Jacques-Yves Cousteau

UNESCO Courier, Nov, 1991 by Bahgat Elnadi, Adel Rifaat

So religion shouldn't be held responsible. Fear of the future may be, however. In the so-called developing countries there is no insurance for old age. Retirement pensions, if they exist, do not even provide for basic needs. Even when they are young people panic when they think about their old age, especially since they grow old quickly because of poor sanitary and other conditions. To care for them in their old age they need a male child they can rely on. And since they have to take account of their chances of having daughters as well as sons, of mortality rates, and of the possibility that some of their children are not going to be interested in looking after them when they get old, they need to have six off-spring before they can be sure of having a dependable male child. Six children to be sure of having three boys. Three boys to be sure of having two who survive. And two living boys to be sure of having one who will look after his parents.

In addition to the insecurity factor there is the factor of female illiteracy, which is also a result of poverty. In the developing countries education has made great strides but there are still not enough schools. Selection is thus made on the basis of sex. Boys take priority over girls when it comes to enrollment in school.

Why? My answer may make you raise your eyebrows, but the fact is that little girls do not go to school because there is no safe drinking water. When there is no drinking water in the vicinity the girls have to go and fetch it from the spring. I have seen adolescent girls fetch drinking water from twenty and sometimes thirty kilometres away, which takes a whole day. By the time they are fourteen or fifteen years old, these girls whose lives are geared to meeting the urgent need for water have never been to school, have never learned anything. How can they use contraception or even know that contraception exists?

Some people even try to explain excessively high birth-rates by the fact that for hundreds of millions of people love is the only source of happiness. Contraception neither prevents nor reduces happiness. The contraceptive pill is distributed freely in many poor countries and yet the women do not take it. Why? Because they have had no education and are subjected to the will of the men who either do not care about the consequences or want children to look after them in their old age.

Overpopulation is our planet's number one problem. Of the 5.7 billion people on Earth, less than 2 billion live in decent conditions. This figure will soon double. Perhaps we shall manage to feed the expected 10 or 12 billion. But that's just about all we shall be able to do.

* Some people believe that the sea can be a rich source of food. . . .

-- That is a ridiculous idea. The sea's resources are diminishing. There is far too much overfishing already. And even if we manage to keep on harvesting the same quantity of protein from the sea, this quantity is bound to diminish as a proportion of consumer needs. I remember that at the beginning of my career 10 per cent of the protein consumed came from the sea. Today the proportion is of the order of 4 to 5 per cent. Tomorrow, when the population has doubled, it will fall to 2 per cent. Here too, productivity has a ceiling which cannot be exceeded. We are already in the overfishing zone.