A shorter version of this article was published in the national newsletter (number 129) of Sustainable Population Australia, in September 2017. That version did not include an additional comment regarding Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, nor the three paragraphs describing my own attempts to enhance “glue”.
In 2016 the US journalist Thomas
Friedman wrote a pair of articles, published in the New York Times, called “Out of
Africa”. He describes a visit to a village in the far northwest of Senegal, worth the trek, he says, “if
you’re looking for the headwaters of the immigration flood now flowing from
Africa to Europe via Libya.” In this village he finds almost no young or
middle-aged men; instead they have left for Europe, in search of opportunity.
According to Friedman “the village’s climate-hammered farmlands can no longer
sustain them, and with so many kids — 42 percent of Senegal’s population is
under 14 years old — there are too many mouths to feed from the declining
yields.” This scene is repeated right across the Sahel, including Niger, which
has a total fertility rate of over 7.
Supporters of Sustainable
Population Australia are unlikely to
need much convincing that the human carrying capacity of much of northern Africa has been exceeded. In 2002 I co-authored a paper for a conference
of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population which argued
that human carrying capacity can be conceptualised as an emergent property of
five kinds of capital: human, social, natural, physical and financial. Applying
this analysis to sub-Saharan Africa, it is clear that its natural capital (e.g.
the capacity of its soil, water, climate and human ingenuity to grow food) is
not keeping pace with population growth. Nor is its infrastructure (physical
capital). At the same time, word of mouth, mobile phones, and the internet provide
hope to many of its people that migration to Europe might provide the means not
only for a better life to those who can escape, but a means to send some money
home (remittances) enabling the import of food and other means to keep life
tolerable, for those for stay behind. Staying behind makes sense for the frail,
old and young, who not only avoid the arduous and dangerous journey to Europe,
but will not need to be housed and fed in a foreign and strange land.
The vectors that
drive migration are most commonly analysed as “push” and “pull”. These are
surely not hard to comprehend by non-Indigenous Australians, all of whom are
descendants of people who arrived more or less yesterday, compared to the time
our earliest ancestors left Africa, perhaps 100,000 years ago. But, in
addition to these factors, there are two more, which I termed “glue” and “fend”
(deterrence) in a report I contributed to in 2005, commissioned by the Australian
Conservation Foundation and the Australian Medical Association (and wrote about
in a blog
in 2015). For “fend” one only has to think of the hard line approach of Peter
Dutton, President Trump and in other countries such as Hungary.
But the “glue” factor seems
less well understood, including in Australia. But it is surely not hard to
understand. I am very happy to be an Australian living here, where my mother
tongue is understood, I am familiar with the culture, and I have the means for
a reasonable life, including a sense of safety. Having lived overseas for 5
years, I know that what Australia can offer me, is, in general, at least as
good as anywhere on Earth. Of those 5 years, about a year has been in Asia, including
in many rural areas. I know that not every Asian seeks to migrate; they are
tied to their homeland by memory, affection, culture and economy.
However, looking forward, in
the context of still rising population growth, sea level rise, and other
manifestations of adverse environmental change it is easy to conceive how push and pull will loosen glue, in many
parts of the Asia Pacific, as is already evident in much of Africa. For many Rohingya (a persecuted Muslim minority largely in Myanmar) this has
already happened.
Australian politicians and the glue factor
I have met Philip Ruddock (a
former Australian minister for migration) at three events organised by recent
migrants to Australia. The last time I saw him he told me foreign aid from Australian
was a luxury we cannot afford. In the context of intractable budget deficits
(significantly due to the immorality of multinational corporations, Australia’s
richest people and their tax lawyers) the position of the Liberal National
coalition is that aid is a form of bad debt, an indulgent consumption. In
response, I argued that aid was a glue and stability enhancing investment that would
enhance global and Australian quality of life. But he gave no hint that he
understood.
Sarah Hanson-Young, until
recently the Greens spokesperson for migration, has repeatedly criticised
Australia’s cruel, duplicitous, expensive, and unaccountable policy of
deterrence (fend) to asylum-seeking but she too, to my knowledge, has very
rarely if ever been reported talking about the need to enhance the glue
dimension to migration. However, I have recently been told, she is in fact well aware of
this dimension – if so, why does the media rarely if ever include Sarah’s
comments on this? (added December 2017, this sentence is not in the published
newsletter).
My own involvement in “glue”
In the late 1970s I decided
to study medicine, primarily to try to improve health in the South, then called the Third World. 1989 I co-founded the
non-government organisations BODHI and BODHI Australia, now two of the oldest Buddhist-influenced
aid organisations based outside Asia. BODHI’s primary goal can be condensed to
an attempt to enhance glue and to reduce push, pull and fend.
The arguments made here have
been more or less clear to me since a long conversation in 1990 with Dr Maurice
King, chief populariser of the concept
of “demographic entrapment”. I won the 2001 Borrie Prize (awarded in 2002) by the Australian Population Association (APA) for
a long essay that traced the rise and fall of Malthusian thinking within
demography. This was an adaptation of the second chapter of my doctoral thesis
(Inequality and
Sustainability), which was supervised by
Professor JC (Jack) Caldwell, a co-recipient
of the 2004 UN Population Prize.
Despite winning the Borrie
Prize, my resultant article was then rejected by a series of demographic journals, include
the Journal of Population Research (the APA journal), the Population
and Development Review and at least five more. Today, despite having
published at least 50 articles, chapters and reports of relevance to global population
dynamics, I have not yet been published in a primarily demographic journal. I
share Maurice King’s opinion that mainstream demography has been corrupted by
neoliberal forces who deny limits to growth, not only physical but social.
Conclusion
It is clear that Australian
political elites have given up on global “health and wealth for all”, despite
ostensibly supporting the Sustainable Development Goals, which will be a mirage if business as usual continue. It is not only shameful but stupid
that Australia has thumbed its nose at the Pearson Commission target for overseas aid. Our approach of miserly aid, rampant
fend (the funding of which probably now exceeds that for aid) is sewing the
seed for future misery, both here and abroad.
About the author
In 2002 Colin Butler was
commissioned by Frank Fenner, of the Australian Academy of Science, to write a report on Australian carrying capacity. In 2013 the Australian Academy
of Science published a chapter in which he argued that the Australian population must be
substantially increased, even though this would reduce the Australian quality
of life, given the global demographic pressure. However, he argued, this must
be accompanied by much greater engagement in the struggle for global
development.
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