PART THREE BEYOND THE DATA "The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity...it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition...of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy." ADAM SMITH, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 Need citation for Indira Gandhi quote. 1981 book? CHAPTER 35 THE FINANCES OF POPULATION CONTROL CHAPTER 35: TABLE OF CONTENTS Where Does the Big Money Come From? Conclusion The issue at stake in part III is simply this: Should United States government funds - and United Nations money, a large chunk of which is contributed by the U.S. - be used to finance propaganda and organizations dedicated to reducing fertility in the U.S. and abroad? The issue is not whether governments and organizations should make birth-control methods available freely. There is a wide consensus, in which I enthusiastically share, that access to birth- control methods is a basic right. Disseminating birth-control devices and information helps people attain the lives they wish by helping them control their family size; it is one of the great social works of our time. Rather, at issue is whether the power and funds of the government should be used to pay for campaigns that attempt to change people's desires for children, and their childbearing behavior. Until the late 1960s, U.S. federal policy was to avoid any involvement in birth control, and even to oppose it with laws against mailing contraceptives and birth-control information. Then the political climate began to change. And once the change began, it continued with such speed and intensity that it seems to have gotten beyond the control of the normal political process. More specifically, public funds are being spent to implement the values and beliefs of a sub-group (which may be the majority) of the U.S. population that believes population control in the U.S. and abroad is a good thing. And this apparently is done without the knowledge and approval of the public as a whole. It is not entirely farfetched to compare this operation to the CIA attempts in prior decades to assassinate leaders and other persons in countries with which the U.S. is at peace, without explicit approval of the American voters and taxpayers. Early in this century, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was thrown into jail for simply disseminating information about birth control. Much has changed since then. Now there are tens of organizations, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars annually, employing thousands of skilled people to prepare propaganda showing that population growth in the world ought to be reduced. In the single decade of the 1960s, the anti-natalists won power in the U.S. government and in such international organizations as the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the World Bank. There is almost no visible organized opposition to them except about abortion. And the prospect for organizing such opposition - as I can report from first-hand experience - is most unpromising. This chapter discusses the main financer behind these anti- natalist organizations: the U.S. State Department's Agency for International Development. Chapter 36 delves into the politics of these organizations, and how they are supported with your tax dollars. (The first edition gave budgets and other details, which the interested reader may consult, but the topic has grown too large to be treated here, and will have to await another book.) Chapters 37 and 38 discuss the dishonesty of their rhetoric. Those chapters do not discuss environmental organizations, though in the 1970s and 1980s they joined forces with the anti-population-growth organizations under the umbrella of the Global Tomorrow Coalition, and hence enormously multiplied the volume of population-control messages. (The enormous, and almost uncritical, popular acceptance of the environmental cause has increased the legitimacy and impact of these messages.) On the other hand, the number of respectable critics of population control grew enormously in the 1980s, both inside and outside academia, suggesting that the population-control message will have a less smooth ride in the future. WHERE DOES THE BIG MONEY COME FROM? The big money for world population activities comes from the U.S. (see the first edition, Table 21-1). Most of it is taxpayers' money, channeled from the U.S. State Department's Agency for International Development (AID) either directly to the recipients or through a wide variety of non-governmental agencies, some of which are discussed below. Much of this has been done deceptively, as will be discussed below, in support of secret population-control activities abroad, ostensibly for the self-interest of the U.S. Starting in 1965, AID worked up to well over $100 (?**) million a year in this activity. The money spent on population control has exceeded the worldwide health-related AID expenditures in total since 1969 (see figure 35-1). And in some years, expenditures on fertility reduction have been almost three times the expenditures on health assistance! (That's worth an exclamation point in my book.) Additional population-control funds come from the World Bank, which is largely funded by the U.S., and from the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), which also is heavily bankrolled by the U.S. Private sources - especially the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations - have given hundreds of millions of dollars and have worked closely with government agencies in this activity. FIGURE 35-1. AID Expenditures on Health and Population Programs Funds also come from more bizarre sources. ***xxx Abedi, the head of the criminal bank BCCI, gave $10 million to the Global 2000 movement through ex-President Jimmy Carter. This shows how trendy is the population-environment movement, and how tied it is to the political establishment. The population-control ideology and strategy ramified throughout the U. S. government in the early 1970s. A document prepared secretly by the National Security Council in 1974, and finally declassified in 1989 -- though with many pages still blacked out - made clear the basic assumption that "Rapid population growth adversely affects every aspect of economic and social progress in developing countries." This document is a master plan for having all the important agencies with a foreign-policy role - the State Department, the CIA, and the Department of Defense - mobilize their organizations toward the goal of population control. And they have continued to do so until the time of writing this second edition. A 1978 Comptroller General's report to Congress on AID's present and future activities set forth the U.S. and AID policies. Lest there be doubt that the official U.S. position is to actively attempt to reduce world population growth for its own self-interest, consider these excerpts: The short summary on the front cover says that AID programs aim to "slow rapid population growth in developing countries" in order "to achieve an acceptable stabilized world population." And elsewhere, "AID...views efforts to contain population growth as a part of its congressional mandate." The reasons given for these aims are the supposed ill consequences of population growth: Rapid population growth in developing countries seriously impedes the already difficult task of improving the lives of millions who live at or near subsistence levels. Population growth often: - Places additional burdens on food production. - Increases unemployment and migration to urban areas. - Places additional demands on inadequate health and educational services. - Encourages political and civil disorders. - Accelerates the use of natural resources. - Threatens the Earth's ability to support life. Population increases can also necessitate increased food imports and related debt increases. In parts of the developing world, declining agricultural productivity due to widespread slash-and-burn farming overgrazing, overcropping, excessive cutting of forests to provide fire wood and ground to cultivate, and the expansion of desert areas have also been attributed to population pressures. One recent report concluded that, unless there is some check on population growth "there ultimately is no solution to the world food problem." Earlier chapters show that there is no factual basis whatsoever for most of these AID assertions. And the U.S. clearly has gone far beyond simply offering other countries material and informational assistance in its euphemistically labeled "family planning programs." Official pronouncements have tried for political reasons to avoid a truthful statement of our intentions (see the following chapter), knowing that heavy-handed language would have repercussions unwelcome to them. But it is unmistakably clear that our official policy is to "contain population growth" in other countries by "motivational programs that would make families want fewer children," because it is thought to be in the U.S. self- interest. And it is justified by the now-discredited assertion that lowering population growth is important for economic development and environmental protection. The reach and detail extent of this 200 page NSC-AID blueprint is extraordinary, as is the degree of realization. It recommends "Utilization of Mass Media and Satellite Communications System for Family Planning," and some years the Office of Population of AID gave $10 million to fund research on audiences at Johns Hopkins University. Out of that grant came expenditures of $350,000 for a record album and tape on family planning intended for the Nigerian public, by a famous musician, King Sunny Ade. Another Johns Hopkins grant was $85,000 to the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria for a "music project." The NSC plan recommends additional funding of research by the Center for Population Research of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and AID, as well as other agencies, and those organizations awarded large sums of money to research that might show how to reduce fertility, and almost none at all to research that might show that the consequences of population growth are not a bad thing. Continuity of this basic policy through the 1970s and 1980s into the 1990s is shown by a General Accounting Office report which chides AID for losing sight of its mission to control population growth, saying Congress' policies and objectives for U.S. population assistance include the intention that the United States promote reductions in population growth rates and motivation of people to have smaller-size families. ... AID no longer initiates discussions on these matters with developing countries that are not already committed to population planning programs. AID then replied that it does indeed pursue that goal actively, saying, ... AID has also funded the production of print materials, including leaflets, booklets, posters, newsletters, and brochures. It has sponsored the development of other materials, such as family planning logos, billboards, T-shirts, calendars, and key chains, to inform and motivate the public acceptance of family planning. AID sponsored the production of professional entertainment music videos in Nigeria, Mexico, and the Philippines to promote messages of sexual responsibility and informed choice. According to AID, the videos became commercial hits and also encouraged increased support for family planning from the corporate commercial sectors. AID reports that broadcast companies in its host countries have donated millions of hours in radio and television air time. In the Philippines, market research on a youth-oriented communication campaign which uses music video reports that 92 percent of the survey respondents remembered the video. ... no family planning program in the developing world exists today that has not directly or indirectly benefited from A.I.D.'s effort. In short, the U.S. works surreptitiously to convince and coerce people in other countries to want and to produce the lower fertility that we think they ought to want. Consider, for example, this statement: "Since large numbers of children may be desired for a variety of reasons, including help in agriculture, support in old age, and status, elements of the socioeconomic milieu which encourage large families need to be changed." And this about Ivory Coast: AID informed the comptroller general that it planned to assign a full-time "population officer" to Abidjan in order to "help create awareness of the impact of population growth and foster greater private and government involvement in supplying family planning services." Translated from bureaucratese, AID intends to tell the Africans that they had better get cracking or else. And in many countries we have made our other development assistance contingent on their efforts to reduce population growth, by requiring a "development project population impact statement" before funding. In other words, if you want our money, you've got to have fewer children. AID even has a mechanism to "influence fertility through development in countries where it has no bilateral assistance programs." The device is to give money to international "private" organizations such as the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) and UNFPA and have them do the job. As a sample of these organizations, consider the first few alphabetically, with data on AID funding and staff size where available: Africare. Some or most funds from AID. No budget given, but $2 million project in Nigeria. Offices in Washington, D.C., and 15 African countries. Alan Guttmacher Institute. Some or most funds from AID. 1988 budget $3.9 million. Full time staff 60. Asia Foundation. 1988 budget unknown, but Bangladesh project has funds from AID of "more than $3 million". Other projects in "more than 20 countries". Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception (formerly Association for Voluntary Sterilization). "USAID now provides most of the funds". 1987--88 budget "over $16 million". 90 full time staff. Center for Population and Family Health, Columbia University. Some or most funds from AID. "Annual funding is $7 million." 100 full time staff. Center for Population Options. No funds from AID or other government sources mentioned. 1989 budget $1.94 million. Full time staff 30. Four organizations listed above employ a total of 280 people; the total staff employed by all 50 organizations surely totals in the many thousands. Most surely get funds from AID, and some get funds from UNFPA, which gets money from AID. [Do lots of cross refs in this chapter to Pop Matters.] Donald Warwick wrote at length about these activities. These are a few of his observations: International donors have had an incalculable effect on the origins, shape, and direction of population programs in the developing countries. Of all the spheres of national development, population has been the most donor driven. Governments do not usually have to be prodded hard to grow more food or to build more roads, but many had to be persuaded to act on population control. Toward that end, dozens of donors stepped in with grants, loans, scholarships, advisers, exhortations, backstage deals, and even clandestine interventions. The specific areas of donor impact included the initial idea that the country had a population problem -- something that was not evident to many governments; the precise definition given to that problem; the broad strategies used for dealing with the problem, such as voluntary family planning programs; the number, location, and organizational structure of population agencies; the strategies they followed in pursuing their mission, including the promotion of specific family planning methods or the use of targets; the kinds of personnel used at all levels; the level of commitment from top to bottom; the criteria used in judging programmatic success of failure; and the program's image in the country. Population donors differ greatly in their size, style, and impact. Some organizations, including the Agency for International Development and the Ford Foundation, were primary in almost all respects. Not only did they have a substantial direct impact through their own work in the developing countries, but they supported many other organizations as well. Others, such as CARE, worked mainly on other aspects of development but accepted funds for small programs related to population. Still others, mostly notably the Pathfinder Fund, were distinguished less by their size and funding power than by the speed and boldness of their initiatives abroad. ... AID was not timid about using its funding leverage to promote desired action by these recipients. A fourth component of AID's strategy was action through intermediaries. From its earliest days, the population unit saw the constraints on its own operations and the advantages of working through others. AID officials cited IPPF as particularly helpful in this regard. When the population unit could not, for political or bureaucratic reasons, enter a country, it could still channel funds through IPPF to the local family planning association. After the Helms amendment, which prohibited the use of AID funds for abortion, IPPF indirectly supported Ravenholt's desire for action on this front by distributing the vacuum aspirators developed by the agency. Because AID's contributions to IPPF were comingled with funds from other sources, IPPF could claim that AID money was not being used for abortion. Other organizations mentioned by AID officials as helpful to their mission were UNFPA, the Population Council, the Pathfinder Fund, the World Assembly of Youth, World Education, Inc., the Council on Social Work Education, the American Public Health Association, and the American Home Economics Association. But the most acute personal and moral dilemmas arose in India during the Emergency of 1975-7. Although the Government never gave formal approval to the use of coercion, Sanjay Gandhi and his associates capitalized on the political situation to force sterilization on unwilling people. Karan Singh, minister of health from 1973 through March 1977, defended the actions of his ministry but acknowledged that there were extraofficial signals from above: At no time was it the policy of the Ministry of Health or of the government that coercion should be used in the implementation of the programme. In fact several times I spoke personally with the concerned Ministers in various states urging them to ensure that coercion is not indulged in... It must, however, be admitted that an extra- constitutional centre of power and authority was operating at that time, and it was this phenomenon that was responsible for the unfortunate manner in which the programme was implemented in some states, causing anger and revulsion in the public mind. Some government workers were apparently told unofficially that their careers would depend on results with sterilization, and they acted accordingly. One indication of their effectiveness is that in the last year of the Emergency eight million sterilizations were performed. ... The Indian report states: Taking advantage of the special immunities and powers under the emergency, the bureaucracy went beyond the official policy framework and implemented the programme virtually as a compulsory programme... While officially, the government appeared to be slowing down with regard to mass sterilization camps, actually the bureaucracy was forcing it on the helpless, ordinary rural folk. The Main extraofficial source of pressure for results on sterilization was the five-point program of Sanjay Gandhi, the prime minister's son. One of these points was rapid action on family planning. 5 I base these observations not only on the sources mentioned but also on a dozen years of direct contacts with AID personnel in Washington and overseas missions, including two years as a contract employee in Peru. Peter Donaldson also described some of these activities: "Senior AID officials would include the Population Council on the distribution list for confidential material of the sort that the United States did not want officials of other governments to see. In 1969, for example, Rutherford Poats sent Bernard Berelson, president of the Population Council, a confidential AID report, noting that "in view of the lingering sensitivity to population planning in certain countries, I would appreciate your restricting the distribution of this message to your key professional staff (Poats to Berelson, November 17, 1969, 286-73A- 716)." "The AID administrator was asked to allow a grant to the International Planned Parenthood Federation "whereby AID and private IPPF funds would be co-mingled thereby freeing AID funds for wider use" (LA Population Officers' Conference, November 9-13, 1970, Panama City, Major Conclusions and Actions; Minutes, 286-73A-474). "The official worry about too visible a U.S. government involvement in international population control activities, and AID's readiness to take a back seat to private-sector groups, were at times very widespread. In a typical example, a comic book dealing with population, El Doble Dilema (The double dilemma), produced by the United States Information Agency and sent to all AID missions in Latin America, was not attributed to the U.S. government; instead, "space on the backcover can be used for attribution to local organization if desirable" (AID circular A2353, October 30, 1969, no source)." "...we channel our aid wherever possible through private intermediaries such as the International Planned Parenthood [Federation], Pathfinder Fund, Population Council and local private organizations and through international agencies such as the United Nations.... They cautioned especially against implying that the U.S. government has a population program for Latin America...." "Leona Baumgartner, who played a crucial role in encouraging AID's nascent interest in the problem of rapid population growth as agency assistant administrator between 1962 and 1965, concluded that Ravenholt and AID were frequently too aggressive: "I think if we hadn't pushed as hard, there would have been better success.... Take India ... he pushed for sterilization ... all those camps all over ... My God, they were horrible. I think he pushed too fast, too hard" (author's interview). David Bell, AID administrator during the program's early days, sounds a similar theme: "If we had found a strong person, but one who would have developed a much broader and a more effective program ... the world would be better off, AID would be better off, and all these millions of dollars would have been better spent." "...Anibal Faundes, who has worked throughout Latin America for the Population Council and the United Nations. Faundes's impression of the American organizations supported by AID is that "their common characteristic is to give money to individuals ready to receive it as a payment for saying yes to whatever proposal idealized in the States is offered to them" (Faundes to Donaldson, August 20, 1979)." "The United States and other governments have recognized that the United Nations and its specialized agencies--particularly the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), and the various international meetings that these groups sponsor--are crucial sources for legitimation of a type that eases the potential negative consequences of developed-country involvement in developing-country population activities. The endorsement of the United Nations can be used to justify countries' becoming involved in their own and others' population problems." "The U.N. Fund for Population Activities became a major recipient of AID Office of Population support and provided a useful way of allowing AID to undertake programs that would otherwise have been more difficult, if not impossible. Ravenholt used UNFPA when other more straightforward channels of assistance were not appropriate." A bizarre but revealing episode began with a speech by R. T. Ravenholt (for many years the head man in AID's population program) concerning a program for foreign doctors at Washington University in St. Louis. The news story was headlined "Population Control of Third World Planned: Sterilization Storm in U.S.," in a Dublin (Ireland) newspaper where I saw it; the account went as follows. In what must be this year's prize-winning entry for reckless candour in public places, a senior State Department official has said the U.S.is seeking to provide the means to sterilize a quarter of all Third World women, in part to protect the interests of American business overseas. The official is Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, Director of the U.S. Office of Population.... Population control, said Dr. Ravenhol 21/ 12-9-2 page# \ultres\ tchar35\ February 3, 1994