The Population Threat
Article Summary and Author Biography
When the global rate of population growth accelerated and reached an all-time high in the 1960s, the United States established foreign population assistance. In the 1980s, as ideological forces came into play, Washington reversed its position and forfeited its commanding role. The United States needs now to recapture its leadership role on population issues; a "continuation of this self-inflicted blindness to demographic insights is increasingly dangerous for U.S. foreign policy.
Michael S. Teitelbaum is with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City. This article draws on contributions by members of the Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on Population and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Stemming Fertility Rates and Migration Flows
THE CLINTON administration can ill-afford to ignore international population trends as it begins to formulate its key foreign policy initiatives. A decade ago the U.S. government performed an extraordinary about-face on this subject, and since then has paid insufficient heed to two increasingly salient sets of demographic issues: the need to forge a balanced and effective foreign assistance program aimed at moderating high fertility rates in the developing world; and the need for better monitoring of disturbingly large migration flows stemming from demographic/ethnic-based disputes.
During the 1980s the United States forfeited operational leadership on a major world issue that it had earlier pioneered. Just as most of the rest of the world was coming belatedly to embrace long-standing American urgings for concerted international attention to population issues, the U.S. government became conspicuous in downplaying the need for such attention.
Fortunately 1993 offers the opportunity for at least three important changes. With Bill Clinton as president, we can expect waning influence for the fringe groups that have been allowed to control population issues for the past decade. Moreover one may hope that the new administration will honor the promise in its campaign book, Putting People First, to "restore U.S. funding for the United Nations population stabilization efforts," in spite of calls by some for deep reductions in U.S. foreign assistance. Finally the disturbing mass migrations produced by recent crises in the Persian Gulf and in Yugoslavia have provided overwhelming evidence of the need for serious demographic foresight and assessment. Such efforts should include appropriate contingency planning aimed at moderating political and ethnic clashes (in the Middle East, in eastern Europe, in the former U.S.S.R.) that have the potential of producing disturbingly large migration flows of desperate people in very short order.
Unprecendented Population Growth
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