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I have often wondered who started the whole issue of ‘Population Control’. Whose big idea was it, that the earth was being filled with too many people? One reads that there is a cull of a certain animal because a shift in the weather patterns or the natural balance has been tampered with through pesticide, or there has been cultural changes in certain countries. Well, I was amazed to read about a classified 200 page study entitled, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. This study was adopted in 1975 by President Gerald Ford, and contained a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. It appears that Ben Scowcroft replaced Kissinger as national security adviser ( the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), and was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defence and agriculture.
The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were apparently, not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which George VI had created in 1944 ““to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided disadvantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”
Kissinger’s study similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. Special attention was paid to ‘key countries’ in which the U.S. had a ‘special political and strategic interest’: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength.
For example, Nigeria: ‘Already the most populous country on the continent, with an estimated 55 million people in 1970, Nigeria’s population by the end of this century is projected to number 135 million. This suggests a growing political and strategic role for Nigeria, at least in Africa.’ Or Brazil: ‘Brazil clearly dominated the continent demographically.’ The study warned of a ‘growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on the world scene over the next 25 years.’
FOOD AS A WEAPON
There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programmes. He also warned that “population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline,” even if such measures were adopted.
A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targeted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: “There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID ( U.S. Agency for International Development) and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.”
“Mandatory programmes may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,”” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power?…. Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/ won’t control their population growth?”
It is questionable, in hindsight, whether the U.S. might have been better off if it did have food rationing, listening to all the programmes now being devoted to the obesity of the nation!
Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programmes unnecessary. “Rapid population and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of a century and beyond,” he reported.
The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDC’s. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.””
“It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades – a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable – famine, which has indeed come to pass.
It has also come to light, how some countries have used scientific programmes to cause bad weather conditions to come to their aid in time of warfare. Consequently, are we now reaping the bad effects from tampering with nature? So have other countries now jumped on the bandwagon of creating wars to keep their superiority? Is this the modern tool by which to assert one’s power base? If rich countries do not want to share what food they have, and help their neighbour, then what chance have we all for getting peace in the world?
By E. Halton A.T.C.L. Dip. Ed.
[Based on article taken from http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/globalnetnews-summary]
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