fm48 = Immigration and the environment: is Australia overpopulated?

By Reihana Mohideen

The long-held image of Australia has been that of a sparsely populated country rich in resources. But in the context of a global ecological crisis, concerns are being voiced about Australia’s population “carrying capacity”. Sections of the environment movement argue that to achieve ecological sustainability in Australia, there have to be immediate measures to limit increases in population.

The argument that the sheer growth in human numbers is destroying the planet is rooted in the biological concept of the carrying capacity of local environments. The term was originally used to refer to the population density of a given species that a natural habitat such as a fishery or grassland could sustain indefinitely.

While populationists such as US academic Paul Ehrlich acknowledge that human beings, unlike other animals, are capable of significantly changing their living environment, they still argue that the carrying capacity concept is relevant to looking at a society at a given point in history.

The problem, however, is that this concept does not give adequate weight to socioeconomic factors, such as land tenureship patterns and available technologies, that exert a major influence over the size of population that an agricultural region can support.

In Brazil, for instance, 2% of landowners own 60% of the land. Vast tracts of fertile land held by large landowners in north-eastern Pernambuco state lie idle, while peasants farm plots too small to feed themselves and their families. Overfarming small plots exhausts the soil, prompting increasing numbers of peasants to migrate to Amazonia to carve new farmland from the tropical forests. As this pattern continues, ever larger portions of forest are destroyed.

The problem is not that Brazil’s “carrying capacity” has been exceeded, but lack of access due to the land tenureship system. There is a similar pattern in most other Third World countries, which supposedly have large “surplus” rural populations.

Given fixed, highly inequitable social structures, virtually any size of population appears “too large” for its environment.

Another central assumption of the carrying capacity thesis is that a given population should obtain most or all of its food and natural resources from its local environment by ecologically sustainable methods.

This notion is archaic even so far as national economies are concerned, and is still more so when the vast, interdependent world economy is considered. No human population, except for a few isolated indigenous tribes, depends entirely on its local environment to meet all its needs. A range of commodities are universally traded.

It may make good economic sense to attempt to meet most basic food needs from local sources — thus assuring uninterrupted supply, lower transportation costs and so forth. But failure to do so does not prove that a region or country is overpopulated. Japan is an obvious example of an advanced economy relying heavily on world markets to meet its food and resource needs.

While the assumption that poverty is a product of overpopulation may hold sway in popular consciousness, and is actively peddled by the governments of the Western capitalist nations, there is plenty of evidence to show otherwise.

Cuba, which leads the Third World in life expectancy, low infant mortality rates and good nutrition, has a population density similar to Mexico’s, where acute poverty is rampant. China has only half as much cropped land per person as India, yet Indians suffer widespread hunger while the Chinese do not. This is because both Cuba and China have, to varying degrees, addressed the socioeconomic roots of the causes of poverty and have opened opportunities to women outside the home.

In a 1986 report on Our Common Future, the UN World Commission on Environment and Development reached the conclusion that “Growth in world cereal production has steadily outstripped world population growth” and that the problem of hunger flowed from the unequal access to resources.

Moreover, in Third World countries where population growth has been reduced, there is no evidence of a corresponding reduction in poverty. In Mexico, despite a 37% decline in fertility rates since the 1960s, there is little evidence that the people are less hungry.

Ignoring the social roots of hunger while trying to reduce birth rates almost inevitably leads to more coercive birth control programs that jeopardise people’s health and self-determination. The Indian government’s major birth control program of the late ’70s led to civil servants being financially penalised for not meeting specified targets and parents with three or more children who didn’t undergo sterilisation being denied food rations and free medical treatment in government hospitals.

One of the most universally observed social phenomena of modern times is the fact that low birth and death rates are results of urbanisation, adequate nutrition, improved health, education and social services and a higher social status for women, all of which accompany industrialisation. The inability of most Third World countries to achieve such development is a result of the imposition, through colonialism and postwar neo-colonialism, of a pattern of development that treats these countries as sources of cheap labour, natural resources, markets and profits for monopoly corporations of the industrialised countries.

Putting population at the centre of an analysis of environmental destruction diverts attention from the socioeconomic framework in damage has arisen.

The population theory is more than simply wrong. The idea that there are too many people in the world and that it would be good if there were fewer tends to devalue human life. Our world appears to be blighted by a “plague” of people, tolerance ebbs, and we confront one another with the fear and hostility of survivalists. Xenophobia grows.

So we have US biologists such as Garrett Hardin counselling against famine relief so that starvation, “nature’s last and most terrible remedy”, can reduce the population to carrying capacity, and sections of the Earth First movement hailing the AIDS epidemic as a potentially providential population control mechanism.

While the Ehrlichs concede that many Western economies have reduced the rate of their population growth over the past decades, they argue that further reduction in population is necessary, given the disproportionate consumption of the world’s resources by these societies. Hence they argue that migration to the “first world” must be reduced if immigrants are from the poorer countries.

In their book The Population Explosion, the Ehrlichs state: “To the degree that immigrants adopt the lifestyles of their adopted countries, they will begin consuming more resources per person and to do disproportionate environmental damage. Net immigration to rich countries is the rough equivalent of natural population increase in those nations.”

So the salvation of the world’s environment to the Ehrlichs is explicitly linked to policies which restrict immigration to countries such as Australia, for in the zero population growth environment, “every immigrant admitted must be compensated for by a birth foregone”, as The Population Explosion puts it.

Similar views have been articulated in Australia by a range of different groups. This includes some with openly racist motives, such as Australians Against Immigration, but also involves others whose concerns are environmental, such as Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population and Writers for an Ecologically Sustainable Population. Sections of the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Democrats also support this view.

How many people can the continent support? The estimates range from only 10 million (Paul Ehrlich) to 480 million (in a pre-World War II discussion of population). There is no generally accepted scientific answer — precisely because the question is primarily social, not scientific.

A simple assertion that Australia is already overpopulated in environmental terms is not convincing in a country which is one of the least densely populated countries on earth, with a 1989 population density of 22 people per thousand hectares. For the world as a whole, the corresponding figure is 395, while the averages for Europe and the United States are 1052 and 269 respectively (and for South America aggregate figures alone suggests that Australia is a vast “underpopulated” nation.

Admittedly, large areas of Australia cannot support more than a very sparse population with any foreseeable technologies. This is one of the reasons that Australia is one of the most highly urbanised of all societies. According to 1990 figures about 85.5% of the population live in urban areas. The average European figure is 72.8%; in the US and Canada it is 74.1% and 76.3% respectively.

On the basis of these figures, if population were a principal problem for the environment, then the main environmental problems in Australia would be related to the urban environment. But some of the major ecological problems are non-urban: soil degradation, forest destruction, water pollution and extinction of plant and animal species. The link between population growth and these ecological problems is by no means a simple and direct one.

It might be thought, for example, that soil erosion is a product of producing food for too many Australians. But in fact, over 70% of all Australian agricultural production is for export, as is nearly all the wool produced. The state of the land resource base in Australia is largely determined by the overseas market, not by immigration and the consequent size of the Australian population.

Moreover, soil degradation is directly related to fossil-fuel-based agricultural techniques, which are heavily dependent on manufactured chemicals. The cost of replacing nutrients is estimated to be, in a number of cases, well in excess of the short-term productive value of the land.

In an agricultural economy oriented to profit rather than social needs, the imperative is to continue to produce in this destructive fashion. The big agribusiness monopolies (four companies dominating 43% of the domestic market for pesticides and 44% of the agricultural machinery market) dictate this type of production.

Therefore to simply equate soil degradation with population is to ignore the real nature of the problem. There are far more important technological, economic and other social factors that should be taken into account. This is true of virtually all environmental problems.

In the area of non-renewable resources, Australian oil reserves are expected to be exhausted by the year 2021. Oil accounts for some 40% of Australia’s energy supplies. But what about solar power? The answer to the world’s energy crisis is sitting there, waiting to be hooked up — no resource depletion, no greenhouse effect and an endless supply of the two main ingredients, sunlight and sand.

Scientists at the University of New South Wales (the “Green Team”, the university’s solar research unit, along with Stanford University in the US, are front-runners in solar energy research), have pointed out that in 1990 the world used up some 30 billion barrels of oil. Existing low-yield solar cells over 1% of the world’s land the same amount of energy. An area the size of the ACT would provide Australia’s entire domestic needs.

What’s holding things up? Vested interests in fossil fuels. The big oil companies, and the governments which back them, prevent adequate resources being allocated for solar energy research.

A standard argument against solar energy is that its “commercial efficiency” is low. But the social overheads of acid rain, polluted farms and livestock, poisoned lakes and rivers and productive areas laid waste are not costed into the use of fossil fuels.

So it’s profitable for companies to continue their destructive practices, which are tacitly backed by governments which impose little or no penalties on the major polluters. Again, the problem is one of social relations, not too many people.

Australia’s environmental problems should be seen in a global context. It is highly unlikely that population growth in Australia will have a major international environmental impact: according to World Resources Institute figures, in the year 2025 the Australian population will be 22.6 million out of a world population of 8.2 billion, ie about one-third of 1%.

Migration distributes, rather than adding to, an increase in world population. While some may rather callously argue that Third World migrants’ increased consumption patterns will add to ecological problems, a counterargument would be that migrants will adopt lifestyles which include the lower population growth rates of the societies that they emigrate to.

Neither will we solve the environmental crisis by cutting ourselves off from it — there is no escaping from the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer into a zero population growth nirvana. And if you adopt such an approach, where do you draw the line? Why limit it to Australia? Why not retreat even further, say into Tasmania?

That may sound like unfair caricature — but some in the green movement actually put forward this bizarre option. An article in the September issue of the Daily Planet, the newsletter of the Tasmanian Green Independents, argues that Tasmanian population growth should be discouraged “by discouraging immigration by keeping Tasmanian incomes lower than the rest of the nation … Secession from the Commonwealth is another possibility to allow Tasmania to establish immigration controls.” What next — King Island?

An anti-immigration position also has serious consequences for such basic democratic rights, as the right to live where one chooses. Of course, giving people the formal right to do so doesn’t mean that a majority of people have the necessary means to exercise that right. It’s highly unlikely that the masses of the Third World will make a beeline to Australia if immigration controls are relaxed (as some in the green movement imply). But having that formal right is nevertheless important.

The question is also posed: if you prevent people from immigrating, shouldn’t they also be prevented from emigrating? Should Australians be allowed to emigrate to other countries with higher population densities, such as the USA, Britain and Europe?

Finally, green opponents of immigration must come to terms with the fact that their positions give a legitimacy, from a more progressive sector of politics, to the racist anti-immigration viewpoint. Racism and anti-Asian xenophobia have characterised Australian history from the beginnings of the modern Australian nation based on the brutal suppression and dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples. For over 100 years, until it was formally buried in 1972, the white Australia policy was the basic tenet of immigration policy. Racism, prejudice and xenophobia still persist in contemporary Australia.

Recent events in France and Germany, where racist violence against migrants is on the increase, sound a warning for us in this country. To blame immigration for a complex problem like the environment has the same logic as blaming it for other problems: the recession, unemployment, crime or whatever. It is hard to prevent a slide from an anti-immigration to an anti-immigrant argument.

A progressive green position is not a matter of advocating immigration, but of supporting a non-discriminatory and humanitarian immigration policy. Any movement that claims to put forward a new politics must campaign strongly against all antisocial views: racism, sexism, homophobia etc.

Most importantly, what would characterise a new politics in the West would be support for Third World political movements that aim to empower the mass of the dispossessed and take measures to genuinely improve their living standards. For those living in countries such as Australia this usually means campaigning against our government’s efforts to block such social change.

While it is true that the Earth’s human population cannot continue growing indefinitely at its present rate, and measures must be taken to achieve a stable or even declining population, the populationists overlook the main means of accomplishing this: secure living standards for all.

The populationists’ approach is a dead end for the environmental movement. It won’t solve any of our immediate ecological problems in the short term, and it directs attention away from the responsibility of the international system of production for profit as the root cause of rapid population growth, poverty and environmental degradation.