The Folly of Stopping at Two
Bernardo M. Villegas
The Philippines is poor not because of a growing population. There has been no evidence in any part of the world or at any point in world history that poverty is caused by population growth.
On the contrary, the strongest evidence in more than 200 years of economic development all over the world is that population growth has been the major stimulus for economic progress. The pressure of a growing population on the temporarily limited resources of a given territory has been a strong motive force for technological innovation and productivity improvement. Thomas Malthus – the English pastor who was the first to speak of population explosion leading to a widespread famine and death – has been proven wrong time and time again.
But why do some Filipino pundits and politicians still resurrect the ghost of Malthus? A possible explanation was recently given by Mike Velarde, the leader of the El Shaddai movement. He hit the nail on the head when he said that those who want to limit birth by government fiat are desperate people. They have admitted failure to purge Philippine society of the many social and economic ills and are now resorting to desperate and defeatist solutions like birth control.
Why has the pressure of economic growth not stimulated economic progress in the Philippines? There are over 30 million very poor people in the Philippines because of three decades of misguided economic policies that gave very short shrift to countryside and agricultural development. Such ill-advised policies led to the lowest GDP growth rate in the region during the last 30 years of the 20th century. To make matters worse, erroneous policies were accompanied by rampant corruption in both the public and private sector. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank in separate studies estimated P200 billion in public funds being lost annually to corrupt practices in government agencies. Another P200 billion in taxes are not being collected annually because of rampant tax evasion. Those P400 billion would have sufficed to double or even triple the annual budget for education of about P100 billion, on the meagerness of which the advocates of population control constantly harp. Instead of focusing on correcting the remaining erroneous economic policies and aggressively fighting corruption, the defeatists prefer to look for scapegoats among the unborn babies.
Usually emotionally agitated by the sight of families in squatter areas having numerous children, these well-intentioned “social engineers” propose to limit the number per children per fertile woman to two. That’s the typical knee-jerk reaction that has not been subjected to a more thorough analysis.
The “stop-at-two” proponents are completely ignoring the obvious fact that more than 70 percent of the Philippines poor are in agriculture. Because of the general absence of such vital infrastructures as irrigation, post-harvest facilities, farm-to-market roads, etc., the small farmer’s only valuable resources are the hands of the immediate member’s of his household. These family members are needed for such labor intensive tasks as ploughing the field, feeding the animals, fetching water, harvesting the crops, drying the grains, etc. Completely left to their own devices by decades of government neglect, the poor farmer and his wife consider a large family a valuable human resource. Telling a Filipino farmer to stop at two would actually condemn him to even more grinding poverty. Two children per rural family would also make it more difficult for a member of the household to go abroad as an overseas worker, further limiting the income potentials of the family.
Some of the most dubious statistics being bandied around by pushers of contraceptive devices are those referring to “unwanted pregnancies.” These are usually finding of surveys funded by the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) or other private foundations openly espousing population control in developing countries. Questions are phrased as to put words into the mouths of the respondents. I still have to read a completely unbiased survey on preferences of family sizes by Philippine households.
Speaking of UNPF, I suggest to those who present “scarifying” projections about Philippine population “doubling 30 years” that they consult another United Nations Population Division (UNPD). Staffed by completely unbiased and scientific personnel, the UNPD presents a more realistic scenario, which the last 25 years have shown to be the low scenario. In its most recent projection of world population, Philippine population using the low scenario is estimated to be growing at 1.8 percent per annum (not the 2.36 percent cited ad nauseum by the birth control advocates). Philippine population under this low scenario will peak at 104 million in 2040 and then will start to decline. There will be no doubling of the present population of about 83 million. Philippine fertility has been declining over the last 30 years from a high of 6 children to a low of 3.1 children per fertile woman. There’s no need to coerce Filipino couples to stop at 2. Such natural forces as the education of women and increased urbanization have already lowered fertility, without the need for an aggressive contraceptive campaign. I do hope some of our lawmakers will shift their attention from reproductive health to more productive measures such as further freeing the economy from bureaucratic regulations and controls, increasing the rate of savings, improving the quality of basic education, making credit available to the poor, prosecuting more aggressively dishonest government officials and business people, etc. For comments, my e-mail is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.
