reilly aside. "The North buys too little from the South," they confided. "The real problem is too little

demand for our exports."

The delegates who told Reilly that the North consumes too little of what the South produces have a point. "With a few exceptions (notably petroleum)," a report from the World Resources Institute observes, "most of the natural resources consumed in the United States are from domestic sources." Throughout the 1980s the United States and Canada were the world's leading exporters of raw materials. The United States consistently leads the world in farm exports, running huge agricultural trade surpluses. The share of raw materials used in the North that it buys from the South stands at a thirty-year low and continues to decline; industrialized nations trade largely among themselves. The World Resources Institute recently reported that "the United States is largely self-sufficient in natural resources." Again, excepting petroleum, bauxite (from which aluminum is made), "and a few other industrial minerals, its material flows are almost entirely internal."

Sugar provides an instructive example of how the North excludes -- rather than exploits -- the resources of the South. Since 1796 the United States has protected domestic sugar against imports. American sugar growers, in part as a reward for large contributions to political campaigns, have long enjoyed a system of quotas and prohibitive tariffs against foreign competition. American consumers paid about three times world prices for sugar in the 1980s, enriching a small cartel of U.S. growers. Forbes magazine has estimated that a single family, the Fanjuls, of Palm Beach, reaps more than $65 million a year as a result of quotas for sugar.

The sugar industry in Florida, which is larger than that in any other state, makes even less sense environmentally than economically. It depends on a publicly built system of canals, levees, and pumping stations. Fertilizer from the sugarcane fields chokes the Everglades. Sugar growers, under a special exemption from labor laws, import Caribbean laborers to do the grueling and poorly paid work of cutting cane. As the United States tightened sugar quotas (imports fell from 6.2 to 1.5 million tons annually from 1977 to 1987), the Dominican Republic and other nations with climates ideal for growing cane experienced political turmoil and economic collapse. Many farmers in Latin America, however, did well by switching from sugar to coca, which is processed into cocaine -- perhaps the only high-value imported crop for which the United States is not developing a domestic substitute. Before the Second World War the United States bought 40 percent of its vegetable oils from developing countries. After the war the United States protected its oilseed markets – for example, by establishing price supports for soybeans. Today the United States is one of the world's leading exporters of oil and oilseeds, although it still imports palm and coconut oils to obtain laurate, an ingredient in soap, shampoo, and detergents. Even this form of "exploitation" will soon cease. In 1994 farmers in Georgia planted the first commercial acreage of a high-laurate canola, genetically engineered by Calgene, a biotechnology firm.

About 100,000 Kenyans make a living on small plots of land growing pyrethrum flowers, the source of a comparatively environmentally safe insecticide of which the United States has been the largest importer. The U.S. Department of Commerce, however, awarded $1.2 million to a biotechnology firm to engineer pyrethrum genetically. Industrial countries will soon be able to synthesize all the pyrethrum they need and undersell Kenyan farmers.

An article in Foreign Policy in December of 1995 observed that the biotechnological innovations that create "substitutes for everything from vanilla to cocoa and coffee threaten to eliminate the livelihood of millions of Third World agricultural workers." Vanilla cultured in laboratories costs a fifth as much as vanilla extracted from beans, and thus jeopardizes the livelihood of tens of thousands of vanilla farmers in Madagascar. In the past, farms produced agricultural commodities and factories processed them. In the future, factories may "grow" as well as process many of the most valuable commodities -- or the two functions will become one.

As one plant scientist has said, "We have to stop thinking of these things as plant cells, and start thinking of them as new microorganisms, with all the potential that implies" -- meaning, for instance, that the cells could be made to grow in commercially feasible quantities in laboratories, not fields. The North not only balks at buying sugar and other crops from developing countries; it also dumps its excess agricultural commodities, especially grain, on them. After the Second World War, American farmers, using price supports left over from the New Deal, produced vast wheat surpluses, which the United States exported at concessionary prices to Europe and then the Third World. These enormous transfers of cereals to the South, institutionalized during the 1950s and 1960s by U.S. food aid, continued during the 1970s and 1980s, as the United States and the European Community vied for markets, each outdoing the other in subsidizing agricultural exports.

Grain imports from the United States "created food dependence within two decades in countries which had been mostly self-sufficient in food at the end of World War II," the sociologist Harriet Friedmann has written. Tropical countries soon matched the grain gluts of the North with their own surpluses of cocoa, coffee, tea, bananas, and other export commodities. Accordingly, prices for these commodities collapsed as early as 1970, catching developing nations in a scissors. As Friedmann describes it, "One blade was food import dependency. The other blade was declining revenues for traditional exports of tropical crops."

It might be better for the environment if the North exchangedthe crops for which it is ecologically suited -- wheat, for example -- for crops easily grown in the South, such as coffee, cocoa, palm oil, and tea. Contrary to common belief, these tropical export crops -- which grow on trees and bushes, providing canopy and continuous root structures to protect the soil -- are less damaging to the soil than are traditional staples such as cereals and root crops. Better markets for tropical crops could help developing nations to employ their rural populations and to protect their natural resources. Allen Hammond, of the World Resources Institute, points out that "if poor nations cannot export anything else, they will export their misery -- in the form of drugs, diseases, terrorism, migration, and environmental degradation."

Peasants in less-developed nations often confront intractable poverty, an entrenched land-tenure system, and a lack of infrastructure; they have little access to markets, education, or employment. Many of the rural poor, according to the environmental consultant Norman Myers, "have no option but to over-exploit environmental resource stocks in order to survive" -- for example, by "increasingly encroaching onto tropical forests among other low-potential lands." These poorest of the poor "are causing as much natural-resource depletion as the other three billion developing-world people put together."Myers observes that traditional indigenous farmers in tropical forests moved from place to place without seriously damaging the ecosystem. The principal agents of tropical deforestation are refugees from civil war and rural poverty, who are forced to eke out a living on marginal lands. Activities such as road building, logging, and commercial agriculture have barely increased in tropical forests since the early 1980s, according to Myers; slash-and-burn farming by displaced peasants accounts for far more deforestation -- roughly three fifths of the total. Its impact is fast expanding. Most of the wood from trees harvested in tropical forests -- that is, those not cleared for farms -- is used locally for fuel. The likeliest path to protecting the rain forest is through economic development that enables peasants to farm efficiently, on land better suited to farming than to forest.

Many have argued that economic activity, affluence, and growth automatically lead to resource depletion, environmental deterioration, and ecological collapse. Yet greater productivity and prosperity -- which is what economists mean by growth -- have become prerequisite for controlling urban pollution and protecting sensitive ecological systems such as rain forests.

Otherwise, destitute people who are unable to acquire food and fuel will create pollution and destroy forests. Without economic growth, which also correlates with lower fertility, the environmental and population problems of the South will only get worse. For impoverished countries facing environmental disaster, economic growth may be the one thing that is sustainable.

What Is WrongWith Consumption?

MANY of us who attended college in the 1960s and 1970s took pride in how little we owned. We celebrated our freedom when we could fit all our possessions -- mostly a stereo -- into the back of a Beetle. Decades later, middle-aged and middle-class, many of us have accumulated an appalling amount of stuff. Piled high with gas grills, lawn mowers, excess furniture, bicycles, children's toys, garden implements, lumber, cinder blocks, ladders, lawn and leaf bags stuffed with memorabilia, and boxes yet to be unpacked from the last move, the two-car garages beside our suburban homes are too full to accommodate the family minivan. The quantity of resources, particularly energy, we waste and the quantity of trash we throw away (recycling somewhat eases our conscience)add to our consternation.

Even if predictions of resource depletion and ecological collapse are mistaken, it seems that they should be true, to punish us for our sins. We are distressed by the suffering of others, the erosion of the ties of community, family, and friendship, and the loss of the beauty and spontaneity of the natural world. These concerns reflect the most traditional and fundamental of American religious and cultural values.

Simple compassion instructs us to give to relieve the misery of others. There is a lot of misery worldwide to relieve. But as bad as the situation is, it is improving. In 1960 nearly 70 percent of the people in the world lived at or below the subsistence level. Today less than a third do, and the number enjoying fairly satisfactory conditions (as measured by the United Nations Human Development Index) rose from 25 percent in 1960 to 60 percent in 1992. Over the twenty-five years before 1992 average per capita consumption in developing countries increased 75 percent in real terms. The pace of improvements is also increasing. In developing countries in that period, for example, power generation and the number of telephone lines per capita doubled, while the number of households with access to clean water grew by half.

What is worsening is the discrepancy in income between the wealthy and the poor. Although world income measured in real terms has increased by 700 percent since the Second World War, the wealthiest people have absorbed most of the gains.

Since 1960 the richest fifth of the world's people have seen their share of the world's income increase from 70 to 85 percent. Thus one fifth of the world's population possesses much more than four fifths of the world's wealth, while the share held by all others has correspondingly fallen; that of the world's poorest 20 percent has declined from 2.3 to 1.4 percent. Writing in these pages, Benjamin Barber ("Jihad vs. McWorld," March, 1992, Atlantic) described market forces that "mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food -- with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogeneous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce." Affluent citizens of South Korea, Thailand, India, Brazil, Mexico, and many other rapidly developing nations have joined with Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and others to form an urban and cosmopolitan international society. Those who participate in this global network are less and less beholden to local customs and traditions. Meanwhile, ethnic, tribal, and other cultural groups that do not dissolve into McWorld often define themselves in opposition to it -- fiercely asserting their ethnic, religious, and territorial identities.

The imposition of a market economy on traditional cultures in the name of development -- for example, the insistence that everyone produce and consume more -- can dissolve the ties to family, land, community, and place on which indigenous peoples traditionally rely for their security. Thus development projects intended to relieve the poverty of indigenous peoples may, by causing the loss of cultural identity, engender the very powerlessness they aim to remedy. Pope Paul VI, in the encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967), described the tragic dilemma confronting indigenous peoples: "either to preserve traditional beliefs and structures and reject social progress; or to embrace foreign technology and foreign culture, and reject ancestral traditions with their wealth of humanism."

The idea that everything is for sale and nothing is sacred – that all values are subjective -- undercuts our own moral and cultural commitments, not just those of tribal and traditional communities. No one has written a better critique of the assault that commerce makes on the quality of our lives than Thoreau provides in Walden. The cost of a thing, according to Thoreau, is not what the market will bear but what the individual must bear because of it: it is "the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

Many observers point out that as we work harder and consume more, we seem to enjoy our lives less. We are always in a rush -- a "Saint Vitus' dance," as Thoreau called it. Idleness is suspect. Americans today spend less time with their families, neighbors, and friends than they did in the 1950s. Juliet B. Schor, an economist at Harvard University, argues that "Americans are literally working themselves to death." A fancy car, video equipment, or a complex computer program can exact a painful cost in the form of maintenance, upgrading, and repair. We are possessed by our possessions; they are often harder to get rid of than to acquire.

That money does not make us happier, once our basic needs are met, is a commonplace overwhelmingly confirmed by sociological evidence. Paul Wachtel, who teaches social psychology at the City University of New York, has concluded that bigger incomes "do not yield an increase in feelings of satisfaction or well-being, at least for populations who are above a poverty or subsistence level." This cannot be explained simply by the fact that people have to work harder to earn more money: even those who hit jackpots in lotteries often report that their lives are not substantially happier as a result.

Well-being depends upon health, membership in a community in which one feels secure, friends, faith, family, love, and virtues that money cannot buy. Robert Lane, a political scientist at Yale University, using the concepts of economics, has written, "If `utility' has anything to do with happiness, above the poverty line the long-term marginal utility of money is almost zero."

Economists in earlier times predicted that wealth would not matter to people once they attained a comfortable standard of living. "In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level," wrote Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century English advocate of the free market. In the 1930s the British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that after a period of great expansion further accumulation of wealth would no longer improve personal well-being. Subsequent economists, however, found that even after much of the industrial world had attained the levels of wealth Keynes thought were sufficient, people still wanted more. From this they inferred that wants are insatiable.

Perhaps this is true. But the insatiability of wants and desires poses a difficulty for standard economic theory, which posits that humanity's single goal is to increase or maximize wealth. If wants increase as fast as income grows, what purpose can wealth serve?

Critics often attack standard economic theory on the ground that economic growth is "unsustainable." We are running out of resources, they say; we court ecological disaster. Whether or not growth is sustainable, there is little reason to think that once people attain a decent standard of living, continued growth is desirable. The economist Robert H. Nelson recently wrote in the journal Ecological Economics that it is no longer possible for most people to believe that economic progress will "solve all the problems of mankind, spiritual as well as material." As long as the debate over sustainability is framed in terms of the physical limits to growth rather than the moral purpose of it, mainstream economic theory will have the better of the argument. If the debate were framed in moral or social terms, the result might well be otherwise.

Making a Place for Nature

ACCORDING to Thoreau, "a man's relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one." For environmentalists in the tradition of Thoreau and John Muir, stewardship is a form of fellowship; although we must use nature, we do not value it primarily for the economic purposes it serves. We take our bearings from the natural world -- our sense of time from its days and seasons, our sense of place from the character of a landscape and the particular plants and animals native to it. An intimacy with nature ends our isolation in the world. We know where we belong, and we can find the way home.

In defending old-growth forests, wetlands, or species we make our best arguments when we think of nature chiefly in aesthetic and moral terms. Rather than having the courage of our moral and cultural convictions, however, we too often rely on economic arguments for protecting nature, in the process attributing to natural objects more instrumental value than they have. By claiming that a threatened species may harbor lifesaving drugs, for example, we impute to that species an economic value or a price much greater than it fetches in a market. When we make the prices come out right, we rescue economic theory but not necessarily the environment.

There is no credible argument, moreover, that all or even most of the species we are concerned to protect are essential to the functioning of the ecological systems on which we depend. (If whales went extinct, for example, the seas would not fill up with krill.) David Ehrenfeld, a biologist at Rutgers University, makes this point in relation to the vast ecological changes we have already survived. "Even a mighty dominant like the American chestnut," Ehrenfeld has written, "extending over half a continent, all but disappeared without bringing the eastern deciduous forest down with it." Ehrenfeld points out that the species most likely to be endangered are those the biosphere is least likely to miss. "Many of these species were never common or ecologically influential; by no stretch of the imagination can we make them out to be vital cogs in the ecological machine."

Species may be profoundly important for cultural and spiritual reasons, however. Consider again the example of the wild salmon, whose habitat is being destroyed by hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River. Although this loss is unimportant to the economy overall (there is no shortage of salmon), it is of the greatest significance to the Amerindian tribes that have traditionally subsisted on wild salmon, and to the region as a whole. By viewing local flora and fauna as a sacred heritage -- by recognizing their intrinsic value – we discover who we are rather than what we want. On moral and cultural grounds society might be justified in making great economic sacrifices -- removing hydroelectric dams, for example -- to protect remnant populations of the Snake River sockeye, even if, as critics complain, hundreds or thousands of dollars are spent for every fish that is saved.

Even those plants and animals that do not define places possess enormous intrinsic value and are worth preserving for their own sake. What gives these creatures value lies in their histories, wonderful in themselves, rather than in any use to which they can be put. The biologist E. O. Wilson elegantly takes up this theme: "Every kind of organism has reached this moment in time by threading one needle after another, throwing up brilliant artifices to survive and reproduce against nearly impossible odds." Every plant or animal evokes not just sympathy but also reverence and wonder in those who know it.

In Earth in the Balance (1992) Al Gore, then a senator, wrote, "We have become so successful at controlling nature that we have lost our connection to it." It is all too easy, Gore wrote, "to regard the earth as a collection of `resources' having an intrinsic value no larger than their usefulness at the moment." The question before us is not whether we are going to run out of resources. It is whether economics is the appropriate context for thinking about environmental policy. Even John Stuart Mill, one of the principal authors of utilitarian philosophy, recognized that the natural world has great intrinsic and not just instrumental value. More than a century ago, as England lost its last truly wild places, Mill condemned a world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up; all quadrupeds or birdswhich are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.

The world has the wealth and the resources to provide everyone the opportunity to live a decent life. We consume too much when market relationships displace the bonds of community, compassion, culture, and place. We consume too much when consumption becomes an end in itself and makes us lose affection and reverence for the natural world.

Source: http://wwics.si.edu/THEMES/URBAN/briefs/webwhite.htm

POLICY BRIEF #1, February 1999

Migration, Urbanization, and Social Adjustment by Michael J. White, Department of Sociology and Population Studies and Training Center Brown University

Presented February 8-9, 1999 at the Woodrow Wilson Center for the Comparative Urban Studies Project's Research Working Group on Urbanization, Population, the Environment, and Security funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. These policy briefs do not represent an o fficial position of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars or the U.S. Agency for International Development. Opinions expressed are solely those of the authors.

Migration is the demographic process that links rural to urban areas, generating or spurring the growth of cities. The resultant urbanization is linked to a variety of policy issues, spanning demographic, economic, and environmental concerns. Growing cities are often seen as the agents of environmental degradation. Urbanization can place stress on the land through sprawl; coincident industrial development may threaten air and water quality. In the eyes of many observers, rapid urbanization is also linked to problems of unemployment and the social adaptation of migrants in their new urban setting. Cities advertise society's inequalities in income, housing, and other social resources, whether these problems are new or just newly manifest in urban settings.

Most of the migration conventionally liked to these urban issues was seen as following a conventional pattern. In this policy brief I raise some issues about the nature of contemporary, migratory behavior, both for our understanding of processes of population redistribution directly, and for understanding some of the implications of that redistribution. Contemporary research is sketching the contours of this migratory behavior and the social adjustment that accompanies it. New research is beginning to shed light on the rate of migrant adaptation, on the connection between origin and destination communities through remittances, and the demographic structure and dynamics of refugee movements.

The New Migration?

Is there an evolving pattern of migratory behavior and composition that warrants a reconsideration of our prevailing models? The first round of migration models presumed that movement -- permanent movement -- was induced by prevailing wage differentials and economic opportunities. Thus one observed transatlantic migration from Old to New World as part of a permanent population redistribution within and across generations. To be sure the emptying of the countryside in the 19th century made London, Paris and New York into huge urban agglomerations.

The conventional push-pull model was eventually placed by one a bit more subtle, one that took into account the inefficiencies of markets in many developing settings. Rather than producing adjustment and equilibrium, migration spurred the growth of the informal sector as rural origin persons settled, at least temporarily, for wages and employment chances below the hoped-for formal sector offering. Thinking about migration in high income settings also shifted. New thinking began to take into account more of the non-pecuniary determinants of migration: climate; social composition of origin and destination; access to amenities. Such thinking made it possible to understand certain paradoxes such as the movement away from some of the economic regions with the highest hourly wages (the U.S. manufacturing belt) and toward other, lower wage but more amenity-rich locales.

During much of this time, policymaking often held a series of assumption about the process of migration and urban growth. A common observation was that urbanization was rapid and driven by rural-urban migration. Consistent with the dual economy (Harris-Todaro) model, the perception was that migrants had a difficult time adjusting in the urban area and were often unemployed or underemployed. Percolating through the time periods as well, was an old demographic adage about the composition of the migrant stream: that it was predominantly, unmarried young males. Concurrently, rapid urban growth fueled concern about denigration of the surrounding physical environment.

These models, trends, and to some degree social realities were consequential for policy. Rural-urban migration was seen as a problem. Urbanization was seen as too rapid, and efforts were considered to slow it or shift the balance of growth to other areas. Notable for instance, was China's policy of encouraging development in mid-size cities during the 1980s. Growth pole or satellite town developments were other offered responses. Of course, an alternative line of thinking evolved, arguing the public sector was the cause of some of the urban ills, with its disproportionate investment in (selective) cities and resultant urban bias. Is our stock of knowledge, our set of models, adequate to understand population movement and redistribution today, especially in contemporary developing economies? Some rethinking is in order. Two major changes have come to many systems of population distribution in the last decade or two: (1) the revolution in technology of transportation and communication; and (2) the restructuring of national economies to allow more market activity. Both of these changes have received considerable attention elsewhere. They have been discussed in the case of migration, but it is worth tracing through how they reshape the nature and composition of migratory flows.

The changes in the technology of communication and transportation have made it easier for migrants to stay in touch with their origin communities. This is more than maintaining simple social ties. The tightness and stability of these connections can reinforce the implicit contracts that generate sharing of resources across locations. Most notably these are remittances. Despite the high level of interest in remittances, it remains to be clearly documented that these technological developments help maintain a continuous flow. There are related influences. The technologies of communication help impart knowledge of job market opportunities within and across national borders.

The "New Migration" includes circulation. Migrants oscillate between origin and destination. From various parts of the wold circulatory migration patterns have been identified. Often these circulatory movements are timed with the agricultural season. In West Africa, Thailand, and Mexico, for instance, individuals remain in the origin region from planting through tending to harvest, and then depart for the cities (and to the United States for Mexicans) during the off season. Limited evidence suggests that the movements are repeated, but not necessarily every season. Landing a "good" job in one year may lead to a longer stay in the destination. This is just another way of managing the informal-formal sector issue.

It may be the case also that the ability to store earnings (in banks) and move funds geographically is contributing to the new migration. One marker of economic development is the improvement in financial infrastructures. If one can move money across international borders, then the ease with which one can be a new migrant and remain a connected member of the origin community and household rises. While there have been efforts to account for the value of international flows of remittances, there is little understanding of whether improvements in financial infrastructure help generate and support migration in the first place.

Data coming from various field sites suggest that the conventional demographic profile of the rural-urban migrant may be shifting as well. Migrants are still young. While many are male and single, there seems to be an increasing fraction of migrants who are female and a larger pool of family migrants. The work on Mexican migration to the United States finds substantial fractions of females in the migratory flow, fractions that increase with time. Our own work in Ghana challenges the notion that migrants are detached from families in the destination. What we need to know more about is the timing of the movements of family members. It is probably the case that frontier or first-wave migration is predominantly young single males, but how exactly the stream is altered after that is not well known.

The second major impetus for the New Migration is economic restructuring. Many countries have reoriented their economies in the direction of more free market activity. To argue that this trend is universal or that the movement is to an unfettered marketplace would be silly. Nevertheless, in several important ways the shift is on, and population distribution is a manifest component of this shift. The most notable case is China. Where once all residence was controlled by registration permit (or hukou), the years since market reform have enabled individuals to relocate to areas of economic opportunity. This has created a huge pool --a "floating population" in the tens of millions of persons -- living apart from their place of formal registration. While often referred to as "temporary" migrants, the length of residence in destination can now approach several years. Considerable controversy swirled about the motivations of these temporary migrants (including the claim that women were moving to avoid the structures of the one-child family planning policy), but the migration seems to be economically driven.

This kind movement, a migration problem, in the wake of the relaxation of strictures on economic activity and hocusing has been seen in other settings as well. VietNam is now going through a process similar to that experienced by China. While residence registration was never as strictly controlled as in China, the economic restructuring (Doi Moi) has generated internal migration. In Ethiopia the fall of the Derg and its more authoritarian and socialist ways ushered in a period of economic relaxation. This loosening not only lets people move to new locations (often back to older villages they were forced to abandon), but also generates differential economic growth by region, producing labor force opportunities to which workers respond.

Even in economies without government restrictions on residence and movement, there have been patterns of population movement that are similar in many respects. The undocumented movement of the Mexican origin population to the United States and parallel movement of former colonial populations to high-income economies of Europe have created similar floating populations, each with its own stamp for the particular migratory flow and condition of reception in the host society. Again, "temporary" migration is sometime sustained by circulation, at some risk of being caught, and rarely is temporary or guest-worker migration, in fact, temporary. Circulation may be substituting for return.

The evidence from Ghana indicates that the country's pursuit of structural adjustment has resulted in substantial shifts in regional activity, even as the overall growth of economic activity outpaces other sub-Saharan African nations. In the age-old way this induced movement, directed differentially to some urban areas. Migration's Consequences

Migration from rural to urban areas generates a series of concerns, including worries about environmental stress and social adaptation of the migrants themselves. Since migration feeds urbanization, and since urban growth is associated with industrial development (pollution) and land consumption, migration is often held culpable in environmental degradation. Although the link is there, it is not clear how strong that link is.

Direct public policies regarding environmental conditions, the underlying infrastructure for transportation, and the national level of income may have much more to say about the amount of insult visited upon the environment than the amount of rural-urban migration per se. As income rises, so does consumption of consumer goods, transportation, and land. These all can lead to more pollution and sprawl in any country. But as the level of income rises so does the demand for a cleaner local environment, and so there is an element of feedback in all of this.

There is another demographic component of the comparison. It is useful to remember that a large fraction, maybe nearly half, of urban growth is generated just by natural increase of the urban population. Thus, stemming urbanward migration will not stem urban growth. This reminds us that in the absence of migration but in the presence of positive population growth rates, there is more "population pressure" in both urban and rural areas. Migration may be more implicated than its true demographic contribution would warrant. Not that the increasingly intensive use of rural and quasi-rural areas can lead to soil erosion, eforestation, and the like.

This might lead one to call for stronger emphasis on fertility reduction measures, but the demographic community seems somewhat agnostic about the empirical connection between population growth and environmental conditions. The other major area of concern in urbanward migration is that of the absorption of migrants into the host community. Migrants have always generated apprehension about their ability to mix into the receiving society. Migrants are seen as adapting slowly or not at all. Empirical evidence runs counter to this.In many studies of immigrant adaptation in the United States, the first generation exhibits substantial differences from the native population along socioeconomic lines: income, education, language ability, etc. By the second generation, however, differences are narrowed considerably. Even if one does not adjust for background characteristics, the second generation gap is modest compared to the first generation gap. But when one does adjust for the (usually lower) level of resources for members of the second generation, the gap narrows even more. Work with nationally representative longitudinal data on immigrant achievement in school illustrates the point. Once we control for family characteristics (parental presence and supervision, socioeconomic status) and starting point in school, the trajectory of subsequent school achievement does not differ for immigrant children.

Interestingly we find a closing of the gap among migrants to Kumasi, Ghana. The first generation has lower status than members of the indigenous group in the same residential area, but members of the second generation show very little shortfall at all. In a parallel vein we find a process of occupational adaptation that differentiates the first generation more than the second. Market adjustment in China generated a huge flow of persons, both officially recognized and documented and "temporary" or undocumented. Despite the observation of migrants on streetcorners and under bridges (latter day hiring halls), the evidence again is that migrants are driven by economic considerations. The claim was made in China that female migrants to the city were motivated by a desire to avoid the family planning policies enforced in their origin community. In fact such rural-urban migrants were found to have birth rates no higher than urban natives of the same educational level and age. Here again, migrants were not out of line with expectation; they had come for jobs and merged into the urban fabric.

Concluding Policy Considerations

There are several policy implications of this redistribution, but I will concentrate on just three points.

1. Migration is Only Part of the Picture

As we have discussed migration accounts for roughly half of urban growth in most developing country cities. Most demographic analyses confirm that overall urban growth rates are closely ties to national population growth rates. Declining fertility rates overall will help reduce urban population pressure. High income economies experience the mirror image effect. Most of these nations have very low rates of natural increase. Consequently international migration contributes a substantial fraction of total year-to-year national population growth. The lesson is that it is important to have the comparative framework clear when making assertions about the impact of migration.

2. Informal Migration is a Broad-based phenomenon

Undocumented, circulate, and temporary migration is now a world-wide phenomenon. It exists as internal migration in some restructuring economies (such as in China) but also appears as international migrant flows in other settings (such as Mexican origin migration to the United States). It is useful for policy-makers to think about the parallels in these movements, rather than concentrate only on the differences.

3. Recognize Migratory Realities.

It is time for policy-makers to respond to migration rather than try to control migration. This is the case for internal migration and displacements. The opening of markets within and between countries will produce further internal and international redistribution. For voluntary movement, this recommendation means that efforts should go into adjustment efforts for migrants. Efforts might be made to improve access to information about health care, get migrant children into health and educational facilities, and provide language assistance as appropriate. For forced migrants the story is somewhat different. Here the migrants are outside their original location, often in a bounded settlement or camp. The policy need here is to realize that these refugee movements are often not temporary. This means a whole set of long-term services (health, family planning, productive work) must be provided. For people displaced within national borders, sometimes without the assistance of international agencies, the relocation can be permanent.

Asia-Pacific Population Journal Vol. 12, No. 1 (1997), pp. 3-16

Source: http://www.unescap.org/pop/journal/1997/v12n1a1.htm

Policies that accept the wider mobility of the population are likely to accord with policies that will enhance the well-being of greater numbers of peopleBy Ronald Skeldon*

Thailand. Over 71 per cent of the world's poor were to be found in the ESCAP region in the mid-1980s and the vast majority of these were living in the rural sector (World Bank, 1990:2). Although urban poverty is hardly insignificant, the absolute numbers of poor and the incidence of poverty tend to be greatest in the rural sector. It might therefore be concluded that programmes to eradicate poverty must necessarily focus on that sector. While this article would not seek to dispute the general thrust of this conclusion, it will attempt to highlight the significant interactions between urban and rural that suggest that any programme that focuses solely on the rural (or the urban) sector is ignoring very real forces that can help to reduce poverty. To view either the rural or the urban sectors as discrete policy targets is a recipe for policy failure.

The ESCAP region, in common with other parts of the world, is becoming more urban. In 1990, Asia (excluding Japan) was 29 per cent urban, up from 20 per cent in 1970, and it was the only major world region to show an increase in its rate of urban growth between 1965-1970 and 1985-1990 (United Nations, 1996:172-177). Population migration is not the only, or necessarily the most significant, component of urban growth. Natural increase and reclassification of rural areas to urban areas are also important, with the former often being the most important component of growth.

Yet we know that there are major weaknesses in many of the data that are used to measure the size of urban populations and their rates of growth, and urban populations are often significantly underenumerated. In particular, short-term migrants tend not to be included in urban population figures. It might be thought that these short-term migrants need not be included as they are not permanently in the towns and cities. Nevertheless, although the individual migrants may not be permanent residents, as a group they make up a permanent sector of the urban population that still requires basic services. Also, in practice, it is virtually impossible to separate longer-term and more permanent migrants from shorter-term and circular migrants: those who come for only a few weeks may secure a job and remain, and those who have spent one or two years in the city may return permanently to their villages. For an in-depth discussion of the issue of measurement of migration in developing countries, see Skeldon (1986).

The magnitude of short-term migration can be significant. In China, for example, it has been conservatively estimated that there may be a "floating population", that is, short-term migrants, of some 70 million in the cities who do not appear in the official urban population figures (Chan, 1994:267). While atypical in terms of absolute numbers, the case of China is quite representative in terms of relative importance of short-term movers. The basic point is that the existing data on rural-to-urban migration usually underestimate the real volume of rural-to-urban population movements. One of the clearest indicators of the underenumeration of migration in Asia comes from the National Migration Survey of Thailand, which showed that estimates derived from the population census, upon which policies are usually based, could be doubled or even almost tripled when various measures of short-term migration are incorporated (Chamratrithirong and others, 1995).

Given that most of the poor are to be found in the rural sector and that there is considerable, and underestimated, rural-to-urban migration, the key questions revolve around the following:

1.Can rural-to-urban migration improve the well-being of the rural areas of origin of migration, or are these areas further impoverished through the rural exodus?

2.Can rural-to-urban migration improve the well-being of those who move to the cities, or are they pauperized and degraded by the experience?

3.Is the rural poverty simply transferred to the urban sector?

4.What are the gender implications of the migration, in terms of the experience of women as migrants and in terms of the women left behind?

Each of these questions raises numerous and often contentious issues and the evidence is still not sufficient in order to derive definitive conclusions. Nevertheless, we are perhaps now moving more towards a consensus than a few years ago. One of the most significant shifts in thinking about the process of migration and development in recent years has been "an acceptance that urbanization in developing countries is inevitable" (McGee, 1994:iii, emphasis in the original). This article will briefly attempt to answer the above questions in the context of the Asian region and come to some policy implications of the impact of rural-to-urban migration on poverty alleviation.

Migration and rural poverty

Except in cases of forced migration due to political or ecological factors, all the evidence suggests that it is not the poorest who move. There appears to be a level of poverty below which migration is not possible (see Arlacchi, 1983). The move itself requires some resources, not just the cost of the passage, but also to support the migrant at the destination until either friends or regular or part-time employment can meet those expenses. However, there are other factors involved. Those who move tend to be from among the better educated in any community: from those families who can afford to remove their children from the household labour force and send them to school. Thus, the wealthier groups in any community send their household members to pursue their education and they are precisely those who will be among the first to move out. The better educated are those who can more readily respond to information concerning opportunities in other areas and are those best prepared to meet them. The earliest migrants from any community are almost invariably from the local elite: that word is used advisedly as it clearly must be seen in relative terms. Those that make up the elite in an isolated village in northern Pakistan, for example, are quite different in wealth and status from the rural elite in Sind Province.

Thus, the poorest are likely to be among those left behind. Migration might thus be seen to exacerbate rather than to alleviate poverty in the rural sector by depriving the villages of their most energetic and best prepared members. This argument, it might seem, would be a strong case for programmes of poverty alleviation to focus on the village to improve conditions there so that people will not wish to leave and/or to alleviate the living conditions of those left behind. This is a logical and perfectly understandable policy alternative. However, it tends to ignore certain critical aspects of the development process. One of the very few universal generalizations that can be made about human migration is that young adults are the most likely to move. Over the long term, the reproductive capacity of a community may wane through migration. However, this interpretation does not take into consideration the importance of circulation and return to the villages, or of the importance of monies sent back to the villages in the form of remittances.

Remittances tend more to be associated with international migration, but cash and goods in kind are every bit as important in the context of internal migration for the families of the migrants. At the macro-level, there are indeed differences in the impact of remittances, depending upon whether the source is internal or international.

In the latter case, the funds are obviously earned overseas and have an impact upon foreign exchange earnings and are thus of great interest to governments in developing countries. In the former case, there are no such direct macro-level linkages, although there is much concern over how the monies received in the villages are used. There is an impression that they are used primarily for consumption, which may favour imported goods and lead to a deterioration in foreign exchange earnings.

Accurate data on remittances are extremely difficult to obtain, particularly where there are exchanges in kind. Nevertheless, a consensus appears to be emerging that there is no clear demarcation between investment and consumption. For example, conspicuous consumption on house construction and improvement, which is a common use of remittances, stimulates the local construction industry, not only generating employment but favouring investment in expanding these industries to meet the increasing demand. An interesting case comes from southern India, where increasing remittances in Kerala State led to the immigration of skilled craftsmen from neighbouring states to participate in the construction boom (Nair, 1989:353). Even more obvious cases of consumption such as the support of wedding parties or religious festivals can have positive feedback economic effects in local agricultural production or the employment of musicians, as well as the more nebulous impact on the preservation and promotion of local cultural life.

While, almost certainly, the impact of remittances has favoured those families with migrant members, it has also increased wealth differences within rural communities. Those without migrants are excluded from direct access to the new wealth, and to this extent some families may become relatively more deprived as a result of the migration. That said, however, it appears that some non-migrants should be able to improve their status through the provision of services to the migrant households. Return migrants from the towns and cities are also among those who can introduce new ideas into otherwise conservative communities, promoting new agricultural techniques, entrepreneurial activities and even new attitudes towards family size that may encourage programmes of family planning, thus easing dependency burdens.

Although migration to urban centres can indeed have negative consequences for sending communities, on balance the net impact appears to be positive. The urban sector, through human rural-to-urban circulation, becomes but one more resource niche in the economic base of the rural household (which can be conceptualized as an urban "field" to be harvested on a regular basis) that can extend local resources and help to protect the household against risk. The urban sector, in effect, acts as a support for the villages, sustaining them during times of profound change. Thus, initially at least, rural-to-urban migration itself can act to alleviate poverty in the rural sector and policies that are aimed at restricting population migration may very well be counterproductive and not in the best interests of the rural poor.

Policies that are aimed at trying to incorporate non-migrants into the circuits that can provide services to wealthier migrant households, through training in appropriate services for example, may be more effective in alleviating rural poverty, as would be programmes to support the activities of returned migrants. For a review of the case material on migration on which many of these conclusions are based, see Skeldon (1990).

Migration and the transfer of rural poverty to urban areas

Although the migrants from any village may come from the wealthier and better educated groups in that village, they are likely to be poorer and less educated than the vast majority of urban residents. Do they therefore become pauperized in the city and join the legions of the urban poor, unemployed and unemployable? Here the evidence appears to be much clearer: migrants in urban areas tend to have higher labour force participation rates than non-migrants. While there is some information to suggest that women in particular enter extremely low-paying jobs, migrants in general enter a wide range of activities in view of their wide range of skill levels reflecting those from primarily urban backgrounds through to those from isolated rural backgrounds. Studies in India's Punjab State have clearly shown that migrants are not necessarily thrust into those most poorly paid jobs and, more generally, there appear to be few overall migrant/non-migrant differences as far as the nature of employment is concerned (Oberai and Singh, 1983).

The informal sector has often been seen as a refuge for poor migrants eking out a living on the margins of the largest cities. This sector, primarily of services, petty trading and small-scale industrial activities, lies beyond government control and is usually viewed with suspicion by officials. It has often been seen as an undesirable transitional step on the way towards incorporation in more regulated employment within formal government or the private sector. Here again this viewpoint is distorted. Studies in New Delhi have shown that earnings in the formal sector are only about 9 per cent higher than in more informal activities (Banerjee, 1983).

Also, the informal sector, with no taxes or deductions for social security and with flexible working hours, may have greater appeal for urban workers than the bureaucratic formal sector. Workers may thus choose to opt out of formal sector activities and go into the informal sector.

Not too much should be made from a clear division between formal and informal sectors. Those employed in formal government employment may also "moonlight" in the informal sector to improve their salaries, and private companies often use petty traders to extend their markets into niches that might otherwise be closed to them.

Thus, there are close linkages between formal and informal sector activities. What does seem incontrovertible, however, is that formally generated employment cannot keep pace with the demand for jobs in the rapidly expanding urban centres in the developing world. It is the informal sector, with its capacity to create an almost infinite variety and number of activities, that absorbs most of the growth of the labour force. In the Philippines, for example, it has been estimated that 73 per cent of non-agricultural activities were informal in the early 1980s (Chickering and Salahdine, 1991a:188). This process can be seen as "involution" (Armstrong and McGee, 1968), in which the informal sector is like a sponge, constantly absorbing labour and providing employment, and the point at which the marginal productivity of labour becomes zero is continuously postponed.

This key role of the informal sector in providing at least the basics of a livelihood in the urban sector is reinforced by the presence of social networks that have led to the segmentation of the labour market and the provision of some form of protection for the workers. These networks are often, although not exclusively, based upon place of origin. The informal sector is not, it must be emphasized, the sole preserve of migrants, although they indeed make up a large share of that labour force; native urban workers are also to be found in large numbers in informal activities. The common pattern is that people from one particular area will control access to one particular occupation. This means that people from the same area can be provided with employment when they arrive in the city -- often, when jobs become available, word is sent back to the village to make sure that someone will come to fill it. The idea of an open search process for urban employment is false, particularly at the lower skill levels for which the informal sector is known. These social networks are often institutionalized into associations that can assist the migrants in the city, making sure that they have accommodation as well as a familiar environment in which to socialize.

The essential point is that the majority of migrants to the cities of developing countries are generally absorbed into the economic and social fabric of the cities; they are not necessarily thrust into poverty. The principal reasons for this situation revolve around the support mechanisms that the migrants themselves create. There is a wealth of energy, organizational skills and talent within these communities and the informal sector that governments can tap to their own advantage, as well as to the benefit of the migrants themselves. Allowing, and facilitating, the migrants to help themselves in terms of generating employment, organizing transportation, arranging security and building homes is likely to be the most cost-effective way of improving conditions in the largest cities in the developing world. Finding ways to cut "red tape" and to support, rather than discourage, informal housing or employment is likely to prove a more effective approach. Thus, if the rural migrants are provided with an environment that allows them to make use of their energy and skills, they will not be pauperized. These ideas are well outlined in the important work of deSoto (1989), and his ideas are examined for Asia in Chickering and Salahdine (1991b).

Gender implications of migration and povertyIt is clear that, in many parts of the world, the incidence of poverty is greatest among women. Their levels of literacy, education and labour force participation tend to be significantly lower than those of men in all but the most developed countries of the ESCAP region (see table). Without access to basic training, their participation in income-earning opportunities is limited and universally women work longer hours for less remuneration. Initially at least, development tended to favour men in generating income-earning opportunities more appropriate for them. Women were often left behind in the villages as men moved to plantations or towns in search of work and female-headed households tend to have higher incidences of poverty than those where both parents are present.

In terms of migration, with the exception of Latin America, women, until recently, were seen mainly as being left behind in the home areas or to be primarily followers in migration. Over the last 50 years, however, one of the basic characteristics of the migration system has been the increasing participation of women in population movement, to the extent that women now dominate the flows in many countries and regions. For example, more women than men now move in the Philippines, the Republic of Korea and Thailand. As part of the new international division of labour, light, labour-intensive industries have been diffused out of the most developed countries to the periphery, initially to what are now known as the newly industrialized economies (NIEs), of Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan Province of China, and, later, much more deeply into other developing areas. The NIEs have now developed to such an extent that they would be better known as the newly de-industrializing economies, as they move into primarily tertiary, service activities. Labour-intensive industrialization, and later service activities, created employment opportunities for women. This did not inevitably lead to an improvement in their status as many of these jobs were temporary, with no security, and were extremely low-paid. The female labour force was docile, non-unionized, vulnerable and easily exploitable. Many other women went early into low-paying service occupations such as domestic servants; some became involved in degrading activities such as prostitution (commercial sex workers). Women often had to accept a double burden: family provider as well as income earner.

Yet, despite the real and widespread exploitation, a comparison has to be made in terms of conditions back in the areas of origin and prior to migration. Both women who move and those who are left behind are placed in new situations which often require independent decisions. It is becoming increasingly clear that women are moving independently of, and often despite the wishes of, fathers and husbands (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994). Those left behind need to take decisions regarding the running of the household without the advice of absent husbands. Although there is considerable variation among the countries of the ESCAP region, and even within each country, the process of migration can act to improve the position and status of women. Women left behind can find themselves playing key roles as entrepreneurs in investing or divesting remittance income or running a bazaar economy based on the sale of remittances in kind (Brown and Connell, 1993). These activities act to alleviate poverty in the villages.

Women, through migration, can be provided with opportunities that they otherwise would not have had. Where large numbers are involved in independent movement to towns and cities their average age of marriage is likely to rise, thus contributing to a decline in fertility. The increasing demand for women in urban service activities is a demand for more highly educated women and, over time, the differences in level of education compared with men are likely to decline, as can be seen in the cases of the NIEs in the table. Although there is unquestionably abuse, over the longer term the incorporation of women into the labour force can but improve their status and bring greater "empowerment". The women remaining in the rural areas, linked to a wider economy through migrant husbands, are likely to have to act more independently in their absence and to have access to additional sources of income from remittances. Thus, migration can be a means towards the improvement and empowerment of women in developing countries.

Migration, poverty and policy

Migration policies in developing countries are aimed, almost without exception, towards limiting the volume of movement. Very seldom are there policies to encourage internal migration, unless that movement is away from the cities and towards areas of agricultural resettlement, as in the cases of the transmigration programme in Indonesia or of the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) in Malaysia. Governments tend to be concerned about the rapidly expanding city and the concentration of perhaps disaffected migrants in urban areas. Urban elites traditionally have feared the rural masses: the wealth of the few feels threatened by the poverty of the many. Yet, cities bring prosperity. There is not one highly developed country or area that is not very urbanized.

As emphasized previously in this article it is now widely accepted that urbanization is inevitable. The experience of policies to limit migration to the largest cities has been one of abject failure. Apart from short-term success in China during the 1960s and early 1970s, few policies in the non-socialist world have made any significant impact on urban growth. Even in the socialist world these may have had only a limited effect. For example, the implementation of the reforms from 1979 in China that has led to rapid economic growth in coastal provinces has been accompanied by fast urbanization and massive internal migration. Thus, the control of migration, even in such a centrally planned economy as China, could only be sustained over the relatively short term. Of the more market-oriented economies in Asia, Malaysia was among those to pursue most aggressively programmes of rural development. Over the last decades, however, Malaysia has seen very rapid rates of urbanization indeed, with Kuala Lumpur emerging as one of the mega-urban regions of Asia. Control of urbanward migration is a control on the expansion of the labour force. Such a limitation of the labour market is not going to attract the kinds of labour-intensive industries which enable countries to embark upon rapid programmes of development and which, in turn, can ultimately alleviate poverty.

Thus, there is a basic contradiction between attempts to control migration towards cities on the one hand and poverty alleviation on the other. The conclusion to be drawn from the evidence summarized above is that migration, on the whole, acts to alleviate poverty in both the urban and rural sectors. Policies therefore need to accommodate to this reality, perhaps not actively to promote migration towards the urban sector, as this will occur anyway, but to deal appropriately with the consequences of the migration. Attempts to promote informal activities in both the urban and rural sectors, the latter based upon remittance income, are likely to be far more effective in alleviating poverty in both the urban and rural sectors than any attempt to restrict migration or to limit the informal sector.

The thrust of this article is certainly not to recommend the abandonment of existing programmes of rural development and to encourage more people to move to the cities. Quite the reverse, rural programmes require strengthening and deepening. And this article in no way denies the very real problems, both social and economic, that can occur upon the movement of people to cities. What it does advocate strongly is that programmes of poverty alleviation need to focus on these social and economic problems in the cities. It recognizes the inevitability of migration towards urban centres and argues that governments must plan accordingly. Policies that are most likely to be effective are those that accept existing trends rather than those that seek to reverse them. Policies that accommodate, rather than seek to control, the existing situation are more likely to meet with success.

In the context of the urban sector, the critical policy areas revolve around how to manage large cities most effectively, rather than controlling their growth. Thiscounsels neither enhancement nor abatement of migration. In the rural sector, the critical policy areas revolve around opening a greater range of opportunities to village people: many of these will be local but others may well be in urban or even overseas destinations. Thus, the real policy options may lie in how to promote the most beneficial systems of rural-urban interaction.

There still appears to be a reluctance on the part of many governments and experts to recognize the key roles that both migration and informal sector activities can play in improving the quality of life and alleviating poverty. Although, unquestionably, there can be negative consequences to these activities, and generalizations are difficult to make, on balance the contribution that migration can make towards poverty alleviation appears to be positive. Policies that accept the wider mobility of the population are therefore likely to accord with policies that will enhance the well-being of greater numbers of people. It is likely that the poorest of the poor do not migrate at all as they cannot afford to do so, and means need to be found to draw them into local and regional circuits of migration in order to increase their options and choices. Poverty, ultimately, is a function of the lack of choice and the provision of choice will involve both rural and urban options.

The weight of the evidence, therefore, demonstrates that rural poverty is not transferred to the city. Rather, migration allows the circulation of goods, money and ideas, as well as people, between urban and rural sectors. It concentrates a population that has considerable potential for self-organization which, given a favourable policy environment, can create a dynamic economy and society. That dynamism will involve both a return to, and interaction with, the rural sector that is likely to improve the welfare of both sectors over the short term. Migration is an integral part of development and, ultimately, of the alleviation of poverty, but its important positive role in this process remains largely unappreciated.

References

Arlacchi, P. (1983). Mafia, Peasants and Great Estates: Society in Traditional Calabria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Armstrong, W.R. and T.G. McGee (1968). "Revolutionary change and the third world city: a structural analysis", Civilisations 18:353-378.

Banerjee, B. (1983). "Role of the informal sector in the migration process: a test of probabilistic migration models and labour market segmentation for India", Oxford Economic Papers 35:399-422.

Brown, R.P.C. and J. Connell (1993). "The global flea market: migration, remittances and the informal economy in Tonga", Development and Change 24:611-647.

Chamratrithirong, A. and others (1995). National Migration Survey of Thailand (Bangkok: Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University).

Chan, K.W. (1994). "Urbanization and rural-urban migration in China since 1982", Modern China 20:243-281.

Chickering, A.L. and M. Salahdine (1991a). "The informal sector's search for self- governance", In: Chickering and Salahdine (eds.) 1991b:185-211.

Chickering, A.L. and M. Salahdine (eds.) (1991b). The Silent Revolution: The Informal Sector in Five Asian and Near Eastern Countries (San Francisco: International Center for Economic Growth).

de Soto, H. (1989). The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper and Row).

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (1994). Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press).

McGee, T.G. (1994). "The future of urbanization in developing countries", Third World Planning Review 16: iii-xii.

Nair, P.R.G. (1989). "Incidence, impact and implications of migration to the Middle East from Kerala (India)", In: R. Amjad (ed.) To the Gulf and Back: Studies of the Economic Impact of

Asian Labour Migration (New Delhi: International Labour Organization), pp. 344-364.

Oberai, A.S. and H.K.M. Singh (1983). Causes and Consequences of Internal Migration: A Study in the Indian Punjab (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).

Skeldon, R. (1986). "Migration and the population census in Asia and the Pacific: issues, questions and debate", International Migration Review 21:1074-1100.

__________ (1990). Population Mobility in Developing Countries: A Reinterpretation (London: Belhaven).

United Nations (1996). World Population Monitoring 1993 (New York).

UNDP (1991). Human Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press).

World Bank (1990). World Development Report 1990 (New York:Oxford University Press).

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"Why Do So Many Third World Countries Have Primate Cities?"

James S. Okomboli - Ong’ong’a

Source:

http://www.kimep.kz/SSE/popdev-k/Topics/Conferences/Urbanization/Okomboli4.html

Is the phenomenon of primate cities unique to developing countries? Are there specific characteristics that make third world countries particularly suited for the development of primate cities? In seeking responses to these questions, three authors studied characteristics that favoured the development of primate cities. With reference to their published results, I will outline why these cities exist, and evaluate the theories that seek to account for their existence.

Three different methods were used to measure primacy and urban concentration: the urban primacy index, the ratio of the population of the largest metropolitan area to combined populations of the next two largest ones, and the H (sum of squared shares) index. The Gini coefficient and the income share held by the top 10% of income recipients measured income inequality. In so far as level of economic development and ethnicity were concerned, the GNP per capita and H-index respectively were employed, while the distribution of administrative functions determined the administrative structure of the country. The main conclusive result was that income inequality was established as having a particular relationship to urban concentration and primacy. At the same time, nevertheless, it was concluded that attempting to reduce primacy would require that economic efficiency be sacrificed.

In "Urban Concentration and Primacy Revisited: An Analysis and Some Policy Conclusions," Servet Mutlu defines primacy as a disproportionately large size of the first city in relation to the second city in a country. He established that primacy is encouraged by governance and central administration being located in the largest city, which also might serve as the capital of the polity. This is because there are managerial efficiencies that can be accrued by central government including the "fusion of national and international ideas." (Richardson, 33). Because of communication, imported ideas and technology might be adapted and applied in the main port or city, which continues to give it an upper edge over other areas in attracting certain types of industry, as Richardson notes. If a city thrived under colonial rule, it also tended to dominate in the colonial status. Another finding was that the degree of urbanisation in the country, and how much the economy relied on agriculture and agro-industry also influenced primacy. The less dense and lower the population growth rate was, and the less ethnically diverse a country was, the more likely it was that primacy would manifest.

However, there are some factors that hinder the development of a primate city, especially the level of non-farm contribution to the economy that is the higher the level of industrialisation and income diversification, the less likely it would be that a primate city would crop up. Moreover, the availability of arable land stimulated the location of processing and trading centres at different areas of the country. Depending on how open an economy is, how interdependent it is on the international economic framework (whether it was at the core or at the periphery) the chances of primacy would lessen. Similarly, the more mature the economy was and the longer period during which urbanisation was part of national policy, the less likely that primacy would exist. Finally, the greater the ratio of the urban population employed in manufacturing is to those employed in the service industry, the smaller the size of the urban population and higher national levels of literacy would reduce the chances that a primate city would develop. In some of these factors, nonetheless, it has been cautioned that the causation is not definite and could be contested.

One factor that explains the existence of primate cities deals with externalities. Economies of scale and large-scale production result in increasing returns to scale. Because of the high concentration of physical capital and human capital from rural-urban migration, the higher population in urban areas might lead to a higher marginal product of labour, which complements the increasing returns to scale that provide economic efficiencies that may lead to primacy. On the consumer side, public goods and collective services are more efficiently consumed and supplied in quantities that may also be indivisible. Furthermore, there are advantages in the range and variety of consumer options in big cities, which may lead to the bias the elite and entrepreneurs have towards cities. With the lower costs of infrastructure development and maintenance, there are economies that may arise from higher levels of utility of urban infrastructure, in addition to diversified economic activity and industries that are more suited to large cities. Due to advantages of agglomeration, positive externalities also arise from higher levels of financial, technical and spatial proximity of production units and specialisation of labour. Bigger cities, as mentioned earlier, are conducive to technological change and education partly because of the information and technology transfers from other economies and countries. Although negative externalities such as pollution, crime, social strife and congestion may arise, at low levels of income and development they issues generally tend to be almost insignificant—or as is more likely the case, ignored.

Another factor is the effect that income inequality exerts on the degree of urban primacy. Because of financial constraints that bedevil developing nations, government-supplied social and physical infrastructure such as roads, higher institutions of learning and hospitals may be only available in major cities. Furthermore, higher-income classes in society are apt to settle in major cities to take advantage of the core-periphery relation with the surrounding regions of the country: on one hand, the high density of higher-income people creates a concentration of demand and employment (and hence income) through production, marketing and maintenance of luxury goods and services. On the other hand, it restricts the development of markets outside of the central city: not only due to lower incomes but also because of limited returns to the primarily agricultural and primary product-oriented industries in the periphery. Moreover, infrastructure deficiencies in the periphery are worsened by the fact that the higher income classes not only decide how income and public services are to be distributed, but also, they benefit the most from publicly provided social and physical infrastructure. It becomes difficult, then, to decentralise production and in some cases, consumption, away from the largest city which engenders primacy.

The level of economic development in the country also influences primacy. At low levels of economic development, there is little diversification of the economy; a direct result of this is that national revenues are limited. Therefore, few areas can be supported by the exchequer in terms of infrastructure development. In addition, a low level of economic development leads to a limited selection of job opportunities, which in turn encourages the informal sector to flourish (in part due to low literacy and low incomes per capita). This is because with a small market, firms tend to be smaller than in economies with high demand. Development broadens the market, leading to industrial expansion and income diversification. With an expanding market, it is easier to establish transport and communication networks and to invest in industrial development in lower-cost peripheral regions, if not only to alleviate the congestion, and avoid the rising costs of the central city. Supply restrictions (of raw materials, labour, land, and housing) may also encourage peripheral development, as new firms will be forced to locate in areas proximate to the raw materials and cheaper labour costs.

The size of the country and ethnic composition also influences primacy. This happens through the motive of minimising costs of production and increasing accessibility to the market. If a nation is small, the cost of accessing consumers is low but is overshadowed by economies of scale and the need to target external economies because of the small local market (in order to satisfy the "threshold demand" required for production). This would lead to primacy. However, for a large country, competing centres would arise, and different regions may be able to meet the demand threshold required since high economies of scale can be met at multiple locations—in which case access costs outweigh economies of scale. The more ethnically diverse a country is, the more likely that the political set-up would prefer to decentralise administration and hence develop more cities. This would be in order to ensure inequality and unfairness in the political system is prevented, or else the country would witness a lot of violent protests. By seeking to establish greater ethnic political/administrative autonomy, ethnic identity will encourage the growth of secondary cities in traditional areas of ethnic residence.

Finally, the emergence and existence of primacy can be attributed to colonialism. By centralising administration and focusing transport and communication for easier control of the colony, colonialism helps create primate cities. Colonialism also concentrated politics in the core; by furthering the dominance-dependence relationship between the colonist and former colonies, colonialism continues to encourage primacy in both countries. Additionally, because of advantages accrued during the colonial period and by being the local nexus of multinational corporations’ operations, the largest city continues in domination.

Decentralising political administration and power would check primacy. But, with democracy and capitalism—that is, free enterprise economies— primacy is more likely to develop than it is under command economies primarily because of the features of command economies that encourage and facilitate spatial extensiveness: full employment policies that ensure the wage gap is not too steep, control of migration flow, and the control of external trade.

Andrew Morrison, in "African City Systems and Urban Growth," challenges the idea of an "optimal" city size. This is because the theory of optimal city size— as cities grow infrastructure and public service costs initially decrease, plateau and then eventually rise— does not consider the benefits of living in cities of different sizes while it emphasises unit cost minimisation. Furthermore, this theory also fails to realise that income levels do have an impact, especially on the quality of investments, and that most systems are not static but dynamic—which necessitate analysing city-specific factors. Nonetheless, he also notes that the largest cities (in Africa particularly) have benefited from "infrastructure policies, pricing, and exchange rate policies that favour their growth relative to both smaller cities and to rural areas" (Morrison, 58). The growth of government has been an additional driving force behind primacy, which at the same time may stymie the growth of agriculture-oriented industries. He reiterates that unless agricultural production increases, factors that affect primacy will continue to manifest, that is: high urban concentration in countries with small populations, low incomes per capita, small agricultural surpluses and an economy that is not diversified.

A factor that might explain primacy, and one that was not addressed by the other authors was the Central Place Theory—while it may have limited relevance in the African context, it predicts that interaction of agglomeration economies and well developed transportation network would lead to the development of cities.

Geographical factors, in particular terrain and climate, also play a part in influencing primacy and city development. Many African cities sprouted as they were readily accessible, easy to defend and were situated along a trade route. This was complemented by the facilitation of administrative control, and the establishment of colonial trade patterns that tended to prefer extraction and export of goods to the "mother"—colonising—country. And because colonists were not concerned with urbanisation, there was little secondary city development, worsened by competition from European imports that ensured in some cases, the demise of African small-scale industry. Technological progress and government policies also influence primacy through urban bias, and the capacity to be innovative in only certain areas of a nation may result in those areas advancing more than others.

In the final analysis, many of the causes of primacy can be reversed by appropriate government policy. However, the expense (financial and physical) of planning the decentralisation of important aspects of administration economics and infrastructure overwhelm the need to prevent primacy, even as a country pursues industrialisation and urbanisation. And until a convincing reason is found, primacy will continue to manifest, especially in the third world.

References:

Mutlu, Servet. "Urban Concentration and Primacy Revisited: An Analysis and Some Policy Conclusions." Economic Development and Cultural

Change 37 (1989): 611-613.Richardson, Harry W. "Efficiency and Welfare in LDC Mega Cities" Third World Cities: Problems, Policies and Prospects. Ed. John D. Kasarda and Allan M. Parnall. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993.Becker, Charles, Andrew Hamer and Andrew Morrison. "African City Systems and Urban Growth." Beyond Urban Bias in Africa. New Hampshire:Heinemann Publishers.

Source: http://www.bw.edu/~dreith/central.html

CENTRAL PLACE THEORY

This is our third idea regarding urban organization.Central Place Theory is based on observations by Walter Christhaller.He made certain observations about the size and spacing of cities in a particular area of Germany during the 1930's, especially notingthat it was possible to visualize cities as being distributed like points on an equilateral triangle. As a result of these observations, he sat down and theorized how the situation arose.

This theory is first and foremost an economic theory - it sees cities an economic entities and consequently draws upon that dismal science for explanation and interpretation. The theory assumes that urban places come into being in order to provide for the exchange of goods and services. Additionally, it gives us an understanding of how cities grow - of how small places become large places.

CENTRAL PLACE FUNCTIONS: this theory distinguishes between central place functions (which the theory concerns) and non-central place functions (which the theory does not concern itself with).

1. central place cities exercise control or administration over a surrounding countryside, e.g., the provision police protection, education, government in general, etc.

2. central place cities exchange goods and services for a surrounding countryside, e.g., entrepreneurial activities, including daily necessities

Non-central place functions include resource processing, or manufacturing, or the introduction of anything so specific that it would not be important or of interest to the general population.

CENTRAL PLACE ASSUMPTIONS:

1. Only service centers or central places are considered in this theory (or those parts of cities which function in this capacity; that may be a part of any city

2. The surface of the central place and its surrounding area is flat and homogeneous; such a surface is said to be isotropic (this is an assumption built into virtually every geographic model)

3. A central place consists of two parts: 1) a node, which is the actual place of exchange itself); and 2) a hinterland, which is the surrounding tributary area (the countryside)

4. Population is uniformly distributed throughout the hinterland (same as #2, isn't it?)

5. Purchasing power is everywhere equal

6. Transporataion costs are linear, i.e., if something costs $1 to ship one mile and $2 to ship two miles, then it costs $3 to ship it three miles

7. There is no attenuation of demand for any product or service with distance from the service center (node) - whatever is needed by people or someone near the center is in equal demand by people or someone toward the perimeter

8. Each node has a monopoly over a hinterland, and that monopolistic hinterland is defined by a radius of constant distance (so what's the shape?)

9. People behave rationally in economics, i.e., they shop at the node serving their area

10. All areas are served by some central place.

PLAYERS IN THE THEORY:

1. Providers, or entrepreneurs. These are the people who supply the goods and services. The threshold spatially includes (encompasses) the area they need to break even, monetarily. It is possible to draw this threshold outward from the center - we know that population is evenly distributed in the hinterland. A threshold is kind of like an umbrella - how large an area does it have to cover? If it doesn't cover enough of you, you get wet. Cover all of you, and you're dry. Cover more than you need, and you can help somone else out. (Look at - with caution - the Garrison-Berry table of threshold values)

2. The consumers, or buyers. These are the people who support the urban place economically. Their range is the distance they are willing to travel in order to purchase a particular good or service; this is really a value preference. In some cases, we would be willing to travel a great distance for something; in some other cases, we might not be willing to go any farther than the corner grocery store. Range can be defined spatially by drawing a radius of this preference and then encircling it.

Between these two groups of people, consider their relationships in terms of the circles drawn about them. What happens if the threshold line and the range line are coincidental? What happen if the threshold line exceeds the range line? And what happens if the range line exceeds the threshold line?

If range and threshold are equal, provider breaks even.

If range is greater than the threshold, provider prospers.

If range is less than the threshold, provider loses.

(Turn these around the other way, too.)

ORDERS OF GOODS AND SERVICES:

An order of a good or service is a ranking of how desired or important or valuable something is. We will look at orders in a qualitative (not metric) way.

An order is low when the range and the threshold of a goodor service is small. What are low order goods and services? They are the everyday things: bread, milk, gasoline, the newspaper. An order is high when the range and the threshold of a good or service is great (distance of the radius will be great, in other words): lawyer, symphony orchestra, specialized medical personnel.

THE GEOMETRY OF CENTRAL PLACES:

The best and perfect shape for central places is the circle; in fact, this is the best shape for any kind of geographic region. It is best because it minimizes the length of the border and because every place on the permeter is equidistant from the center.

Furthermore, review Point 8 above about assumptions: it says that central places exercise a monopoly over areas and that these areas are defined as circles in space.

This is certainly a good theoretical concept or for a single central place that might exist in total isolation. But it doesn't work in reality. Why not? Take a look at what happens when a set of three central places, identified by circles, exist in space. Either: 1) they leave places unserved (this violates Point 10 above); this occurs when we butt the three circles up against one another and leave a triangular area between them; or 2) they duplicate areas (destroying the monology of a single central place and violating Point 8 above); this occurs when we overlap them so no area goes unserved, but then they overlap each other.

(Use models here.)

What's a good B-W Methodist student to do? Punt is one possibility. Cheating is another. Let's do that. How many different kinds of geometries can you nest? Triangles can be put together without overlapping or underserving. So can squares. But both of both are pretty far from our ideal circle. Try a pentagon. What we are going to go is use a hexagon as a pinch hitter for the circle. In isolation, a hexagon certainly is not a circle - it has points and flat edges, along which the distance to the center varies so that not all points are equidistant from the center of the hexagon. But nested in a set, hexagons have an advantage over circles: they neither overlap nor underlap. They cover all area.

Summary: in isolation, the circle is the best shape. In sets, a hexagon is the best shape. In sets, circles are not as efficient as hexagons. In isolation, a hexagon is not as good as a circle.

HOW DO PLACES GROW?

In this system, someone often has a want or a need for a good or service not normally provided for by a small service center. In fact, the person would be willing to travel some distance for it (in other words, it is a higher range/higher threshold = higher order good or service). When this occurs, some place will usually recognize that need and step forward to offer it. Some small order little) place will then begin to grow. An entrepreneur will recognize the greater range and recognize that his threshold also has to increase. His or her place then starts to grow - in size, in function, etc.

At this point, a new level or order is being created. A new set of places does not come into being - the original ones simply compete at the new level, using the same rules and conditions we had at the beginning. It is important to note here that when this happens, every small place remains inside the larger order place. In other words, every large place is also a small place - though the reverse is not true. Wheat is being said is that you can buy a small order good or service, e.g., a loaf of bread, in a big city - as well as the higher order services of a cardiologist. But, of course, you won't find the world-famed cardiologiost working out of little Noname, OH. This growth process probably repeats itself a number of times and additional levels are established. Each of the orders or levels has its own hexagonal pattern, and these are duplicated and superimposed on one another.

HIERARCHIES OF ORDERS:

As a consequence of the growth process noted above, central places are ordered from high to low in a hierarchy; low order places (the bottom of the hierarchy, with small hexagons) are small in size, close together, many in number, and usually have only a minimal number of goods and services. High order places (the top of the hierarchy, with large hexagons) are large in size, far apart, few in number, and offer many goods and services (obviously of a higher range). Then there are places that are intermediate in the system - and intermediate in these characteristics.

(Draw hierarchy here.)

Note that popular names or terminologies for urban places tend to support this hierarchical system. For example, what do we call places at the top, in the middle, or at the bottom of this hierarchy? Think about their size and distance, their number, and what they offer, as we did above. Metropolises, cities, towns, villages, hamlets - these are all popular (not necessarily legal) names we gieves to urban places in various parts of this system. Think about something: the small places are so numerous we don't know many of them; they are everywhere.

REGULARITIES AMONG THE HIERARCHICAL ORDERS:

One of the things that can be observed from a series of overlays of the various hierarchies is the regularity of the additional space (and, thus, population, too, since this is an even distribution) as we move upward through the scheme. While there are several different methods of nesting hierarchies, we will consider only one. Notice that each larger hierarchy includes one smaller one within it, plus six thirds of other hierarchies (with the other two-thirds of each belonging to two other/different larger hierarchies). That means that each larger system is three times larger (6/3 = 2; 2 + 1 = 3) than the next lower. (Look at Christhaller's table for the original German scheme)

RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER ITEMS:

When we looked at the Township and Range Survey System, it was with reference to rural dispersed (disseminated) patterns. However, it also had some import for urban patterns because the centers of (political) townships usually included a school and ancillary economic activities that formed a small urban place. These places formed the bottom of this central place hierarchy. They were the node serving the farmers of the hinterland.

DOES THE THEORY WORK?

There are some conditions which work to modify the application of this theory. Where some conditions exist, it works well; where they don't, it doesn't. Here are some of the conditions governing this application:

1. All places are not wholly service centers. Where they are, it is better; where they aren't, it doesn't work exactly right

2. The isotropic surface is an ideal and not real

3. Consumers may lack information or education to act rationally or they may fall victim to marketing techniques

4. The model is static while the world is dynamic

5. Multiple-purpose trips occur so that you may shop for both high range and low range things simultaneously, thus tending to confuse the organization of the idea

6. Model doesn't really consider the effects of an urban place upon itself

This system of urban distribution works exceptionally well in some places:

1. Areas that are flat

2. Areas that are agricultural

And it doesn't work in other places:

1. Areas that have rugged topography

2. Areas that are highly industrialized (Northeast Ohio)

Furthermore, it is probably more pure toward the bottom of the hierarchy and less pure toward the top. That is because large places include a good deal of non-central place function within them, e.g., manufacturing and specialized produce, which increase their non-central place actual size. This is to say that some places have a central place population and a non-central place population.(Maps of the pattern in the United States here)

APPLICATION TO INTRAURBAN ENVIRONMENTS

If this theory works between cities, is there any recognition of similar economic behavior within cities? Is there some kind of economy hierarchy of places of exchange? Shopping centers might be the answer. At the top of the hierarchy is "downtown," or the Central Business District to geography. Here virtually every commodity that you would need should be found. Below this level are the regional shopping centers - Great Northern, Randall Park, and the like. Then perhaps are the shopping areas found scattered around intersections of roads. Lastly are the little corner grocery stores that used to be found in every neighborhood. (Incidentally, why are corner grovery stores disapearing? The same answer might be applied to why are little country villages dying and disappearing - it has something to do with the migration routes we have discussed, together with the threshold requirement of entrepreneurs.)

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarchy.htm

February 1994

How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet

by Robert D. Kaplan

The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "In forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse--the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this." The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children. "In three months these boys confiscated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Minister mentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him."

Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is now part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was what my friend--a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened were I to identify him more precisely—really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.

The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate. "The government in Sierra Leone has no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in the capital, Freetown, last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the house of an American man. They tied him up and stole everything of value. Forget Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for "extortion by law-enforcement and immigration officials." This is one of the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italian ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador's residence. After university students in the Ivory Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their dorms, they executed them by hanging tires around their necks and setting the tires on fire. In one instance Ivorian policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with restless, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows, demanding "tips" for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In cities in six West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting. "You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process."

"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued,"there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another." Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have "a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made her invisible, so that she could cross to the army's positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the rebels' chances of success."

Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in West Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother in one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined while desertification and deforestation—also tied to overpopulation--drive more and more African peasants out of the countryside.

A Premonition of the Future

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence--as I intend to do in this article—I find I must begin with West Africa. There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive--where, in fact, they tell such lies--as in West Africa. Start with Sierra Leone. According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined borders, with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government, run by a twenty-seven-year-old army captain, Valentine Strasser, controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the rural interior. In the government's territory the national army is an unruly rabble threatening drivers and passengers at most checkpoints. In the other part of the country units of two separate armies from the war in Liberia have taken up residence, as has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The government force fighting the rebels is full of renegade commanders who have aligned themselves with disaffected village chiefs. A pre-modern formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking the wars in medieval Europe prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ushered in the era of organized nation-states.

As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally displaced, 280,000 more have fled to neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000 have fled to Liberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have fled to Sierra Leone. The third largest city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp. With an additional 600,000 Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the borders dividing these four countries have become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones none of the governments except the Ivory Coast's maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty. The Koranko ethnic group in northeastern Sierra Leone does all its trading in Guinea. Sierra Leonian diamonds are more likely to be sold in Liberia than in Freetown. In the eastern provinces of Sierra Leone you can buy Liberian beer but not the local brand.

In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in Ghana, most of the primary rain forest and the secondary bush is being destroyed at an alarming rate. I saw convoys of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal ports. When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of the country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the proportion has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. The deforestation has led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and more mosquitoes.

Virtually everyone in the West African interior has some form of malaria. Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas Greene's vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.

Consider "Chicago." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a slum district of Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area have named after the American city. ("Washington" is another poor section of Abidjan.) Although Sierra Leone is widely regarded as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has been considered an African success story, and Abidjan has been called "the Paris of West Africa." Success, however, was built on two artificial factors: the high price of cocoa, of which the Ivory Coast is the world's leading producer, and the talents of a French expatriate community, whose members have helped run the government and the private sector. The expanding cocoa economy made the Ivory Coast a magnet for migrant workers from all over West Africa: between a third and a half of the country's population is now non-Ivorian, and the figure could be as high as 75 percent in Abidjan. During the 1980s cocoa prices fell and the French began to leave. The skyscrapers of the Paris of West Africa are a facade. Perhaps 15 percent of Abidjan's population of three million people live in shantytowns like Chicago and Washington, and the vast majority live in places that are not much better. Not all of these places appear on any of the readily available maps. This is another indication of how political maps are the products of tired conventional wisdom and, in the Ivory Coast's case, of an elite that will ultimately be forced to relinquish power.

Chicago, like more and more of Abidjan, is a slum in the bush: a checkerwork of corrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboard and black plastic wrap. It is located in a gully teeming with coconut palms and oil palms, and is ravaged by flooding. Few residents have easy access to electricity, a sewage system, or a clean water supply. The crumbly red laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizards both inside and outside the shacks. Children defecate in a stream filled with garbage and pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In this stream women do the washing. Young unemployed men spend their time drinking beer, palm wine, and gin while gambling on pinball games constructed out of rotting wood and rusty nails.

These are the same youths who rob houses in more prosperous Ivorian neighborhoods at night. One man I met, Damba Tesele, came to Chicago from Burkina Faso in 1963. A cook by profession, he has four wives and thirty-two children, not one of whom has made it to high school. He has seen his shanty community destroyed by municipal authorities seven times since coming to the area. Each time he and his neighbors rebuild.

Chicago is the latest incarnation. Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast's population is urban, and the proportion is expected to reach 62 percent by 2000. The yearly net population growth is 3.6 percent. This means that the Ivory Coast's 13.5 million people will become 39 million by 2025, when much of the population will consist of urbanized peasants like those of Chicago. But don't count on the Ivory Coast's still existing then. Chicago, which is more indicative of Africa's and the Third World's demographic present--and even more of the future--than any idyllic junglescape of women balancing earthen jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once a model of Third World success, is becoming a case study in Third World catastrophe.

President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last December at the age of about ninety, left behind a weak cluster of political parties and a leaden bureaucracy that discourages foreign investment. Because the military is small and the non-Ivorian population large, there is neither an obvious force to maintain order nor a sense of nationhood that would lessen the need for such enforcement. The economy has been shrinking since the mid-1980s. Though the French are working assiduously to preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibility worse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence—an urbanized version of what has already happened in Somalia. Or it may become an African Yugoslavia, but one without mini-states to replace the whole. Because the demographic reality of West Africa is a countryside draining into dense slums by the coast, ultimately the region's rulers will come to reflect the values of these shanty-towns. There are signs of this already in Sierra Leone--and in Togo, where the dictator Etienne Eyadema, in power since 1967, was nearly toppled in 1991, not by democrats but by thousands of youths whom the London-based magazine West Africa described as "Soweto-like stone-throwing adolescents." Their behavior may herald a regime more brutal than Eyadema's repressive one. The fragility of these West African "countries" impressed itself on me when I took a series of bush taxis along the Gulf of Guinea, from the Togolese capital of Lome, across Ghana, to Abidjan. The 400-mile journey required two full days of driving, because of stops at two border crossings and an additional eleven customs stations, at each of which my fellow passengers had their bags searched. I had to change money twice and repeatedly fill in currency-declaration forms. I had to bribe a Togolese immigration official with the equivalent of eighteen dollars before he would agree to put an exit stamp on my passport. Nevertheless, smuggling across these borders is rampant. The London Observer has reported that in 1992 the equivalent of $856 million left West Africa for Europe in the form of "hot cash" assumed to be laundered drug money.

International cartels have discovered the utility of weak, financially strapped West African regimes. The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise. Getting visas for these states can be as hard as crossing their borders. The Washington embassies of Sierra Leone and Guinea--the two poorest nations on earth, according to a 1993 United Nations report on "human development"--asked for letters from my bank (in lieu of prepaid round-trip tickets) and also personal references, in order to prove that I had sufficient means to sustain myself during my visits. I was reminded of my visa and currency hassles while traveling to the communist states of Eastern Europe, particularly East Germany and Czechoslovakia, before those states collapsed. Ali A. Mazrui, the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton, predicts that West Africa--indeed, the whole continent--is on the verge of large-scale border upheaval. Mazrui writes, "In the 21st century France will be withdrawing from West Africa as she gets increasingly involved in the affairs [of Europe].

France's West African sphere of influence will be filled by Nigeria--a more natural hegemonic power. . . . It will be under those circumstances that Nigeria's own boundaries are likely to expand to incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the Republic of Benin (the Yoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon."

The future could be more tumultuous, and bloodier, than Mazrui dares to say. France will withdraw from former colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the Ivory Coast, where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do so not only because its attention will be diverted to new challenges in Europe and Russia but also because younger French officials lack the older generation's emotional ties to the ex-colonies. However, even as Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too, is likely to split into several pieces. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research recently made the following points in an analysis of Nigeria: "Prospects for a transition to civilian rule and democratization are slim. . . . The repressive apparatus of the state security service . . . will be difficult for any future civilian government to control. . . . The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable. . . . Ethnic and regional splits are deepening, a situation made worse by an increase in the number of states from 19 to 30 and a doubling in the number of local governing authorities; religious cleavages are more serious; Muslim fundamentalism and evangelical Christian militancy are on the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety over southern [Christian] control of the economy is intense . . . the will to keep Nigeria together is now very weak." Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the region—its population of roughly 90 million equals the populations of all the other West African states combined--it is apparent that Africa faces cataclysms that could make the Ethiopian and Somalian famines pale in comparison. This is especially so because Nigeria's population, including that of its largest city, Lagos, whose crime, pollution, and overcrowding make it the cliche par excellence of Third World urban dysfunction, is set to double during the next twenty-five years, while the country continues to deplete its natural resources.

Part of West Africa's quandary is that although its population belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross-purposes with demography and topography. Satellite photos depict the same reality I experienced in the bush taxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastal corridor--indeed, the entire stretch of coast from Abidjan eastward to Lagos--is one burgeoning megalopolis that by any rational economic and geographical standard should constitute a single sovereignty, rather than the five (the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) into which it is currently divided.

As many internal African borders begin to crumble, a more

impenetrable boundary is being erected that threatens to isolate the continent as a whole: the wall of disease. Merely to visit West Africa in some degree of safety, I spent about $500 for a hepatitis B vaccination series and other disease prophylaxis.

Africa may today be more dangerous in this regard than it was in 1862, before antibiotics, when the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton described the health situation on the continent as "deadly, a Golgotha, a Jehannum." Of the approximately 12 million people worldwide whose blood is HIV-positive, 8 million are in Africa. In the capital of the Ivory Coast, whose modern road system only helps to spread the disease, 10 percent of the population is HIV-positive. And war and refugee movements help the virus break through to more-remote areas of Africa. Alan Greenberg, M.D., a representative of the Centers for Disease Control in Abidjan, explains that in Africa the HIV virus and tuberculosis are now "fast-forwarding each other." Of the approximately 4,000 newly diagnosed tuberculosis patients in Abidjan, 45 percent were also found to be HIV-positive. As African birth rates soar and slums proliferate, some experts worry that viral mutations and hybridizations might, just conceivably, result in a form of the AIDS virus that is easier to catch than the present strain.

It is malaria that is most responsible for the disease wall that threatens to separate Africa and other parts of the Third World from more-developed regions of the planet in the twenty-first century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria, unlike AIDS, is easy to catch. Most people in sub-Saharan Africa have recurring bouts of the disease throughout their entire lives, and it is mutating into increasingly deadly forms. "The great gift of Malaria is utter apathy," wrote Sir Richard Burton, accurately portraying the situation in much of the Third World today.

Visitors to malaria-afflicted parts of the planet are protected by a new drug, mefloquine, a side effect of which is vivid, even violent, dreams. But a strain of cerebral malaria resistant to mefloquine is now on the offensive. Consequently, defending oneself against malaria in Africa is becoming more and more like defending oneself against violent crime. You engage in "behavior modification": not going out at dusk, wearing mosquito repellent all the time. And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the future while driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The forty-five-minute journey in heavy traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence. The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls were coated with black slime. Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers, junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle of floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead rats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eight years Guinea's population will double if growth goes on at current rates. Hardwood logging continues at a madcap speed, and people flee the Guinean countryside for Conakry. It seemed to me that here, as elsewhere in Africa and the Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature is now beginning to take its revenge.

Africa may be as relevant to the future character of world politics as the Balkans were a hundred years ago, prior to the two Balkan wars and the First World War. Then the threat was the collapse of empires and the birth of nations based solely on tribe. Now the threat is more elemental: nature unchecked. Africa's immediate future could be very bad. The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aid missions to be closed over the next three years are in Africa--a prologue to a consolidation of U.S. embassies themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa is set to go over the edge at a time when the Cold War has ended, when environmental and demographic stress in other parts of the globe is becoming critical, and when the post-First World War system of nation-states--not just in the Balkans but perhaps also in the Middle East--is about to be toppled, Africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades hence.

To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war. The order in which I have named these is not accidental. Each concept except the first relies partly on the one or ones before it, meaning that the last two--new approaches to mapmaking and to warfare--are the most important. They are also the least understood. I will now look at each idea, drawing upon the work of specialists and also my own travel experiences in various parts of the globe besides Africa, in order to fill in the blanks of a new political atlas.

The Environment as a Hostile Power

For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent upheavals abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply, it will become apparent that something else is afoot, making more and more places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable. Mention The Environment or "diminishing natural resources" in foreign-policy circles and you meet a brick wall of skepticism or boredom. To conservatives especially, the very terms seem flaky. Public-policy foundations have contributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmental studies replete with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just

let pile up on their desks. It is time to understand The Environment for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh--developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts--will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water.

Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic caseof how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy today in the shape of a doughnut--lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center." The environment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security, filling the hole in Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a post- Cold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by design.

Our Cold War foreign policy truly began with George F. Kennan's famous article, signed "X," published in Foreign Affairs in July of 1947, in which Kennan argued for a "firm and vigilant containment" of a Soviet Union that was imperially, rather than ideologically, motivated. It may be that our post-Cold War foreign policy will one day be seen to have had its beginnings in an even bolder and more detailed piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the journal International Security. The article, published in the fall of 1991 by Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is the head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, was titled "On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict." Homer-Dixon has, more successfully than other analysts, integrated two hitherto separate fields--military-conflict studies and the study of the physical environment.

In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish. Just as there will be environmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will be environmentally induced praetorian regimes--or, as he puts it, "hard regimes." Countries with the highest probability of acquiring hard regimes, according to Homer-Dixon, are those that are threatened by a declining resource base yet also have "a history of state [read 'military'] strength." Candidates include Indonesia, Brazil, and, of course, Nigeria. Though each of these nations has exhibited democratizing tendencies of late, Homer-Dixon argues that such tendencies are likely to be superficial "epiphenomena" having nothing to do with long-term processes that include soaring populations and shrinking raw materials. Democracy is problematic; scarcity is more certain. Indeed, the Saddam Husseins of the future will have more, not fewer, opportunities. In addition to engendering tribal strife, scarcer resources will place a great strain on many peoples who never had much of a democratic or institutional tradition to begin with. Over the next fifty years the earth's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more than nine billion. Though optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, they fail to note that, as the National Academy of Sciences has pointed out, 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world, where governments now--just look at Africa—show little ability to function, let alone to implement even marginal improvements. Homer-Dixon writes, ominously, "Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today's environmental-social system, but as time passes their analysis may become ever more compelling." While a minority of the human population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a "post-historical" realm, living in cities and suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and space to survive in. In the developing world environmental stress will present people with a choice that is increasingly among totalitarianism (as in Iraq), fascist-tending mini-states (as in Serb-held Bosnia), and road-warrior cultures (as in Somalia). Homer-Dixon concludes that "as environmental degradation proceeds, the size of the potential social disruption will increase."

Tad Homer-Dixon is an unlikely Jeremiah. Today a boyish thirty-seven, he grew up amid the sylvan majesty of Vancouver Island, attending private day schools. His speech is calm, perfectly even, and crisply enunciated. There is nothing in his background or manner that would indicate a bent toward pessimism. A Canadian Anglican who spends his summers canoeing on the lakes of northern Ontario, and who talks about the benign mountains, black bears, and Douglas firs of his youth, he is the opposite of the intellectually severe neoconservative, the kind at home with conflict scenarios. Nor is he an environmentalist who opposes development. "My father was a logger who thought about ecologically safe forestry before others," he says. "He logged, planted, logged, and planted. He got out of the business just as the issue was being polarized by environmentalists. They hate changed ecosystems. But human beings, just by carrying seeds around, change the natural world." As an only child whose playground was a virtually untouched wilderness and seacoast, Homer-Dixon has a familiarity with the natural world that

permits him to see a reality that most policy analysts—children of suburbia and city streets--are blind to.

"We need to bring nature back in," he argues. "We have to stop separating politics from the physical world--the climate, public health, and the environment." Quoting Daniel Deudney, another pioneering expert on the security aspects of the environment, Homer-Dixon says that "for too long we've been prisoners of 'social-social' theory, which assumes there are only social causes for social and political changes, rather than natural causes, too. This social-social mentality emerged with the Industrial Revolution, which separated us from nature. But nature is coming back with a vengeance, tied to population growth. It will have incredible security implications.

"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction."

We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not.

The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground water tables in the western United States. He will build dikes to save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake beaches from rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast of India, sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of millions of people inland where there is no room for them, and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.

Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in his Toronto office. "The darker the map color, the worse the degradation," he explains. The West African coast, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related to winds, chemicals, and water problems. "The worst degradation is generally where the population is highest. The population is generally highest where the soil is the best. So we're degrading earth's best soil." China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential example of environmental degradation. Its current economic "success" masks deeper problems. "China's fourteen percent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power. It means that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking place, is joining the rest of the Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is intensifying." Referring to the environmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of arable land in interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that the quality of that land has been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinization. He mentions the loss and contamination of water supplies, the exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 billion by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China has gotten its population under control. Large-scale population movements are under way, from inland China to coastal China and from villages to cities, leading to a crime surge like the one in Africa and to growing regional disparities and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism and a weak tradition of central government--again as in Africa. "We will probably see the center challenged and fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map," Homer-Dixon says.

Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power relationships, at which we now look. Skinhead Cossacks, Juju Warriors In the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, published a thought-provoking article called "The Clash of Civilizations?" The world, he argues, has been moving during the course of this century from nation-state conflict to ideological conflict to, finally, cultural conflict. I would add that as refugee flows increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the world--turning them into sprawling villages--national borders will mean less, even as more power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups. In the eyes of these uneducated but newly empowered millions, the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe. Huntington writes, "First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic," involving, among other things, history, language, and religion. "Second . . . interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness." Economic modernization is not necessarily a panacea, since it fuels individual and group ambitions while weakening traditional loyalties to the state. It is worth noting, for example, that it is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in India, Bombay, that has seen the worst intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims.

Consider that Indian cities, like African and Chinese ones, are ecological time bombs--Delhi and Calcutta, and also Beijing, suffer the worst air quality of any cities in the world--and it is apparent how surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict are deeply related.

Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu, Muslim, Slavic Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations: for instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in India, Turkic Muslims clashing with Slavic Orthodox Russians in Central Asian cities, the West clashing with Asia. (Even in the United States, African-Americans find themselves besieged by an influx of competing Latinos.) Whatever the laws, refugees find a way to crash official borders, bringing their passions with them, meaning that Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural disputes.

Because Huntington's brush is broad, his specifics are vulnerable to attack. In a rebuttal of Huntington's argument the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world beyond suburbia, writes in the September-October, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, "The world of Islam divides and subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus . . . are not coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interests of states. Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast religious zeal . . . to the wind . . . in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian Armenia."

True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus. But that is only because he has misidentified which cultural war is occurring there. A recent visit to Azerbaijan made clear to me that Azeri Turks, the world's most secular Shi'ite Muslims, see their cultural identity in terms not of religion but of their Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter are Muslims but because they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages employing a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic script) across the whole swath of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans the Iranians. Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a flashpoint of cultural and racial war. But, as Ajami observes, Huntington's plate tectonics are too simple. Two months of recent travel throughout Turkey revealed to me that although the Turks are developing a deep distrust, bordering on hatred, of fellow-Muslim Iran, they are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish public opinion, revising their group identity, increasingly seeing themselves as Muslims being deserted by a West that does little to help besieged Muslims in Bosnia and that attacks Turkish Muslims in the streets of Germany.

In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for nation-state war at the beginning of the twentieth century, could be a powder keg for cultural war at the turn of the twenty-first: between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus that House of Islam is falling into a clash between Turkic and Iranian civilizations. Ajami asserts that this very subdivision, not to mention all the divisions within the Arab world, indicates that the West, including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West has proved capable of playing one part of the House of Islam against another.

True. However, whether he is aware of it or not, Ajami is describing a world even more dangerous than the one Huntington envisions, especially when one takes into account Homer-Dixon's research on environmental scarcity. Outside the stretch limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible pattern--meaning there's no easy-to-define threat. Kennan's world of one adversary seems as distant as the world of Herodotus.

Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense change. But it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning. The crack-up of the Soviet empire and the coming end of Arab-Israeli military confrontation are merely prologues to the really big changes that lie ahead. Michael Vlahos, a long-range thinker for the U.S. Navy, warns, "We are not in charge of the environment and the world is not following us. It is going in many directions. Do not assume that democratic capitalism is the last word in human social evolution."

Before addressing the questions of maps and of warfare, I want to take a closer look at the interaction of religion, culture, demographic shifts, and the distribution of natural resources in a specific area of the world: the Middle East.

The Past Is Dead

Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital, exude visual drama. Altindag, or "Golden Mountain," is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward heaven--the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere else on the planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man's striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one. To see the twenty-first century truly, one's eyes must learn a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. There are far too many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real--whose raw energies and desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the future into something frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns are not all bad.

Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler's checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home--order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal.

Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses.

Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future's winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future's victims. Slums--in the sociological sense--do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history's perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

The future of the Middle East is quietly being written inside the heads of Golden Mountain's inhabitants. Think of an Ottoman military encampment on the eve of the destruction of Greek Constantinople in 1453. That is Golden Mountain. "We brought the village here. But in the village we worked harder--in the field, all day. So we couldn't fast during [the holy month of] Ramadan. Here we fast. Here we are more religious." Aishe Tanrikulu, along with half a dozen other women, was stuffing rice into vine leaves from a crude plastic bowl. She asked me to join her under the shade of a piece of sheet metal. Each of these women had her hair covered by a kerchief. In the city they were encountering television for the first time. "We are traditional, religious people. The programs offend us," Aishe said. Another woman complained about the schools. Though her children had educational options unavailable in the village, they had to compete with wealthier, secular Turks. "The kids from rich families with connections--they get all the places." More opportunities, more tensions, in other words.

My guidebook to Golden Mountain was an untypical one: Tales From the Garbage Hills, a brutally realistic novel by a Turkish writer, Latife Tekin, about life in the shantytowns, which in Turkey are called gecekondus ("built in a night"). "He listened to the earth and wept unceasingly for water, for work and for the cure of the illnesses spread by the garbage and the factory waste," Tekin writes. In the most revealing passage of Tales From the Garbage Hills the squatters are told "about a certain 'Ottoman Empire' . . . that where they now lived there had once been an empire of this name." This history "confounded" the squatters. It was the first they had heard of it.

Though one of them knew "that his grandfather and his dog died fighting the Greeks," nationalism and an encompassing sense of Turkish history are the province of the Turkish middle and upper classes, and of foreigners like me who feel required to have a notion of "Turkey."

But what did the Golden Mountain squatters know about the armies of Turkish migrants that had come before their own--namely, Seljuks and Ottomans? For these recently urbanized peasants, and their counterparts in Africa, the Arab world, India, and so many other places, the world is new, to adapt V. S. Naipaul's phrase. As Naipaul wrote of urban refugees in India: A Wounded Civilization, "They saw themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of community and self-help. For them the past was dead; they had left it behind in the villages."

Everywhere in the developing world at the turn of the twenty-first century these new men and women, rushing into the cities, are remaking civilizations and redefining their identities in terms of religion and tribal ethnicity which do not coincide with the borders of existing states.

In Turkey several things are happening at once. In 1980, 44 percent of Turks lived in cities; in 1990 it was 61 percent. By the year 2000 the figure is expected to be 67 percent. Villages are emptying out as concentric rings of gecekondu developments grow around Turkish cities. This is the real political and demographic revolution in Turkey and elsewhere, and foreign correspondents usually don't write about it.

Whereas rural poverty is age-old and almost a "normal" part of the social fabric, urban poverty is socially destabilizing. As Iran

has shown, Islamic extremism is the psychological defense

mechanism of many urbanized peasants threatened with the loss of traditions in pseudo-modern cities where their values are under attack, where basic services like water and electricity are unavailable, and where they are assaulted by a physically unhealthy environment. The American ethnologist and orientalist Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam "has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period." Beyond its stark, clearly articulated message, Islam's very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden. It is the one religion that is prepared to fight. A political era driven by environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensification of Islam, already the world's fastest-growing religion. (Though Islam is spreading in West Africa, it is being hobbled by syncretization with animism: this makes new converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes for a weakened version of the faith, which is less effective as an antidote to crime.)

In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardly forging a consensus with modernization, a trend that is less apparent in the Arab and Persian worlds (and virtually invisible in Africa). In Iran the oil boom--because it put development and urbanization on a fast track, making the culture shock more intense--fueled the 1978 Islamic Revolution. But Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab world, has little oil. Therefore its development and urbanization have been more gradual. Islamists have been integrated into the parliamentary system for decades. The tensions I noticed in Golden Mountain are natural, creative ones: the kind immigrants face the world over.

While the world has focused on religious perversity in Algeria, a nation rich in natural gas, and in Egypt, parts of whose capital city, Cairo, evince worse crowding than I have seen even in Calcutta, Turkey has been living through the Muslim equivalent of the Protestant Reformation.

Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another way vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians. Turks may have little oil, but their Anatolian heartland has lots of water--the most important fluid of the twenty-first century. Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Project, involving twenty-two major dams and irrigation systems, is impounding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that Arabs and perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by Turks. The project's centerpiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are emblazoned the words of modern Turkey's founder: "Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene" ("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").

Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge.

On a recent visit my eyes took in the immaculate offices and their gardens, the high-voltage electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep of giant humming transformers, the poured-concrete spillways, and the prim unfolding suburbia, complete with schools, for dam employees.

The emerging power of the Turks was palpable.Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me that "while oil can be shipped abroad to enrich only elites, water has to be spread more evenly within the society. . . . It is true,we can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq for up to eight months without the same water overflowing our dams, in order to regulate their political behavior."

Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from the oil fields of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, to the water plain of Harran, in southern Anatolia--near the site of the Ataturk Dam. But will the nation-state of Turkey, as presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth? I very much doubt it.

The Lies of Mapmakers

Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of political reality outside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, Turkey, an organic outgrowth of two Turkish empires that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has been among the most stable. Turkey's borders were established not by colonial powers but in a war of independence, in the early 1920s. Kemal Ataturk provided Turkey with a secular nation-building myth that most Arab and African states, burdened by artificially drawn borders, lack.

That lack will leave many Arab states defenseless against a wave of Islam that will eat away at their legitimacy and frontiers in coming years. Yet even as regards Turkey, maps deceive.

It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on urban maps. Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing--as are the considerable territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in "northern Iraq" with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled by a local mafia--to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa--led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.

Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is generally an invention of modernism, specifically of European colonialism. Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty Years' War--an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly flush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them. Frontier is itself a modern concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind. And as European nations carved out far-flung domains at the same time that print technology was making the reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.

In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a "totalizing classificatory grid. . . . It was bounded, determinate, and therefore—in principle--countable." To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an accountant's ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the grammar" that would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. The state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century applied to countries covering only three percent of the earth's land area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industrialized world. Even the United States of America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder, consists of "arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here."

Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only in the United Nations but in various geographic and travel publications (themselves by-products of an age of elite touring which colonialism made possible) that still report on and photograph the world according to "country." Newspapers, this magazine, and this writer are not innocent of the tendency. According to the map, the great hydropower complex emblemized by the Ataturk Dam is situated in Turkey. Forget the map. This southeastern region of Turkey is populated almost completely by Kurds. About half of the world's 20 million Kurds live in "Turkey." The Kurds are predominant in an ellipse of territory that overlaps not only with Turkey but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union. The Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War, has already exposed the fictitious nature of that supposed nation-state.

On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred to me what a risky idea the nation-state is. Here I was on the legal fault line between two clashing civilizations, Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the people doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds.

In such a moonscape, over which peoples have migrated and settled in patterns that obliterate borders, the end of the Cold War will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among existing states. No longer will these states be so firmly propped up by the West or the Soviet Union. Because the Kurds overlap with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out of a state in the post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the natural selector--the ultimate reality check. They have destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt states that do not offer them adequate breathing space, while strengthening states that do.

Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their growing economy, and the social cohesion evinced by the most crime-free slums I have encountered, are on the verge of big-power status, and because the 10 million Kurds within Turkey threaten that status, the outcome of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more critical to the future of the Middle East than the eventual outcome of the recent Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

America's fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, coupled with its lack of interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one, is a function of its own domestic and ethnic obsessions, not of the cartographic reality that is about to transform the Middle East.

The diplomatic process involving Israelis and Palestinians will, I believe, have little effect on the early- and mid-twenty-first-century map of the region. Israel, with a 6.6 percent economic growth rate based increasingly on high-tech exports, is about to enter Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, fortified by a well-defined political community that is an organic outgrowth of history and ethnicity. Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artificial frontiers, fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent. Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970--youths with little historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts at nation-building, or any of the Arab-Israeli wars. The most distant recollection of these youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991. Today seventeen out of twenty-two Arab states have a declining gross national product; in the next twenty years, at current growth rates, the population of many Arab countries will double. These states, like most African ones, will be ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies. The Middle East analyst Christine M. Helms explains, "Declaring Arab nationalism "bankrupt," the political "disinherited" are not rationalizing the failure of Arabism . . . or reformulating it.

Alternative solutions are not contemplated. They have simply opted for the political paradigm at the other end of the political spectrum with which they are familiar--Islam."

Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and other Arab states are often contrary to cultural and political reality. As state control mechanisms wither in the face of environmental and demographic stress, "hard" Islamic city-states or shantytown-states are likely to emerge. The fiction that the impoverished city of Algiers, on the Mediterranean, controls Tamanrasset, deep in the Algerian Sahara, cannot obtain forever. Whatever the outcome of the peace process, Israel is destined to be a Jewish ethnic fortress amid a vast and volatile realm of Islam. In that realm, the violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns may be indicative of the coming era.

The destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less certain, but far more relevant to the kind of map that will explain our future world. The Kurds suggest a geographic reality that cannot be shown in two-dimensional space. The issue in Turkey is not simply a matter of giving autonomy or even independence to Kurds in the southeast. This isn't the Balkans or the Caucasus, where regions are merely subdividing into smaller units, Abkhazia breaking off from Georgia, and so on. Federalism is not the answer. Kurds are found everywhere in Turkey, including the shanty districts of Istanbul and Ankara. Turkey's problem is that its Anatolian land mass is the home of two cultures and languages, Turkish and Kurdish. Identity in Turkey, as in India, Africa, and elsewhere, is more complex and subtle than conventional cartography can display.

A New Kind of War

To appreciate fully the political and cartographic implications of postmodernism--an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms--it is necessary to consider, finally, the whole question of war. "Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend themselves, enemies who are awake!" Andre Malraux wrote in Man's Fate. I cannot think of a more suitable battle cry for many combatants in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The intense savagery of the fighting in such diverse cultural settings as Liberia, Bosnia, the Caucasus, and Sri Lanka--to say nothing of what obtains in American inner cities--indicates something very troubling that those of us inside the stretch limo, concerned with issues like middle-class entitlements and the future of interactive cable television, lack the stomach to contemplate. It is this: a large number of people on this planet, to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down.

"Just as it makes no sense to ask 'why people eat' or 'what they sleep for,'" writes Martin van Creveld, a military historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in The Transformation of War, "so fighting in many ways is not a means but an end.

Throughout history, for every person who has expressed his horror of war there is another who found in it the most marvelous of all the experiences that are vouchsafed to man, even to the point that he later spent a lifetime boring his descendants by recounting his exploits." When I asked Pentagon officials about the nature of war in the twenty-first century, the answer I frequently got was "Read Van Creveld."

The top brass are enamored of this historian not because his writings justify their existence but, rather, the opposite: Van Creveld warns them that huge state military machines like the Pentagon's are dinosaurs about to go extinct, and that something far more terrible awaits us.

The degree to which Van Creveld's Transformation of War complements Homer-Dixon's work on the environment, Huntington's thoughts on cultural clash, my own realizations in traveling by foot, bus, and bush taxi in more than sixty countries, and America's sobering comeuppances in intractable-culture zones like Haiti and Somalia is startling. The book begins by demolishing the notion that men don't like to fight. "By compelling the senses to focus themselves on the here and now," Van Creveld writes, war "can cause a man to take his leave of them." As anybody who has had experience with Chetniks in Serbia, "technicals" in Somalia, Tontons Macoutes in Haiti, or soldiers in Sierra Leone can tell you, in places where the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, I vicariously experienced this phenomenon: worrying about mines and ambushes frees you from worrying about mundane details of daily existence. If my own experience is too subjective, there is a wealth of data showing the sheer frequency of war, especially in the developing world since the Second World War. Physical aggression is a part of being human. Only when people attain a certain economic, educational, and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized. In light of the fact that 95 percent of the earth's population growth will be in the poorest areas of the globe, the question is not whether there will be war (there will be a lot of it) but what kind of war. And who will fight whom? Debunking the great military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, Van Creveld, who may be the most original thinker on war since that early-nineteenth-century Prussian, writes, "Clausewitz's ideas . . . were wholly rooted in the fact that, ever since 1648, war had been waged overwhelmingly by states." But, as Van Creveld explains, the period of nation-states and, therefore, of state conflict is now ending, and with it the clear "threefold division into government, army, and people" which state-directed wars enforce. Thus, to see the future, the first step is to look back to the past immediately prior to the birth of modernism--the wars in medieval Europe which began during the Reformation and reached their culmination in the Thirty Years' War.

Van Creveld writes, "In all these struggles political, social, economic, and religious motives were hopelessly entangled. Since this was an age when armies consisted of mercenaries, all were also attended by swarms of military entrepreneurs. . . .

Many of them paid little but lip service to the organizations for whom they had contracted to fight. Instead, they robbed the countryside on their own behalf. . . ."

"Given such conditions, any fine distinctions . . . between armies on the one hand and peoples on the other were bound to break down. Engulfed by war, civilians suffered terrible atrocities."

Back then, in other words, there was no Politics as we have come to understand the term, just as there is less and less Politics today in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, among other places.Because, as Van Creveld notes, the radius of trust within tribal societies is narrowed to one's immediate family and guerrilla comrades, truces arranged with one Bosnian commander, say,may be broken immediately by another Bosnian commander.

The plethora of short-lived ceasefires in the Balkans and the Caucasus constitute proof that we are no longer in a world where the old rules of state warfare apply. More evidence is provided by the destruction of medieval monuments in the Croatian port of Dubrovnik: when cultures, rather than states, fight, then cultural and religious monuments are weapons of war, making them fair game.

Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted to a specific territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and control will mean more. "From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious . . . fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict" in the West than at any time "for the last 300 years," Van Creveld writes. This is why analysts like Michael Vlahos are closely monitoring religious cults. Vlahos says, "An ideology that challenges us may not take familiar form, like the old Nazis or Commies. It may not even engage us initially in ways that fit old threat markings." Van Creveld concludes, "Armed conflict will be waged by men on earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war." While another military historian, John Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.

Van Creveld's pre-Westphalian vision of worldwide low-intensity conflict is not a superficial "back to the future" scenario. First of all, technology will be used toward primitive ends. In Liberia the guerrilla leader Prince Johnson didn't just cut off the ears of President Samuel Doe before Doe was tortured to death in 1990--Johnson made a video of it, which has circulated throughout West Africa. In December of 1992, when plotters of a failed coup against the Strasser regime in Sierra Leone had their ears cut off at Freetown's Hamilton Beach prior to being killed, it was seen by many to be a copycat execution. Considering, as I've explained earlier, that the Strasser regime is not really a government and that Sierra Leone is not really a nation-state, listen closely to Van Creveld:

"Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down much as is already the case today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia."

If crime and war become indistinguishable, then "national defense" may in the future be viewed as a local concept. As crime continues to grow in our cities and the ability of state governments and criminal-justice systems to protect their citizens diminishes, urban crime may, according to Van Creveld, "develop into low-intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines." As small-scale violence multiplies at home and abroad, state armies will continue to shrink, being gradually replaced by a booming private security business, as in West Africa, and by urban mafias, especially in the former communist world, who may be better equipped than municipal police forces to grant physical protection to local inhabitants.

Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades--and with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other states--peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them. Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between peoples?

The Last Map

In Geography and the Human Spirit, Anne Buttimer, a professor at University College, Dublin, recalls the work of an early-nineteenth-century German geographer, Carl Ritter, whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity" based on regionalism and a constant, living flow of forms. The map of the future, to the extent that a map is even possible, will represent a perverse twisting of Ritter's vision. Imagine cartography in three dimensions, as if in a hologram. In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop the merely two-dimensional color markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving "centers" of power, as in the Middle Ages. Many of these layers would be in motion.

Replacing fixed and abrupt lines on a flat space would be a shifting pattern of buffer entities, like the Kurdish and Azeri buffer entities between Turkey and Iran, the Turkic Uighur buffer entity between Central Asia and Inner China (itself distinct from coastal China), and the Latino buffer entity replacing a precise U.S.-Mexican border. To this protean cartographic hologram one must add other factors, such as migrations of populations, explosions of birth rates, vectors of disease. Henceforward the map of the world will never be static. This future map--in a sense, the "Last Map"--will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.

The Indian subcontinent offers examples of what is happening. For different reasons, both India and Pakistan are increasingly dysfunctional. The argument over democracy in these places is less and less relevant to the larger issue of governability. In India's case the question arises, Is one unwieldy bureaucracy in New Delhi the best available mechanism for promoting the lives of 866 million people of diverse languages, religions, and ethnic groups? In 1950, when the Indian population was much less than half as large and nation-building idealism was still strong, the argument for democracy was more impressive than it is now. Given that in 2025 India's population could be close to 1.5 billion, that much of its economy rests on a shrinking natural-resource base, including dramatically declining water levels, and that communal violence and urbanization are spiraling upward, it is difficult to imagine that the Indian state will survive the next century. India's oft-trumpeted Green Revolution has been achieved by overworking its croplands and depleting its watershed. Norman Myers, a British development consultant, worries that Indians have "been feeding themselves today by borrowing against their children's food sources."

Pakistan's problem is more basic still: like much of Africa, the country makes no geographic or demographic sense. It was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, yet there are more subcontinental Muslims outside Pakistan than within it. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan is a patchwork of ethnic groups, increasingly in violent conflict with one another. While the Western media gushes over the fact that the country has a woman Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, Karachi is becoming a subcontinental version of Lagos. In eight visits to Pakistan, I have never gotten a sense of a cohesive national identity. With as much as 65 percent of its land dependent on intensive irrigation, with wide-scale deforestation, and with a yearly population growth of 2.7 percent (which ensures that the amount of cultivated land per rural inhabitant will plummet),Pakistan is becoming a more and more desperate place. As irrigation in the Indus River basin intensifies to serve two growing populations, Muslim-Hindu strife over falling water tables may be unavoidable.

"India and Pakistan will probably fall apart," Homer-Dixon predicts. "Their secular governments have less and less legitimacy as well as less management ability over people and resources." Rather than one bold line dividing the subcontinent into two parts, the future will likely see a lot of thinner lines and smaller parts, with the ethnic entities of Pakhtunistan and Punjab gradually replacing Pakistan in the space between the Central Asian plateau and the heart of the subcontinent.

None of this even takes into account climatic change, which, if it occurs in the next century, will further erode the capacity of existing states to cope. India, for instance, receives 70 percent of its precipitation from the monsoon cycle, which planetary warming could disrupt.

Not only will the three-dimensional aspects of the Last Map be in constant motion, but its two-dimensional base may change too. The National Academy of Sciences reports that "as many as one billion people, or 20 per cent of the world's population, live on lands likely to be inundated or dramatically changed by rising waters. . . . Low-lying countries in the developing world such as Egypt and Bangladesh, where rivers are large and the deltas extensive and densely populated, will be hardest hit. . . . Where the rivers are dammed, as in the case of the Nile, the effects . . . will be especially severe."

Egypt could be where climatic upheaval--to say nothing of the more immediate threat of increasing population--will incite religious upheaval in truly biblical fashion. Natural catastrophes, such as the October, 1992, Cairo earthquake, in which the government failed to deliver relief aid and slum residents were in many instances helped by their local mosques, can only strengthen the position of Islamic factions. In a statement about greenhouse warming which could refer to any of a variety of natural catastrophes, the environmental expert Jessica Tuchman Matthews warns that many of us underestimate the extent to which political systems, in affluent societies as well as in places like Egypt, "depend on the underpinning of natural systems." he adds, "The fact that one can move with ease from Vermont to Miami has nothing to say about the consequences of Vermont acquiring Miami's climate."

Indeed, it is not clear that the United States will survive the next century in exactly its present form. Because America is a multi-ethnic society, the nation-state has always been more fragile here than it is in more homogeneous societies like Germany and Japan. James Kurth, in an article published in The National Interest in 1992, explains that whereas nation-state societies tend to be built around a mass-conscription army and a standardized public school system, "multicultural regimes" feature a high-tech, all-volunteer army (and, I would add, private schools that teach competing values), operating in a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry has more influence than the "national political class." In other words, a nation-state is a place where everyone has been educated along similar lines, where people take their cue from national leaders, and where everyone (every male, at least) has gone through the crucible of military service, making patriotism a simpler issue. Writing about his immigrant family in turn-of-the-century Chicago, Saul Bellow states, "The country took us over. It was a country then, not a collection of 'cultures.'"

During the Second World War and the decade following it, the United States reached its apogee as a classic nation-state. During the 1960s, as is now clear, America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. The signs hardly need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various kinds. William Irwin Thompson, in Passages About Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture, writes, "The educational system that had worked on the Jews or the Irish could no longer work on the blacks; and when Jewish teachers in New York tried to take black children away from their parents exactly in the way they had been taken from theirs, they were shocked to encounter a violent affirmation of negritude."

Issues like West Africa could yet emerge as a new kind of foreign-policy issue, further eroding America's domestic peace. The spectacle of several West African nations collapsing at once could reinforce the worst racial stereotypes here at home.

That is another reason why Africa matters. We must not kid ourselves: the sensitivity factor is higher than ever. The Washington, D.C., public school system is already experimenting with an Afrocentric curriculum. Summits between African leaders and prominent African-Americans are becoming frequent, as are Pollyanna-ish prognostications about multiparty elections in Africa that do not factor in crime, surging birth rates, and resource depletion. The Congressional Black Caucus was among those urging U.S. involvement in Somalia and in Haiti. At the Los Angeles Times minority staffers have protested against, among other things, what they allege to be the racist tone of the newspaper's Africa coverage, allegations that the editor of the "World Report" section, Dan Fisher, denies, saying essentially that Africa should be viewed through the same rigorous analytical lens as other parts of the world. Africa may be marginal in terms of conventional late-twentieth-century conceptions of strategy, but in an age of cultural and racial clash, when national defense is increasingly local, Africa's distress will exert a destabilizing influence on the United States.

This and many other factors will make the United States less of a nation than it is today, even as it gains territory following the peaceful dissolution of Canada. Quebec, based on the bedrock of Roman Catholicism and Francophone ethnicity, could yet turn out to be North America's most cohesive and crime-free nation-state. (It may be a smaller Quebec, though, since aboriginal peoples may lop off northern parts of the province.) "Patriotism" will become increasingly regional as people in Alberta and Montana discover that they have far more in common with each other than they do with Ottawa or Washington, and Spanish-speakers in the Southwest discover a greater commonality with Mexico City. (The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau, a book about the continent's regionalization, is more relevant now than when it was published, in 1981.) As Washington's influence wanes, and with it the traditional symbols of American patriotism, North Americans will take psychological refuge in their insulated communities and cultures.

Returning from West Africa last fall was an illuminating ordeal. After leaving Abidjan, my Air Afrique flight landed in Dakar, Senegal, where all passengers had to disembark in order to go through another security check, this one demanded by U.S. authorities before they would permit the flight to set out for New York. Once we were in New York, despite the midnight hour, immigration officials at Kennedy Airport held up disembarkation by conducting quick interrogations of the aircraft's passengers--this was in addition to all the normal immigration and customs procedures. It was apparent that drug smuggling, disease, and other factors had contributed to the toughest security procedures I have ever encountered when returning from overseas.

Then, for the first time in over a month, I spotted businesspeople with attache cases and laptop computers. When I had left New York for Abidjan, all the businesspeople were boarding planes for Seoul and Tokyo, which departed from gates near Air Afrique's. The only non-Africans off to West Africa had been relief workers in T-shirts and khakis. Although the borders within West Africa are increasingly unreal, those separating West Africa from the outside world are in various ways becoming more impenetrable.

But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore this dying region at our own risk. When the Berlin Wall was falling, in November of 1989, I happened to be in Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians. The future was in Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin. The same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an expanding desert. The real news wasn't at the White House, I realized. It was right below.

Copyright © 1994,The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.The Atlantic Monthly; February 1994; The Coming Anarchy; Volume 273, No. 2; pages 44-76.