This article by Simon Gear first appeared on the MoneySmart website (www.moneysmart.co.za) in Jan 2012.

I’m always interested by the overpopulation crowd.  For reasons that I have never fully understood, every person who comes up to me after a presentation to pitch the idea that human population is the root of all environmental evil will always preface their insight with, “I know it’s taboo to talk about this but…”

Taboo!?  How so?  Unless people are far, far more prudish than I could think possible, I can’t see how speaking about overpopulation should be taboo at all.  I also can’t help but notice that the people most concerned about overpopulation generally seem agreed that it is ‘other people’ who are the problem.  Specifically, other poor people.  I have yet to hear anyone say, “There are too many of my family on the planet.”

For us to be really honest about overpopulation, we need to be clear about which problem we are talking about. Generally, population growth rates in poor countries are primarily a social problem.  There is an environmental angle as well, but first and foremost, more kids to a poor, rural teenager means another generation of badly educated, malnourished and socio-economically outcast wretches.  Fewer kids to the same girl means each child has a better chance at getting a share of a meagre pie.

More kids to your suburban middle class family doesn’t have much of a human impact at all.  So, you’ll have to work a bit harder to foot the grocery bill and buy a bigger car, but your quality of life is unlikely to change much.  The environmental impact, however, is enormous.  Because the problem is not actually overpopulation at all.  The problem is consumption. And middle class folk like you and I eat and burn and drink and flush way more than our fair share of the earth’s resources.

So what to do?  Should middle-class, northern suburb types be worried about population?  Yes, we absolutely should.  But it is our own numbers that we should be beefing about.  In truth, the only strategy that helps developing countries to get a handle on their growing population is female empowerment.  Once your nation’s girls are better educated and more employable, they start having fewer children.  Population is a result of (and a catalyst for) other problems, but it is not a problem in its own right.  Fix education and the population issue will fix itself.

The nice thing about this is that it works on all scales from the individual up to the society.  Want to buffer your domestic worker from the indignity of a retirement spent looking after grandchildren in rural Limpopo while her own children struggle for minimum wage in town? Help her educate her kids.

For you and I, what is required is a bit of honesty.  Do I think that having three kids is selfish?  I am afraid I do.  “Two kids and the snip” should be the motto we rally behind. If you’re desperate to fill your house with armies of little darlings, there is a tragic oversupply of orphans in South Africa, desperate for a home. In the same way that too many kids is one of the more mindlessly damaging things we do, stepping up to the plate to raise someone else’s unwanted child is the most heroic.

South Africa needs more middle class people, but we need to get them by raising up our poor, not by making more of the rich.