“African elites have long had the perception that rapid population growth was not an issue because of the vastness of Africa, abundance of resources, relatively low population densities and, more recently, the threat of HIV/AIDS,” but as rapid population growth becomes a more urgent problem across the continent, that view is increasingly falling out of favor, said World Bank lead demographer John May in a recent interview with the African Press Organization. As governments work to improve their population programs, the World Bank is adopting “new demography” principles that examine age structures, dependency ratios, human capital investments, and the demographic dividend to craft cross-sectoral approaches to population policy.

Current demographic trends, the result of reduced infant and child mortality and slowly falling fertility rates, will double the population of Africa by 2036 if left unaddressed, said May. The security implications of this population growth are readily apparent. Rapid population growth has been identified as a factor in increasing resource scarcity and can help lead to conflict. In Sudan, for example, the pressures of overgrazing, desertification, ongoing drought, and escalating competition between pastoralist and agriculturalist communities have contributed to violence. Kenya presents a similar scenario: Rapid and uneven population growth led to land scarcity in the late 1980s, exacerbating latent political and ethnic tensions. The violent conflict that erupted between 1991 and 1993 was fueled in part by natural resource scarcity. More recently, insecure land tenure, shaky property rights, and competition over natural resources have triggered violence across East Africa. Population pressures also play a part, and some argue that demographically-induced land scarcity was at the heart of violence in Kenya earlier this year.

May lamented that far less attention has been paid to population than to humanitarian crises, good governance, and climate change—despite compelling evidence that population growth is likely to negatively impact the chances for peace. Sexual and reproductive health, for example, form 20 percent of the global disease burden, and there is compelling evidence that good reproductive health leads to poverty reduction. He reminds us that demographic issues are inextricably tied to larger development issues, and must be addressed together.

Some countries have successfully reduced fertility rates, May noted. In the 1960s, the Tunisian government introduced a program to reduce fertility rates through increased education for girls, government provision of family planning services, and legal reforms to increase the economic status of rural women and girls. Today, the country boasts a replacement-level fertility rate. Efforts to improve gender equity are highly effective in reducing unsustainable population growth: “It could be argued that the population issue in sub-Saharan Africa is in essence a gender issue,” said May, who argued that “[e]conomic and social development is of course the best contraceptive.”

“The task ahead is huge and difficult, however some concrete results have already been obtained,” said May. He offered a simple suggestion to governments wondering how to craft population policies: “let people, especially women, decide for themselves and…provide them with the means to exert their choices.”

Eighty-two percent of experts surveyed by Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress for the 2008 Terrorism Index said that the threat posed by competition for scarce resources is growing, a 13 percent increase over last year.

China Environment Forum Director Jennifer Turner maintains that China is facing “multiple water crises” due to pollution and rising demand in an interview with E&ETV;.

The Population Reference Bureau has two new articles examining the nexus between population and environment. One explores the relationship between forest conservation and the growth of indigenous Amazonian populations, while the other provides an excellent examination of population’s role in the current food crisis, with a special emphasis on East Africa.

Ethiopia’s rapid population growth “has accelerated land degradation, as forests are converted to farms and pastures, and households use unsustainable agricultural methods to eke out a living on marginal land,” writes Ruth Ann Wiesenthal-Gold in “Audubon on the World Stage: International Family Planning and Resource Management.” Wiesenthal-Gold attended a November 2007 study tour of integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) development programs in Ethiopia sponsored by the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club.

On Sunday, the Ugandan army attacked thousands of Turkana herders from drought-stricken northern Kenya who had crossed into Uganda seeking water and pasture for their cattle. “This is the second time our people have been attacked and killed,” John Munyes, Kenyan labor minister and Turkana North MP, told The Daily Nation. In 2005, 60 Turkana herders were killed by the Ugandan army in a similar incident. Yet talks scheduled for last month never occurred, and Munyes complained to The Nation that “the [Kenyan] Government had not shown any concern” over deaths in his community.

Fertility rates worldwide have been on the decline for many years, the result of a steady decrease in desired family size. But more often than not, fertility rates have not fallen as quickly as desired family size, as access to contraceptives has not kept pace with increasing demand. Consequently, more than 75 million pregnancies each year are unintended, finds “Fertility Regulation Behaviors and Their Costs: Contraception and Unintended Pregnancies in Africa and Eastern Europe & Central Asia,” a World Bank discussion paper surveying decades of research from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. One fifth of these pregnancies end in induced abortion, fully half of which are classified as unsafe, meaning they are not attended by a properly trained health care worker or in an environment that conforms to minimum medical standards.

The costs of unsafe abortion are tremendous, financially and in terms of human lives. Approximately 67,000 women die annually from complications resulting from unsafe abortion, leaving more than 200,000 children motherless. Sexual and reproductive health issues constitute 20 percent of the global disease burden, and produce additional “direct and indirect costs to the individual woman, the woman’s household, the country’s health system and society as a whole.”

In Africa, post-abortion care can consume up to half of obstetrics and gynecology department budgets. The cost of this care is often much higher than the patient’s monthly salary. The authors report that “comprehensive family planning services to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce unsafe abortion in Nigeria would cost only a quarter of what is being spent in direct costs to treat post-abortion complications.” This point is taken up by author Margaret E. Greene is the latest issue of FOCUS, ECSP’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. She writes that “[r]obust, compelling evidence linking good reproductive health to poverty reduction,” as is offered in the World Bank report, will “support efforts to include it in country-level poverty reduction strategies and in the allocation of international poverty reduction funding.”

This situation repeats itself across the globe. In Central Asia and Eastern Europe, induced abortion is “the principal method of birth control,” due to the expense of importing Western contraceptives, the medical community’s stigma against oral contraceptives, and the availability of abortion result. In Russia, government concerns about low fertility led the government to dismantle its sex-education curriculum and to carry out widespread layoffs in the government-controlled offices of contraceptive manufacturers.

Without exception, the case studies in this discussion paper find significant financial benefit to increasing modern contraceptive availability. Inadequate access is “an important barrier,” the authors write, discounting the argument that the contraceptives are there and people simply don’t use them. DHS surveys worldwide find that cost has prohibited contraceptive use for fewer than 2 percent of the estimated 137 million women with an unmet need. Women have decided, it seems, that the costs of childbearing far outweigh those of contraceptives.

“It is imperative,” the authors write, “that policies and programs address the need for contraception globally – for all population groups but with special emphasis on those who are most disadvantaged.” Community insurance schemes to reduce out-of-pocket payments can help accomplish this. Other ideas include increased subsidies for basic health services and adjusted user fee policies. The report also urges expanded and improved provision of contraceptive information and services, as well as improved training for health care providers. The problem is not a lack of good ideas and policies, but a lack of political will.

Senegal’s southernmost region, Casamance, has been the site of outright or latent conflict for some 40 years. Even before Senegal gained independence, there were calls for independence from the region. Separatist agitation in the region was inflamed during the 1970s by an influx of unemployed migrants from Senegal’s drought-stricken northern regions, seeking a part of “the greatest [economic] potential in all of Senegal.” Beginning in 1983, calls for independence soon led to armed conflict between southern separatist groups and the Senegalese government.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Senegal worked to support a peaceful resolution to the conflict by bolstering infrastructure and providing jobs. One USAID-funded program, undertaken in partnership with EnterpriseWorks Worldwide in 2001, aimed to modernize Casamance’s cashew-processing industry to strengthen the region’s war-torn economy. While cashew exports can bring in significant revenue, the region lacked the infrastructure to produce high-quality nuts for export. Processed cashews can bring in seven to 10 times the price of raw nuts. Today, 90 percent of the 15,000 metric tons of cashews Senegal produces each year come from Casamance.

Sadly, violence in the Casamance region has welled up again in earnest. The peaceful conclusion that many had hoped for following the peace accord of 2004 failed to materialize, and instead, the Senegalese army and Movement for Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC) rebels both maintain a large presence in the region.

The USAID-funded expansion of cashew production in Casamance may be having an unintended, and profoundly negative, consequence, reports IRIN News: Skyrocketing cashew prices are “lining the pockets of armed rebels.” Cashews remain a central feature of this conflict in other ways, as well. Earlier this year, more than a dozen villagers attempting to harvest nuts were rewarded by having their ears cut off with machetes by rebels patrolling the area.

MFDC member Damien Manga disputes claims that rebel groups are financed by revenue from cashew exports. He says that while rebels do sell the nuts, the profits finance living expenses only, not weapons purchases. “We collect cashew nuts to sell like everyone else…Some say [selling] cashews…enables us to buy weapons. This is false…it is only our leaders who buy our weapons.” Instead, Manga places blame for violence around the cashew orchards squarely on the shoulders of the Senegalese military. Senegalese military spokesman Lieutenant Malamine Camare refutes this claim, saying that the army’s mission is “to ensure the safety of people and goods in this region. We never engage in profit-making activities, and we execute our mission by the rules.”

Because certain resources and activities are so frequently linked to conflict – diamonds and oil, for example – the role of agriculture is often ignored. As authors Alec Crawford and Oli Brown argue in a new publication discussed in this New Security Beat post, any resource can be exploited to further conflict. Earlier this year, ECSP hosted the “New Horizons at the Nexus of Conflict, Natural Resources, and Health” event series exploring the interaction between human health, natural resources, and conflict.

Photo: A cashew seller in the Gambia. Courtesy of Flickr user Javier D.

“If you want fast money and are willing to take the risk, that’s the only way to get it,” says Abdullah Dieng, a fisherman in Bissau, Guinea, in a new IRIN article, “Fishermen turn to trafficking as fish profits drop.” Fishermen in Guinea have a problem: No one is buying their fish. “The lack of decent roads into the interior of the country, combined with prohibitive fuel prices, makes it too difficult for fish-sellers to transport fish any further than Bissau, creating a saturated market,” reports IRIN. As an alternative, the fishermen are turning to illegal trade in drugs and humans. By smuggling, they can earn much more money.

“The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates several hundred kilograms of cocaine go through the country each week, while according to 2004 figures from the International Office of Migration, one million West and Central Africans head clandestinely to Europe every year,” reports IRIN.

Fisheries are collapsing all over the world, but especially in Africa. The New York Times article “Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow” reports that there is almost no regulation of Bissau’s fishery, like most fisheries along the African coast. “Creating the Enabling Environment for Effective Fisheries Enforcement,” an event in the Environmental Change and Security Program’s fisheries series, explored some of the challenges associated with fisheries management. One of the most basic problems is a lack of information. Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, told the Times that “no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.” As a result, both local and European fishers have mostly stripped the area of its fish.

The lack of oversight is largely due to a lack of attention, and thus a lack of money. IRIN reports that “The fishing ministry receives just 5 percent of the government’s paltry annual budget, despite fishing bringing in 40 percent of the country’s annual revenues, and most of this money can only cover staff salaries.” Without increased funding and attention, it is unlikely that a solution will emerge to the environmental and economic problems that force fishermen to turn to illegal and dangerous activities. As the source of their livelihoods disappears, they have fewer and fewer options. Said one consultant quoted in the Times story, “The sea is being emptied.”

The land of Niger’s Tuareg Bedouin tribes—and thus the Tuareg way of life—is drying up. The steadily advancing Sahara desert is swallowing northern Niger at a rate of six kilometers per year, part of a centuries-old process recently accelerated by climate change and groundwater withdrawals by the nation’s booming uranium mining industry.

In the Central Albertine Rift, which runs from the northern end of Lake Albert to the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, “environmental factors are increasingly an underlying cause of instability, conflict and unrest,” says a new report from the Institute for Environmental Security, Charcoal in the Mist, which outlines environmental security issues and initiatives in the Albertine Rift region.

Part of the larger Great Rift Valley, the Central Albertine Rift encompasses portions of Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The area is one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, but is also a geopolitical hotspot, producing critical natural resources for a number of nations recently emerging from devastating civil wars. Lake Victoria, the birthplace of the Nile River, sits in this region, which means that the watchful eyes of its riparian states are trained at all times on the politics of the area. The Albertine Rift is also home to Africa’s Great Lakes, each of which straddles multiple nations and provides significant income to surrounding communities. Questions of access to these waters only heighten existing geopolitical tensions.

Charcoal in the Mist cites armed rebels, illegal mining, and a growing population’s increasing demands for food and energy as threats to regional environmental security. Virunga National Park, an internationally prized wilderness preserve in the DRC, has fallen victim to these pressures. Rampant poaching and illegal mining, as well as conflicts in the DRC and Rwanda, have left park authorities unable to protect the 7,800 square kilometer park. A timeline from National Geographic dramatically illustrates how violent conflict has disrupted conservation efforts in Virunga.

The “interconnectedness between natural resources, development and security” in the Central Albertine Rift region reinforces the need for innovative approaches to address these issues. For example, according to the report, population density around protected areas in this region is far higher than in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and the continually growing population already exceeds the capacity of local resources. The area’s population swelled with thousands of refugees fleeing the civil war in Rwanda in the 1990s, and simmering tensions continue to push people away from conflict zones and toward the relative calm of the Albertine Rift. Similarly, conflict stemming from the civil war in DRC, which lasted from 1998 until 2003, has beset North Kivu province. Rebel armies continue to clash in the region, restricting the ability of development organizations to work there and limiting the livelihoods of the local population.

The authors of Charcoal in the Mist call for more comprehensive mapping and monitoring of the Central Albertine Rift ecosystem in order to promote effective policies to address the region’s challenges. They also advocate for enhancing property rights to address fundamental conflicts over land, strengthening environmental law, dampening the illegal natural resource trade, and more aggressively protecting Virunga National Park. They believe that transboundary environmental cooperation has the potential to preserve both the ecological integrity and political stability of this important region.