CIA's 'Global Drivers'
Population Tops the List

Every minute, 380 women get pregnant. Every minute, one woman dies.
So say running headlines on a web page devoted to a far-reaching multi-agency programme called the Safe Motherhood Initiative. It is a project of the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, World Health Organisation, and a collection of assorted UN groups and others funded mainly by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Safe Motherhood consortium held a one-day seminar in Washington in early January, devoted in large part to lobbying for more money to expand their operations.
Thats where the one death per minute comes in handy. Virtually all of the private groups working under the Safe Motherhood umbrella have contracts with USAIDs population office. If the idea of population control turns people off, the prevention that one death can be used in its place. Contraceptives do not cure malaria, of course, nor are they of any assistance in case of famine, dysentery, snakebite, or war. But when it comes to gaining public approval and legislative favour, wrapping birth control in the rhetoric of child survival and healthy mothers is good business.
Safe Motherhood affiliates were not the only ones lobbying for population money as the country prepared for the big leadership change on 20 January. Another pitch for population programmes comes from the Central Intelligence Agency. In a lengthy and unclassified document called Global Trends 2015, the CIAs National Intelligence Council examines seven factors called global drivers that are likely to shape the world of tomorrow. The most important of these are technology, natural resources, and population. Population appears at the top of the list.
Unclassified documents from the CIA often contain information dramatically different from their classified counterparts. In fact, one might be tempted to call this one a 50-plus-page press release. Still, it is not lacking in useful observations.
World population, says the CIA, is expected to increase from 6.1 billion to 7.2 billion by the year 2015, with more than 95 percent of the growth occurring in developing nations. Over the same period of time, the study adds, most western nations will see a substantial decline in the number of productive workers available to sustain their economies.
Even as these changes sap the potency of the west, other nations are sure to rise. China, for instance, has proven politically resilient, according to the document. It adds that China has been increasingly assertive in positioning itself for a leadership role in East Asia, and has enhanced its capability to constrain U.S. power in the region.
Perhaps even more important will be India. The size of its population 1.2 billion by 2015 and its technologically driven economic growth virtually dictate that India will be a rising regional power.
Along with these changes in the characteristics and concentration of global population will likely come new patterns in the distribution of resources and technology. The intelligence estimate notes, for example, that by the year 2015 the bulk of Middle Eastern oil will go to the rising Asian markets with a mere ten per cent directed to western countries. The Agency acknowledges that while energy demands will rise significantly, the vast majority of energy resources, including 95 percent of gas, still remains underground. Nonetheless, it adds, a major disruption in global energy, something that might result from future terrorist actions, would have a devastating effect.
Those nations that have high birthrates will not only gain in sheer numbers, but will have the additional advantage of youthful populations. Indeed, many of these young people are likely to live in urban centers, says the CIA, where they will be both connected to technology and exposed to political or religious radicalism.
Even more ominously, the Intelligence Council warns, Disaffected states, terrorists [and other enemies] will take advantage of the new high-speed information environment and other advances in technology to ... compound their threat to stability and security around the world, while adversaries will try to circumvent or minimise U.S. strengths and exploit perceived weakness. The study concludes, however, that technology will be less important to the equation than population growth. Technology will court for less, it asserts, and large, youthful and motivated populations for more.
Further, says the report, adversaries are likely to multiply with the growth of population and communications media in developing countries, thus ensuring that the United States will be faced with increasing political ... ideological, and religious extremism in the next decade the result of growing resentment over U.S. hegemony. As a result, say the intelligence analysts, diplomacy will become more complicated, and Washington will have great difficulty harnessing its power to achieve specific foreign policy goals.
Indeed, among all developing regions, only parts of Africa are exempt from the CIAs predictions. In fact, the paper includes a statement that population decline is probable in many parts of the continent, particularly those countries having high rates of AIDS.
While the rest of the developing world gains rapidly on the west, both in terms of economic activity and communications technology, the established great powers will be in the process of gradual deterioration.
The CIA paper insists, for example, that in western nations as well as some emerging countries, declining birthrates and aging will combine to increase health care and pension costs while reducing the relative size of the working population, straining the social contract, and leaving significant shortfalls in the size and capacity of the work force.
Specifically, say the analysts, Europes agenda will require it to demonstrate influence in world affairs commensurate with its size in population and economic strength. And if European population continues its downward trend, the west faces a certain crisis. European and Japanese populations are aging rapidly, requiring more than 110 million new workers by 2015 to maintain current dependency ratios between the working population and retirees, the document says. If growth in Europe and Japan falters, the economic burden on the U.S. economic would increase, weakening the overall global outlook.
One set of alternatives to the demographic anaemia facing the west involves policies to rapidly increase birth rates in low-fertility societies (something the report scarcely touches) and meeting workforce demands by opening borders to migrants from less-developed regions.
But migration brings another set of problems. For one thing, it would create within the recipient nations influential diasporas, affecting policies, politics, and even national identity in many countries, according to the CIAs analysts. In other words, should Arabs, Africans, and Asians enter the European workforce in numbers large enough to offset the anticipated work force deficit, they may well retain their old country loyalties, effectively demanding international policies favourable to their home countries.
Still more troublesome, say the agencys experts, is the potential for large numbers of foreign immigrants to disrupt the racial and cultural balance in western societies. The study points out that migrants already account for over 15 per cent of the population in more than 50 countries. These numbers will grow substantially, the CIA predicts, and will increase social and political tension and perhaps alter national identities even as they contribute to demographic and economic dynamism.
The CIAs theory about population change and migration also holds that, by 2015, ethnic heterogeneity will increase in almost all states as a result of international migration and divergent birthrates of migrants and native populations.
In other words, friction will grow between the native populations of the advanced countries and the large numbers of immigrants that the CIA sees as necessary to fill the labour gap left by diminished fertility. And conflict will be intensified because of the higher birth rate of the non-white newcomers.
The CIA is not alone in making these observations. In fact, the debate over global population control is being transformed by mounting public awareness of the fact that wealthy nations are endangered by the absence of population growth.
One columnist, writing in the Washington Times in mid-January, commented that the real threat to conservative, nationalistic movements in the U.S. is that vast unrestricted immigration from Third World countries that is lessening the value of the white vote. If nothing is done to stop immigration, the writer concluded, whites will become a minority of American voters.
Several racist web pages feature an article called The Dwindling Minority, which claims that brown and black populations are growing at an increasing rate while white populations nearly everywhere are at best static. The commentary, titled Programme of the National Alliance, advocates a scheme to reverse non-white population growth quickly. Non-white populations, it boasts, have no ability to counter such measures, militarily or otherwise.
Western civilisation is rushing towards death, begins a similar essay distributed by the right-wing British National Party in July of 1995. Unless we procreate we disintegrate, says author Richard White in an article still available on the internet (www.bnp.to/spear1~3.htm). The writer cites Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa as formidable examples of how differential rates of population growth can upset power structures:
White populations in both cases were small, and had no hope of overcoming the one man one vote offensive. Consequently they collapsed. The Israelis, in stark contrast, prove far more pragmatic. All along, they ensured that the number of Jews in Palestine greatly exceeded the number of Arabs... There is much to be learned from this ... and utilised for the benefit of our own people.
While these openly racist invectives seem to confirm the opinions expressed in the CIAs 2015 projections, the latter does not directly call for specific birth control activities. It concentrates instead on the perils of not doing so, leaving programme advocacy contraceptives to the non-governmental organisations (or NGOs) that receive government funds for carrying out such missions.
Indeed, the CIA paper makes some interesting statements with regard to the use of NGOs in pursuit of western interests in the developing world.
NGOs, it says, deliver critical services to individuals and private groups, with 67 percent of nonprofit activities in health, education, and social services alone. They provide information and expertise, advocate policies on behalf of their interests, and work through international organisations, both as implementing partners and as advocates.
Even more interesting is the paragraph that follows: Nonprofit organisations will have more resources to expand their activities and will become more confident of their power and more confrontational, the CIA promises. And they will also move beyond delivering services to the design and implementation of policies, whether as partners or competitors with corporations and governments.
Moreover, the intelligence briefing notes that the UN and the old powers are likely to depend more and more on such surrogate civil society organisations where there is political controversy or when they might otherwise wish to minimise their direct involvement. Even so, it concludes, many developing countries ... will tend to view [NGO] interventions as dangerous precedents challenging state sovereignty.
This tactic, of course, is how the U.S. intelligence community has always pursued its sensitive missions abroad through proxies and front groups, institutions set up to funnel money to collaborators, with still more groups setting up programmes, influencing policy decisions, and creating constituencies for western ideologies.
In many ways, however, the most important assignment given to the governments population contractors is to devise a palatable justification for their goals. And its far easier to sell people on Safe Motherhood than to propose coercive limits on births.
It is highly unlikely that the Safe Motherhood Initiative will have an impact on those women who die at the rate of one per minute. But the 380 women who become pregnant in the time span can, without a doubt, expect a lot of unwanted attention

Click here to read the CIA report

The Myth of Planetary Overpopulation

(1) No more than 1-3% of the Earth's ice-free land area is occupied by humans.

(2) Less than 11% of the Earth's ice-free land area is used for agriculture.

(3) Somewhere between 8 and 22 times the current world population could support itself at the present standard of living, using present technology.

(4) This leaves 50% of the Earth's land surface open to wildlife and conservation areas.

The lower limit of 8 times the current population (about 44 billion) has been considered as being perfectly workable. According to Dr. Kasun, "better yields and/or the use of a larger share of the land area would support over 40 billion persons." Former Harvard Center for Population Studies Director Roger Revelle estimated that the agricultural resources of the world were capable of providing an adequate diet (2,500 kilocalories per day) for 40 billion people, and that it would require the use of less than 25% of the Earth's ice-free land area. Revelle estimated that the less-developed continents were capable of feeding 18 billion people, and that Africa alone was capable of feeding 10 billion people, or twice the current world population, and more than 12 times the 1990 population of Africa.

In addition to the fact that many new strains of food have been developed that can boost food production, there are other indications that food would not be a problem. In the September 1976 issue of Scientific American, Dr. David Hopper asserted that the worlds "food problem" does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the environment. The limitations on abundance are to be found in social and political structures of nations and the economic relations between them. In fact the planet, during its least populous years, suffered from hunger and famine. It was only when state political controls receded in the late 19th century that hunger also began to recede. With the rise of Communism, welfare states, fascism and international corporate capitalism (all forms of Darwinist Socialism), many of the destructive controls preventing adequate growth and distribution of resources returned. Since absolute cooperation and free-market planetary economic is counterproductive to global socialist and capitalist goals, it is quite apparent that the myth of overpopulation is a form of attack on this same free market, even though no more lawlessness and evil use of men and materials exists than under Socialism.

It is curious that many densely populated countries with relatively free economies are thriving, and are seldom mentioned in the "over-population" debate, while sparsely populated nations with oppressive governments are "plagued with problems relating to population." Taiwan, with a population density of five times that of China, produces 20 times as much Gross National Product than China. Similarly, Singapore, with a density of 11,910 per square mile, enjoys a per capita GNP of $8,782, while Ethiopia, with a density of 101 per square mile, has a per capita GNP of $121. The real problem is that big government is the greatest obstacle to the social advancement of the human race.