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Dear Bill and Melinda Gates,

     Like millions of other people, I stand in awe of the breadth and audacity of your foundation’s noble mission to improve the lives of billions of underprivileged people in the third world countries by freeing them of AIDs, malaria and other diseases. However, if I may add my humble opinion, your mission is incomplete if you do not at the same time include a rigorous family planning drive to control over-population in some of these countries.

    Just by treating the symptoms and not the root cause of diseases will not solve the problem of lifting those people out of poverty. Suppose you are able to reduce the infant mortality rate drastically by the application of vaccines, medication and environmental measures, you would bring up to adulthood many who might have otherwise perished. In a world where 80% of the population still live in poverty, near or below the starvation level (ref 1), is it better to have this extra population, clamoring for employment, food, water and other planet’s resources, when already we cannot feed the existing population without this extra boost ?

   Over-population is the root cause of many evils which lead directly to poverty. If we can first reduce the population to a sustainable level, then all other problems, such as disease, overcrowding, shortage of food and other necessities will become infinitely more amenable than it is now.

    Fundamentally, there is a mismatch between population growth which is exponential and the growth of the world food supply, which can be at best linear. If the birth rate is unchecked, then a man and a woman having 10 children today may lead to 100 individuals in a little over one generation if the offsprings all continue to have 10 children each. It is forecast that the world will have a population of 8.2 billion by the year 2030 from our present 6.5 billion. How are we to provide enough food and water, not to mention all the other resources required for this 26% increase? Eventually all exponential rates of growth will be checked by the shortage of necessities such as in this case food and water. It is far better to control population growth so that starvation does not occur rather than having starvation as a tool for limiting the world’s population.

    When one just mentions controlling world’s over-population, there is a tendency to throw up our arms in despair. This is actually unjustified for much has been achieved in the past few decades. There are shining examples to follow: For example, Japan managed to reduce its birth rate by half in just 7 years between 1951-58. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea, struggling to achieve first world living standards have actually managed to lift themselves out of poverty by following Japan’s example.

   The recent history of Iran also shows what can be done in a Muslim country. When Ayatollah Khomeini first came to power in 1979, he dismantled the Shah’s family planning clinics in the belief that more people brought strength in numbers especially when it came to wars like the Iraq-Iran war.  However the attendant additional stresses on society: unemployment, overcrowding, environmental degradations and more made him realize that much can be gained by achieving a stable sustainable population. So in 1989 the country turned an about-face, with an aggressive management of family planning clinics combined with universal primary school education and sex education in particular, government propaganda and incentives, he was able to reduce the rate of population growth from an explosion to a very low level in a space of 10 years (ref 2,3). This is by no means an endorsement of Iran’s foreign policy nor the treatment of women in his country.

   The cost of pursuing a zero growth population is NOT prohibitive. At the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 ( ref 4) it was estimated that a fully funded population program to stabilize world population in the next 20 years would cost $17 billion per year up to 2000 and $22 billion annually by 2015. This was to be covered 2/3 by the developing countries themselves and 1/3 from first world countries. So far, the industrial world has fallen short of this goal by half. This is one way your Foundation could make a difference.

   Last, while finding effective vaccines is an arduous task involving many years of research, sometimes not even knowing whether the final product is useful, pursuing a course to reduce population growth is sure to succeed because there are precedents. Furthermore, results can be visible in a short space of timeperhaps 5 to10 years.

Yours Sincerely,
Gioietta Kuo, PhD,

References:
1. “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, pp. 508, Viking Press 2005.

2. “Iran Birth Rates Plummeting at Record Rates” in Lestor R. Brown, Janet Larsen and Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts: “The Earth policy Reader” ( New York, W.W. Norton and Co, 2002, pp190 -194).

3. Homa Hoodfar & Samad Assadpour: “The Politics of Population Policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran” Studies in Family Planning. March 2000, pp. 19-34.
And Farzaneh: “Iran’s Family Planning Program: Responding to nation’s Needs,“ MENA Policy Brief, June 2002.
And UN Population Referenca Bureau, 2005 World Population Data Sheet, wall chart. Washington DC, August 2005.

4. UN Population Fund (UNFPA): “Meeting the Goals of ICPD ( International Conference on population and Development): Consequences of Resource Shortfalls up to year 2000,” paper presented to the Executive Board of the UN Development program and the UNFPA, New York 12-23 May 1997; UNFPA, Population Issues Briefing Kit (New York: Prographics Inc, 2001)

About the Author:
Dr Gioietta Kuo: Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, UK; Former Research Scientist, Plasma Physics Lab, Princeton University. US Senior Fellow of “American Center for International Policy Studies,” www.amcips.org, Washington DC. kuopet@sbcglobal.net

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