‘STARVING INTO OBLIVION’

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31981, 7 May 1969, Page 22

‘STARVING INTO OBLIVION’

(N.Z.P.A.-Heuter—Copyright)

WASHINGTON.

Rather like a voice froin the past, the earn, est words of Mr Robert McNamara at Notre Dame this week served with startling suddenness to restore some long-range perspective to the affairs of the world, writes Tom Wicker, of the New York Times News Service. Wicker writes:

While men still creep cautiously in reluctant pursuit of what seems an ever-reced-ing peace in Vietnam, while politicians in this country bicker over A.B.M. and a few millions for the. hungry, while commissars in the Soviet Union fuss over Czechoslovakian dissent, while young people everywhere rail at the. vast conspiracy of oppression and manipulation they seem to see overhanging all—while all this is taking the place of useful social and economic action, the human race proceeds apace toward breeding and starving itself into oblivion.

Mr McNamara, returning to a theme he has sounded before, echoed some of the recent words of Lord Snow in Britain and Mr Andrei D. Sakharov, in the Soviet Union, in insisting on a “humane but massive” population reduction. So fast is the rate of population growth in most of the under-developOd world, Mr

McNamara explained—from his vantage point as president of the World Bank—that even the most energetic and resourceful governments can do nd more than stand still, maintaining an uneasy Status quo in their totally inadequate standards of living. Most are actually slipping backwards. With his curiously Ameri can insistence that man’s ingenuity and dedication can make things come rightseen before in his Montreal speech of a few years ago— Mr McNamara suggested that agricultural technology was being advanced swiftly and dramatically enough to “buy two decades of time, admittedly the barest minimum of time,” during which man might reduce the population explosion to manageable proportions. This corresponds to Lord Snow’s “Model B” for the future—the proposition that one of three possible outcomes of the population crisis would be just enough reduction of hunger to gain time for a wiser generation to come into power and confront the population problem io earnest.

In bis Westminster College speech, Lord Snow made it clear he considered Model B unrealistic, and had even less hope for “Model C,” the idea this this generation might steel itself to the task and that the wealthy nations might make the enormous sacrifices needed to avert disaster.

Hence, the British author and scientist thought “Model A” most likely—that the wealthy nations in their pre-

occupation with nuclear weapons and themselves would do little or nothing, so that in perhaps no more than 30 years millions upon millions of people would be starving, with pome, of course, turning upon the fat. Here are some of the facts of the situation: World-wide births and deaths are now in the ratio of two to one, with a net gain in world population of about 70 millions per year. Nearly 58 million of this increase, according to the authoritative "Population Bulletin” occurs in the poor nations.

“To bring births into balance with low and still declining death rates,” the bulletin says, “would necessitate a cut-back of some 50 million births a year.” For this enormous and complex and delicate task, contorted by incredible problems of religion and ignorance and custom, there is no “framework remotely adequate to put the necessary billions of dollars and the essential brains and skills to work either to slow down human reproduction or to speed up agricultural productivity.” And Dr Georg Borgstrom has said that if all of the food in today’s world were distributed evenly among its 3.5 billion human inhabitants, every one of them would go hungry. Mr Sakharov, putting the “expected date of tragedy” even nearer than did Mr McNamara or Lord Snow—at 1975 to 1980—believes the task of coping with the the danger is so Gargantuan that the developed nations could

only do it by quantum changes in their foreign policies, permitting among them the closest co-operation. And even then, In his opinion, these nations would have to impose on themselves a “15-year tax equal to 20 per cent of the national income.” That, he quite correctly points out, would in itself insure a significant reduction in expenditures for weapons. Mr McNamara, whose warning was more restrained but no less pointed, gave his belief in a “rational, responsible, moral solution to the population problem” a solution that he said all shared in the responsibility of finding. Well, everyone shares the responsibility, all right, but not much else. The “Population Bulletin” says that the total outlay devoted yearly to the population crisis outside the United States is about sBom. Yet, all the world’s nations spend $154,300m a year for military purposes (or did in 1968—the bill probably has gone up). That means that the world spends $72,000 for military purposes for every one dollar it spendes to control population. Naturally, the Soviet Union and the United States, the only two nations who could do much about population or hunger, contribute more than two-thirds of the world military budget. That is madness, suggesting nothing like a “rational, responsible, moral” solution. And that kind of madness, if we keep on the way we always have in this country and this world, is what we will continue to have right down to the last bitter dying gasp.