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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • In Egypt, Record Food Prices Lead to Family Planning

    June 12, 2008 By Geoffrey D. Dabelko
    At Egypt’s National Population Conference on Monday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—whose government has struggled to respond to recent civil unrest over skyrocketing food prices and bread shortages—told attendees that high population growth is a “major challenge and fundamental obstacle” to development. The following day, Egyptian Minister of Health and Population Hatem el-Gabali announced an $80 million national family planning program with the slogan “Two children per family—a chance for a better life.” Egypt’s current fertility rate is 2.7 children per woman.

    With a population of 81 million, Egypt is the 16th most populous country in the world, and, according to Philippe Fargues of the American University in Cairo (AUC), excluding the desert, Egypt has the highest population density in the world—twice that of Bangladesh.

    Is the government’s plan a productive long-term response to the food crisis? How can it be part of a larger package? Or is population a distraction from the real issue of corruption, as identified by interviewees in the Washington Post article where I first read about the programs.

    I posed these questions to a demography and security listserv and got some interesting responses. According to Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University, a political scientist known best for her book Bare Branches on the security implications of imbalanced male-female population ratios: “Mubarak would do more to achieve his goal of 2.0 children per woman by a focused plan to raise the status of women, for example, by:

    • Outlawing polygamy, or erecting such high legal barriers to it that it becomes impractical
    • Fully implementing CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women]
    • Enforcing the ban on FGM [female genital mutilation]; 97% of Egyptian women are circumcised
    • Educating women on a parity with men; the median number of years of schooling for men is 6.3; that for women is 4.4
    • Raising average age at first marriage for rural women (current average is 19)
    • Creating more parity in family law for women in matters such as divorce, inheritance, etc.—all of which can be found in CEDAW.”
    Daniel Moran, a professor in the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of National Security Affairs, had this to add: “I completely agree with Valerie Hudson that the path to success on this issue, in Egypt and pretty much everywhere, is through the improved education, legal protection, and general empowerment of women. The difficulty, of course, is that in the short run doing such things is not a remedy for social instability, but a form of it. Exercising leadership in areas of this kind is a challenge even for good governments. For bad ones, it can be fatal.” He continued:

    “I don’t think population pressure is a distraction from the real issue of corruption; though the government of Egypt is indeed corrupt by developed-world standards (or maybe by any standard). Corruption, which is symptomatic of state weakness, limits the ability of the Egyptian government to address this problem credibly and effectively. But it doesn’t mean they are wrong about the problem.

    I was actually struck by the modesty of official ambition to reduce the fertility rate from 2.7 (which is slightly above the world median, apparently) to 2.0 (which I’m guessing is pretty close to the middle). This assumes that, basically, a steady state population of, say, 100M Egyptians would be sustainable indefinitely. I’m not so sure of that. The impact of anticipated climate change on Egypt may prove quite formidable by the end of this century. I’m not sure a leveling off after some additional increase will do the trick….Too pessimistic? I hope so.”
    Topics: Africa, conflict, family planning, food security, population
    • http://www.populationaction.org Elizabeth Leahy

      Population Action International submitted the following letter to the editor to The Washington Post regarding this article:

      Dear Editor:

      Ellen Knickmeyer’s article “Egypt’s President Urges Family Planning” (June 11) effectively highlights the challenges that continued population growth can pose for countries’ development by increasing demands for jobs, food and education. It has been shown the world over that investing in women is essential to the well-being of families, communities and nations. As Egypt’s president has recognized, voluntary family planning results in smaller families and is a cost-effective means to ease demographic pressures. Although the U.S. has historically been a top donor of international family planning, the Bush administration has repeatedly proposed drastic cuts to family planning aid. This year, the administration requested $7.7 million for family planning programs in Egypt. This is a little more than half of what the U.S. provided at the time of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development — held in Cairo by the way. This is despite the fact that Egypt’s population grew by 27 percent in the same period. The U.S. government is long overdue to reaffirm its leading role in providing this assistance. In an interconnected world, Americans stand to benefit directly. The prospects for peace and economic development in this century will depend, among other things, on meeting the most basic family planning needs of couples in the developing world and slowing population growth.

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/12871749575352820527 ECSP Staff

      “Regarding Valerie Hudson’s remedies for Egypt’s food shortage woes: I do not understand how polygamy and female circumcision can cause high food prices, bread shortages, and elevated fertility. Nor have education for women or the elimination of gender discrimination been prerequisite elsewhere to lowering fertility. As for age at marriage, Egypt has a remarkably low fertility rate of 2.7, compared to just a couple of decades ago. Raising the age would hardly phase women with at least 20 years of fecund life ahead of them who were determined to more children.

      The gender-related practices in Egypt that make Western society uncomfortable may certainly be indices of something. Addressing them can be laudable goals in themselves. However, the risk of heavy-handed policy efforts to outlaw polygamy, circumcision, early marriage and withholding girls from school is to intensify the undesired effects by driving these practices underground.”

      –Caroline Bledsoe, professor of African studies and anthropology at Northwestern University and current fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/12683235276904026508 valerie

      Hi, Caroline, thanks for your post; Geoff asked if I would respond. I think perhaps we miscommunicated: my comments were not “remedies for Egypt’s food shortage woes”; rather my comments concerned the Egyptian government’s stated desire to reduce fertility to 2.0 children per woman. There is a growing scholarly consensus that government-implemented population planning is simply not as optimally effective in this regard as raising the status of women. Two recent comprehensive examinations of the question, Connelly’s Fatal Misconceptions and Engelman’s More, coming at the question from different political positions, concur on this conclusion.

      Women determined to have children will have them (as have I). However, women in many societies negotiate sexual reproduction from a vastly inferior position relative to men. Connelly and Engelman show that the more inferior the position of women relative to men, the greater the discrepancy between the number of children women want and the number of children they have. Both conclude that governments are more successful in reaching their population goals when they empower those who do the actual reproducing in their nations–women. Their arguments and evidence are well worth reading and considering.

      Governments can lead out in social change to elevate the status of women, and find success in doing so. Egypt itself has progressed strikingly in the area of female education and female workforce participation (though, as mentioned, there is room for improvement in the former), which is no doubt part of Egypt’s lowering of fertility to 2.7. Other Islamic nations, such as Tunisia and Morocco, have made significant improvements in the status of women, for example by making polygamy much more difficult and implementing greater parity in family law. Egypt is a party to CEDAW, and CEDAW is a good place to start for ideas on how to address these issues.

      The consequences of improving the status of women go far, far beyond fertility, however. To give but one example, there is a robust empirical literature linking prevalence of polygyny within a society to both levels of societal violence and degree of governmental authoritarianism. Issues concerning women, that we often think of as ‘private,’ with few implications for the public sphere outside of fertility, are turning out upon more serious examination to have major ramifications for the public sphere. My colleagues and I are engaged in this very research agenda, and our data and analysis, located at http://www.womanstats.org , might be of interest in this regard. Thanks again for your post!

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