Matthew Connelly recently published Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, a book that has chafed demographers and those working in the family planning sector. If Connelly had foreseen the attention his recounting of the population movement would garner, he might have taken more care to represent more sides of the story. He also might have talked to more living people, especially women, rather than relying so heavily on written archives.

Controversially, Connelly argues that family planning programs in the 20th century were responsible for only 5 percent of the fertility decline experienced during that time. His proof? That fertility levels were already declining before family planning programs began. On page 338, he writes, “Moreover, it could not be shown that even the 5 percent effect was actually caused by such efforts, or whether instead broader socioeconomic or cultural changes explained both the decline in parents’ preference for large families and government willingness to provide them with contraceptives (what economists call the endogeneity problem).”

But examples abound in which fertility declined drastically following the introduction of accessible contraception. For example, after officials in Iran revised the country’s family planning program in the late 1980s, fertility dropped from 5.62 births per woman to just above 2 today. Fertility had been declining since the early 1960s, but at a much slower rate.

In the early 1960s, the fertility rate in Brazil was 6.2. In the years after Planned Parenthood arrived and pharmacies began selling contraceptives, fertility fell to 3.5 births per woman. Today, Brazil’s fertility rate is around 2.35 births per woman, which is close to replacement level.

When women can choose for themselves when to have children, they often choose to have smaller families. The family planning movement has not been perfect, but it has frequently acted courageously to give women the choices they deserve. Its successes should not be overlooked.

Marian Starkey, communications manager at Population Connection, holds a master of science in population and development from the London School of Economics.

An article in Time magazine surveys the growing awareness of climate change’s links to traditional and nontraditional security threats.

“Unless some way can be found to stop the explosive rise in food prices generally, and rice prices in particular, we will see sharply higher mortality….This will not be mass starvation, with people dying in the streets, but it will be sharply higher infant and child mortality and weakened adults succumbing prematurely to infectious diseases,” said Peter Timmer, an expert on agriculture and development and a current Center for Global Development non-resident fellow, in an interview earlier this week.

The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a film about sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), premiered yesterday on HBO. GBV is perhaps nowhere more prevalent than in the war-torn eastern provinces of the DRC, where untold numbers of women and girls—likely in the hundreds of thousands—have been raped, mutilated, and abused. GBV encompasses rape, sexual mutilation, and abduction into sexual slavery, and is often worsened by war and civil strife.

The Wilson Center’s Africa Program and Environmental Change and Security Program, in conjunction with Catholic Relief Services, recently hosted a discussion on GBV in the DRC. Kristin Kim Bart, a gender-based violence program officer at the International Rescue Committee, delivered a powerful presentation that outlined the nature and scope of the problem and offered suggestions for how to address it. She explained, “This rape is not about sexual desire—it is about the domination and decimation of the woman, her family, and entire community. And we have seen that it works as strategy of war again and again, and today in DRC.”

GBV can have severe health consequences, including traumatic fistula, severed limbs, transmission of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, and unwanted pregnancy, but “it is the social and psychological consequences of sexual violence that are sometimes the hardest to overcome,” said Kim Bart. “Survivors are stigmatized, shunned, rejected by their families and communities, and blamed for the violence they suffered.”

Despite this bleak picture, there is hope for women and girls who have suffered from GBV. NGOs like CARE and the International Rescue Committee have become increasingly active in providing health, psychological, and economic assistance to survivors, and governments and other donors have begun to make funding these services a higher priority. In addition, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) recently introduced the International Violence Against Women Act, which would make the prevention of violence against women a key priority in U.S. foreign assistance.

“The silver lining of this is that conflict opens a door to address and discuss what is usually a totally taboo subject,” said Kim Bart in an email to the New Security Beat. “And with the proper resources and technical expertise, we see small changes resulting from our work over time. We have witnessed communities begin to recognize the violence women and girls are facing [and] local health professionals treating survivors with care and compassion.”

“The relationship between natural resources and violent conflict is shaped to a large extent by the quality of the governance of those resources, which in turn is a correlate of good governance in general,” says In Control of Natural Wealth? Governing the resource-conflict dynamic, a report by the Bonn International Center for Conversion. “Furthermore, our results confirm the assumption that good (resource) governance increases state stability and, in countries that had experienced violent conflict, the duration of peace.”

Peri-Urban Water Conflicts: Supporting dialogue and negotiation, a report by the Netherlands’ IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, explores water conflicts on the outskirts of three developing country cities: Cochabamba, Bolivia; Chennai, India; and São Paolo, Brazil.

“Poverty Reduction and Millennium Development Goals: Recognizing Population, Health, and Environment Linkages in Rural Madagascar,” published in Medscape General Medicine, evaluates Madagascar’s progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals and discusses how the government’s plans for the country’s development address the linkages between poverty, population, health, and environment.

According to a study carried out by Michael Ross of UCLA, vast oil wealth tends to diminish women’s rights. “Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions,” writes Ross.

The Economist reports on the global effects of China’s growing hunger for natural resources—including oil, copper, grain, and timber. “Some non-governmental organisations worry that Chinese firms will ignore basic legal, environmental and labour standards in their rush to secure resources, leaving a trail of corruption, pollution and exploitation in their wake.”

Earlier this week, public health practitioners, scientists, economists, and policymakers gathered at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., to launch The Lancet‘s new series on maternal and child undernutrition. The series aims to bring attention to the burden of undernutrition and raise support for evidence-based interventions that are implemented to scale. The speakers—including Joy Phumaphi, vice president for Human Development at the World Bank; Kent Hill, assistant administrator for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development; and Tadataka Yamada, president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program—emphasized the linkages between undernutrition and national productivity and prosperity. “Improved health for the world’s poor is not only a moral imperative, but also a pragmatic investment for peace, security, and worldwide economic growth,” said Hill. It is not surprising that the Japanese government recently gave $300,000 to fund a maternal and child health and nutrition program in Pakistan in an effort to alleviate poverty and increase security in the area.

Robert Black of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Policy, the lead author of the series, emphasized that many national plans to improve nutrition have yet to be effectively implemented or have failed to achieve high coverage. He stressed the need to incorporate nutrition priorities into non-health programs and policies such as those addressing poverty, trade, and agriculture. Boldly, Black characterized the international nutrition system as fragmented and dysfunctional and called for reforms that included greater funding, capacity strengthening, and accountability.

According to The Lancet, “3.5 million mothers and children under five die unnecessarily each year due to the underlying cause of undernutrition, and millions more are permanently disabled by the physical and mental effects of a poor dietary intake in the earliest months of life.” It is time national governments and the international community acknowledge the negative impact of undernutrition on health, education, productivity, and human security. Nations will not be healthy, prosperous, and peaceful until their people are properly nourished and given the chance to develop to their full capacity. For more information on this event, visit the Global Health Initiative’s website.

In an editorial in The New York Times, noted author and former Wilson Center speaker Jared Diamond argues that the world’s growing population “matters only insofar as people consume and produce.”

A new guide from MEASURE Evaluation provides a set of evidence-based indicators that integrated population-health-environment (PHE) projects can use for monitoring and evaluation.

WomenLead in Peace and Stability, a new publication from the Centre for Development and Population Activities, profiles 15 women from war-torn nations—including Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Nepal—who have worked to build sustainable peace in their countries.

Tensions are high between those who support the construction of a new township for former Nairobi slum-dwellers, and those who argue the development will jeopardize the future of Nairobi National Park.

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a $15 billion commitment, is set to expire at the end of fiscal year 2008. This critical boost in U.S. AIDS funding has helped millions of individuals infected with HIV, and in so doing, has improved developing nations’ health and education systems and decreased violence against women. In an original podcast by the Environmental Change and Security Program and the Global Health Initiative, UNAIDS Executive Director Dr. Peter Piot discusses how reauthorizing PEPFAR at increased levels of funding, expanding AIDS prevention programs, and coordinating global efforts to combat HIV/AIDS under U.S. leadership could amplify the effectiveness and sustainability of the global AIDS response.

Click here for the Wilson Center, “PEPFAR Reauthorization and the Global AIDS Response” event summary.

They say that a good man is hard to find. But in some countries, the opposite is true: a good woman is hard to find—because it’s hard to find women at all. According to a recent article by the BBC, the Chinese city of Lianyungang has eight men for every five women. Ninety-nine cities in China have gender ratios as high as 125 (125 men for every 100 women, or a 5:4 ratio).

But China is not alone. India has a gender ratio of 113, and the ratio in Asia as a whole is 104.4. In the United States, by contrast, the rate is 97, meaning that there are more women than men.

Gender imbalances are caused by cultural and economic preferences for male children, which contribute to sex-selective abortion and female infanticide. Over 60 million girls are “missing” in Asia as a result of these practices.

Furthermore, some government policies may intensify these gender preferences. China’s one-child policy, for example, may cause concern among parents, particularly in rural areas, that having a female child endangers their family’s future. Government policies intended to combat skewed gender ratios, such as bans on prenatal ultrasounds for the purpose of determining the baby’s sex and bans on sex-selective abortion, have proven ineffective.

Unbalanced gender ratios have consequences that reach beyond just the mothers and children involved. According to Valerie Hudson, high gender ratios leave many men without prospects for marriage, which may mean these men have fewer incentives to contribute peacefully to society. The men with the slimmest prospects for marriage are likely to be unemployed, poor, and uneducated, so they are already at increased risk for violent behavior. Hudson cites statistical evidence showing links between high gender ratios and higher rates of violent crime, drug use, trafficking, and prostitution.

Hudson and co-author Andrea den Boer cover these links in greater detail in their book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population. In the 11th issue of the Environmental Change and Security Report, Richard Cincotta takes issue with some of the statistical methods that Hudson and den Boer use. He argues that what is important is not nationwide gender ratios, but the number of “marriage-age men” (25-29 years old) and “marriage-age women” (20-24).

While there may be some debate over whether the relationship between gender ratios and violent behavior is a causal one, there is little doubt about what causes the gender imbalances in the first place. An end to preferences for female children will be beneficial not only to girls and women, but to societies as a whole.

Photo Credit: A subway in China, courtesy of flickr user 俊玮 戴.