A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that the global food crisis poses a moral and humanitarian threat; a developmental threat; and a strategic threat. The authors recommend that the United States: modernize emergency assistance; make rural development and agriculture top U.S. foreign policy priorities; alter the U.S. approach to biofuels; ensure U.S. trade policy promotes developing-country agriculture; and strengthen relevant U.S. organizational capacities.

Climate change, increasing population, and overuse of land, fisheries, and water supplies threaten to undermine development in Uganda, writes Pius Sawa for the Africa Science News Service. Olive Sentumbwe Mugisa, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) population and health advisor in Uganda, warns that Uganda’s economic growth is not keeping pace with its population growth, which is among the fastest in Africa, due to a fertility rate of 6.7 children per woman.

Native Ugandan Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka spoke about the interconnectedness of population, health, and environment issues in Uganda in two events at the Wilson Center in May of this year. Kalema-Zikusoka is the founder and director of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), which works to conserve the habitat of the endangered mountain gorilla by strengthening community health services and providing communities with information about the benefits of family planning.

Kalema-Zikusoka is also the author of an upcoming issue of Focus, the Environmental Change and Security Program’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. Her piece describes CTPH’s work in and around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, where it has found great success in addressing health, conservation, family planning, and livelihood issues in an integrated fashion.

Photo: Woman and children in southern Uganda. Courtesy of flickr user youngrobv.

“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.”

A recent post on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog—entitled “Poop is Funny, But It’s Fatal”—highlights a UNICEF World Water Day video about the necessity of destigmatizing human waste. Bacterial infections caused by contact with human waste kill 1.5 million people every year—most of them children. The stakes are high. The film uses kids and humor—two good ingredients for education through entertainment—to explain the importance of sanitation. The film emphasizes that although we may not like talking about feces, urine, toilets, and the like, we need to because the fact that 2.6 billion of us lack adequate sanitation is a fundamental threat to human health, productivity, and dignity. It’s a short film—YouTube friendly—and these are complex links, but they are key to understanding the need to invest in available technologies.

India’s Punjab region faces a host of troubles: In the last 10 years, 100,000 of India’s desperate farmers—many of them Punjabi—have been driven to suicide by their inability to repay loans; half a century of heavy fertilizer use in Punjab has led to soaring cancer rates; water tables in the region sink as much as 100 feet per year, the result of decades of rice production in a naturally dry area; overwatering has brought salts to the soil’s surface, making large tracts of land unusable; and by some accounts, 40 percent of Punjab’s youth and nearly half of its agricultural workforce are addicted to heroin. In a series of reports from Punjab published in Slate magazine, Mira Kamdar argues that the economic, security, and environmental problems facing India can ultimately be traced back some 40 years to the policies of the Green Revolution. The drive to feed India’s rapidly growing population put enormous pressure on Punjab’s land and left consideration for sustainability on the back burner, according to Kamdar, who argues that these issues now threaten to paralyze India’s agricultural sector.

The Green Revolution alleviated the chronic famines that historically plagued India. Hybrid seed varieties, extensive irrigation schemes, and the heavy-handed use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides transformed Punjab into an agricultural powerhouse. It comprises only 1.5 percent of India’s territory, but it produces 60 percent of the country’s wheat and 45 percent of its rice. Yet Kamdar wonders whether India will be able to “feed a growing population in the face of environmental collapse and growing political instability fueled by scarcity.”

With little hope for economic stability, Punjab’s youth are increasingly turning to the drug trade for income, and Punjab’s impoverished citizens, many of whom feel exploited and left behind by the Indian government, are attractive recruits for separatist groups. “Conditions affecting the livelihood of the majority of people in poor countries [or regions] are at the heart of the internal violence” so often found there, according to a report from the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO).

Due to the effects of climate change, the 400 million additional people projected to live in India by 2080 may have to make do with a nearly 40 percent decline in agricultural production during the same period, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Current policies will do little to alleviate the pressures colliding in Punjab. The government—as well as the World Bank, international agriculture corporations, and Indian companies—favors privately funded, large-scale industrial operations. Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s minister of finance, is focused on developing India’s agricultural capacity, and is not terribly concerned with the consequences for the environment, security, or human health. Small-scale farming is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Many countries face the challenge of feeding a growing population with diminishing output, and find doing so in an ecologically responsible manner difficult. Ultimately, though, the case of India shows that increasing output at such dramatic cost to human and environmental health is unsustainable, as it quickly creates complex and intractable problems of its own.

Photo: Punjabi farmers transport fertilizer from a nearby village. Courtesy of Flickr user Aman Tur.

The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) officially launched its 2008 World Population Data Sheet yesterday at the National Press Club. The 2008 Data Sheet features key population, health, environmental, and economic indicators for more than 200 countries. New in this year’s edition, co-authored by Carl Haub and Mary Mederios Kent, are data on percent of population in urban areas, number of vehicles per 100,000 people, and percent of population with access to improved drinking water.

Several findings highlight the significant health inequalities between wealthy and poor countries. For example, while around 1 in 6,000 women in developed countries dies from pregnancy-related causes, in the 50 least-developed countries, the risk is an astonishing 1 in 22. Because maternal mortality is generally seen as a proxy for the general state of a country’s health care system, these statistics point to alarming systemic health care failings in many of the world’s least-developed countries.

The 2008 World Population Data Sheet also highlights disparities between developed and developing countries in population growth rate trends; as wealthier countries’ populations stagnate or even begin to decline, the populations of the world’s poorest countries continue to grow at a rapid clip. PRB president Bill Butz noted that “[n]early all of the world population growth is now concentrated in the world’s poorer countries,” and that “[e]ven the small amount of overall growth in the wealthier nations will largely result from immigration.” As Kent pointed out at yesterday’s press conference, the United States is the major exception to this trend, because most of its population growth over the next several decades will come from natural increase.

Unfortunately, the countries with the least access to improved water sources—and therefore some of the highest rates of diarrheal disease and child malnutrition—have among the world’s fastest-growing populations. For instance, in Ethiopia, which has a total fertility rate of 5.3 births per woman, only 42 percent of the population has access to an improved water source, and in Afghanistan, which has a total fertility rate of 6.8, the figure is a mere 22 percent.

Europe’s deepening energy insecurity has been acutely demonstrated by the Russia-Georgia conflict, reports Jeff White, correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Russia’s demonstrated willingness to cut supplies to Europe has prompted the search for alternative sources, including the planned Nabucco pipeline, which bypasses Russia. However, the pipeline “stands little chance of success if this tense situation in Georgia continues,” Zurab Janjgava of Georgian Oil told the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Georgian energy executive Giorgi Vashakmadze expressed his agreement to the Monitor: “Russia is showing it controls this corridor.”

At a recent Wilson Center event, Marshall Goldman of Harvard University explained that Russian influence is wide and expanding because of their energy supplies. One illustration is the German natural gas supply, which is 40% Russian and growing. Russia’s phenomenal economic comeback since 1998 is due almost entirely to the strength of its energy sector. “Putin made a difference, but oil and gas made an even more important difference,” explained Goldman. He warned of the danger of Moscow’s strong control over vital energy supplies to Europe. Said Goldman, “Russia is indeed a petrostate and is very closely tied to the fate of energy.” Europe – and the West – can no longer hold any illusions to the contrary.

Sonia Schmanski contributed to this post.

“Over the next twenty years physical pressures – population, resource, energy, climatic, and environmental – could combine with rapid social, cultural, technological, and geopolitical change to create greater uncertainty,” warns the newly released 2008 National Defense Strategy. Demographic trends, resource scarcity, and environmental change all inform the updated strategy, which encourages international cooperation to address these impending challenges.

The “Population Forum” in the September issue of WorldWatch Magazine “reveals that empowering women to make their own family size choices…is the best strategy to tackle population growth” and the environmental and security problems linked to it. A short history of population trends is available online; the website offers free previews of Lori Hunter’s article on PHE and gender, as well as “Population and Security” by Elizabeth Leahy and ECSP’s own Sean Peoples. Bernard Orimbo links population growth and environmental degradation in his native Kenya, and PAI staff discuss urbanization.

Climate change threatens to exaggerate the challenges faced by the billions of people worldwide who depend upon natural resources for their survival. But the competition and, at times, violent conflict that results from increased resource scarcity is not a given; the recently released World Resources Report 2008 finds that “well-designed, community-based enterprises” can ease the environmental burden on natural resources and pave the way for sustainable dependence on the land.

At the 2008 World Expo’s “Water and Conflict Resolution” week, municipal representatives working with Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) presented case studies from its “Good Water Neighbors” programs: cross-border solutions for the Lower Jordan River; the Jordan River Peace Park project; and the town of Auja in the Jordan River Valley. Speaking about these programs the Wilson Center, FOEME’s Gidon Bromberg said that “by working together, not only do we advance the environmental issues…we also advance peace between our peoples.”