Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 27, 1994 TAG: 9403010182
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Teaching her to read and write and think critically is, the evidence shows, the best place to begin worldwide efforts to stave off a population apocalypse.
Today, and for untold numbers of generations, Rita has been kept ignorant - and barefoot and pregnant.
She is a victim of tradition, and of a massive, worldwide conspiracy against women. Massive problems on a crowded planet are the result.
If Rita - and untold millions like her who toil in poor developing nations - were better educated, they would rely less on their reproductive organs for social security, and more on their brains.
Not only could Rita hope for a better life thereby. Population would be stabilized, poverty reduced. And we Earthlings might avoid the kind of doomsday scenario outlined last week by Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel.
If current population trends continue, predicts Pimentel, there'll be upward to 15 billion people - more than double today's 6 billion - trying to elbow each other off the world by the year 2100. Their constant companions will be "misery, poverty, disease and starvation" on a global scale.
As insulated as we might like to think we are now, Americans would not escape the consequences. U.S. population would climb to half a billion and our standard of living, Pimentel says, would be only slightly better than in present-day China.
Fortunately, it is not too late to reverse the trends. The Clinton administration is beginning to show leadership on the population issue, and is wisely promoting a strategy based on equality for half the population: women.
"Women are the catalyst for about everything we want to do," says Timothy Wirth, Clinton's undersecretary for global affairs. That's "everything" from promoting democracy to ending poverty to protecting the environment to keeping the Earth from getting so heavy with people that it falls off its axis.
An ambitious agenda. Is Rita ready to help?
In many underdeveloped countries, she is not. Girls typically spend fewer years in school than boys do. Oppressed by culture and tradition, they are treated virtually as slave labor. In impoverished nations that are now adding some 90 million people to the world population each year, undereducated Ritas strain at subsistence farming for morsels of food for themselves and their families.
"When they can no longer increase their own labor burdens, women lean more heavily on the contributions of their children, especially girls," says researcher Jodi Jacobson, who's written for Worldwatch Institute. Girls are kept out of school to help with their mothers' menial work. Their options are limited. The men don't object.
The result is practically to ensure that future generations of females will grow up with poorer prospects than males, and women will continue to seek economic security by producing as many children as possible.
Study after study has shown that better-educated women are more likely to use family planning. One report notes that countries with significantly fewer girls than boys enrolled in school have fertility rates two or three times higher than countries with a good record in educating girls.
Better-educated women are also more likely to contribute to economic development - entrepreneurial service enterprises, for example - that is less harmful to the environment than the sort of scratching for survival that contributes to worldwide deforestation.
Keeping women barefoot and pregnant is keeping the world on a path to disaster, and spinning in a vicious cycle: inequality, poverty, the gender gap in education, poverty, high fertility rates, more poverty. Coercive population-control measures won't help. Opening up horizons and options will.
In September, the United Nations will hold a major conference on population and development in Cairo. Wirth will be there, to lay out the Clinton administration's views. It won't be easy (or cheap) to launch a population-stabilization strategy that depends on educational equality and better economic opportunities for women. Much of the world continues to regard women as a servile class.
But the fate of most of the world may depend on pursuing just this strategy. For everyone's sake, as well as hers, it's time Rita went to school.
by CNB