Jeffrey Sachs Visits Seattle

Jeffrey Sachs, on tour to publicize his new book, came to Seattle last week to address the World Affairs Council.

During his speech, he outlined 10 steps he believes would assist humanity in its quest towards equality, ending poverty, and creating a sustainable global society. Two of the steps, number two and eight, involve reducing population to responsible levels. Here are some of Sachs’ comments on the issue:

The second challenge is that not only is the per capita income going up but the world population is on track, on the relatively optimistic medium forecast of the United Nations Population Division, to reach more than 9 billion people by mid-century — another 2.5 billion people, net, added to the global population on a planet that’ already extraordinarily crowded. With all of that increase, at least in the initial point, coming in impoverished countries that already are not creating jobs/livelihoods, and in many cases are already under remarkable environmental stress. But the poorest of the poor are still having 6 or 7 children, maybe 4 or 5 survive to adulthood, each mother is raising 2 daughters to adulthood, each generation therefore is roughly doubling every 25 years, in the poorest lands. And this is against a backdrop of extreme poverty, massive disease burden, great water scarcity, and a tremendous amount of conflict. And the migration pressures that will come as climate change interacts with population growth are going to be phenomenal. And of course we don’t even want to talk about those things. And we have a global policy sophisticated enough to say, basically, ‘people get shot when they try to cross borders’.

So population is the second great challenge. And it’s one that’s not even discussed anymore, because first it’s not deemed to be a matter of concern to our government, and reasons such as, I suppose, the religious right, and others who don’t want to talk about it, and we’ve forgotten about it in public discussion, and again, to our [own] peril.

Eight. I would start refinancing, again, the UN Population Fund. Do you know that we cut all funding for the United Nations Population Fund at the beginning of the Bush administration? Just to make sure that the poorest and most unstable countries in the world don’t have contraception, don’t get their fertility rates under control, and therefore, somehow, are going to help solve these problems in the world, makes absolutely no sense from any point of view: economic development, environmental sustainability, or US national security. And we have to get back to some basic realities: the United States used to lead the effort to help spread family planning, voluntary fertility reduction, contraceptive availability, access to sexual and reproductive health services. And it would make a world of difference for our own security to continue to do that.

Hopefully, Sachs won’t be the last global power broker come to his senses, and embrace responsible population as the real solution to global problems.

The podcast is here, the video link is here.