Can reducing population growth alleviate hunger and other social problems?
The power structures analysis poses one additional question to those advocating family planning as a means of enhancing human well-being and alleviating stress on the environment: Can reducing births reduce poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation? Since rapid population growth is not the cause of these closely intertwined problems, we doubt that simply slowing growth can alleviate them. Consider a few of the countries that have managed to reduce birth rates without significantly redistributing access to survival resources – land, jobs, and health care. In Mexico, for example, despite a 37 percent decline in fertility rates since 1960, there is little evidence that the people are any less hungry.103 Data on malnutrition indicate that fully a fifth of all Mexicans are malnourished, with the estimates ranging as high as 40 to 60 percent for children under four in Mexico’s rural areas.104 The estimates refer to the late 1970s – well after Mexico’s fertility decline was underway105 a
