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Dear Lebo Ramafoko,
Like many other listeners, I felt such glee when I heard your rant on Talk Radio 702 on November 1. I wanted to stand up and cheer. Thank you.
You reacted to a caller who said, basically, that we wouldn’t be short of food and water if people would just breed less. I’ve been fighting comments of this kind for years now. (And I agree with you that there’s an underlying racism, or at the very least, us-and-them-ism, in the comment: at best, it’s the poor who’re breeding too much; at worst, of course, it’s people-who-don’t-originate-from-northern-Europe – the ‘brown people’ in the erstwhile colonies or those teeming hordes of Orientals.)
It sets my teeth on edge.
The mythology that links food shortages with overpopulation really, really needs to be laid to rest. Here, let me quote from the World Food Programme, which does, after all, have some basic info about the causes of hunger. First, one important fact: “The world produces enough to feed the entire global population of 7 billion people.” And then, the shocker: “One third of all food produced (1.3 billion tons) is never consumed. This food wastage represents a missed opportunity to improve global food security in a world where one in 8 is hungry.
“[…] Each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia's Volga River. Producing this food also adds 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere....”
And in South Africa? “The country produces enough food for its current population of around 53 million and is a net exporter of food. […] Despite this, 12 million South Africans spend either days or nights hungry: they either have one meal a day or spend the entire day without food.
“Food wastage also occurs in South Africa: 31,4% of all the food produced in the country annually goes to waste, a total of 9,04 million tons. Add imported food and South Africa wastes 10,2 million tons of food annually. The value of this is R61,5 billion, or 2,1% of the country’s GDP. Of this amount, 27% is wasted during processing and packaging, followed by agricultural production (26%), post-handling and storage (26%), distribution (17%) and consumers (4%).”
(That also represents a shameful waste of water, something all of us should be learning to value more – while many of our crops are rain-fed, a huge proportion of our water use goes to irrigation.)
As you and I know, Lebo – as I can testify to my own shame – the children in our townships and rural areas who go to bed hungry are not the ones wasting food, throwing it away during packaging, making a muck of it during distribution or chucking it out of the fridge because it’s two days past the sell by date.
That’d be us, by and large: the urban consumers, the picket-fence suburbanites with our 2.1 children per household, the virtuous ones, the ones on This Side of the Us-and-Them divide.
It’s over-consumption and the demands of the better-off consumer that drive want, waste, pollution and harm to our precious water, not all those little children the rich South African sees in the blink of an eye as her 4x4 roars past an informal settlement.
And PS, there never are quite as many kids as she assumes. South Africa’s total fertility rate per woman is below the global average, yes, BELOW: the global average is 2.5, we’re at 2.4 (although the CIA has it at 2.31), and the accepted replacement rate is 2.1. Okay? And if anyone wants to mutter about us-and-them stats, yes, fertility inversely tracks wealth, so by and large white South Africans dropped below replacement rate around 1990 – but the fertility rate of the most disadvantaged group in the country more than halved from 1960 or so till the 1990s, from 6.6 to 3.1. And I’ll bet it’s even lower now.
Well-known environmental writer Fred Pearce paints a useful picture to illustrate the real problem: “A woman in rural Ethiopia can have ten children and her family will still do less damage, and consume fewer resources, than the family of the average soccer mom in Minnesota or Munich. In the unlikely event that her ten children live to adulthood and have ten children of their own, the entire clan of more than a hundred will still be emitting less carbon dioxide than you or I.”
And as you will very well know, Lebo, give that woman half a shot at reducing the massive inequalities she labours under – give her an education, decent health care, including contraception, and some protection under law – and she won’t have ten kids to start with.
It’s the tiny crust of rich people, the one percent, who fill the oceans with killer fragments of plastic debris from their good life, or destroy the rainforests of Indonesia so they can have processed foods and cosmetics. “Overpopulation is not driving environmental destruction at the global level; overconsumption is. Every time we talk about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying that simple fact.” (Pearce)
You’re so right, Lebo, and thanks for saying it: this kind of talk must stop. Now. And let us in our fancy cars and houses check our own complicity in hunger and the degradation of our environment.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
