Attempts to Control Population Growth Are Ineffective

During the Baby Boom of 1960s there was an exponentially rise in population going from 2.5 billion to 6.1 billion in just 50 years, from then on it was clear that population control would be on the forefront of government agenda’s worldwide. Population has a direct impact on the economy, providing services and the usage of scare resources. Governments therefore attempt to control population numbers. There are contrasting strategies depending on whether the country wishes to increase its population size or whether to limit it. With the two polices being pro-natalist which attitude encourages childbearing and anti-natalist which does not.
Firstly, I will discuss ineffective population policies that governments have put in place, yet have ultimately failed to control the population in its chosen direction. For instances, Singapore, between 1960s and 70s had an anti-natalist policy in place. However, as economic prospered and population growth rate fell, it adopted a pro-natalist policy the target set at increasing population by 40% in 40 years. With a replacement rate of only 1.006 in 1975 action was needed. It introduced many campaigns that aimed to promote marriage; in this case incentives such as ‘love cruises’ and cash incentives to families that have 3 or more children. In addition subsides were also put on baby caring products such as baby milk and primary schooling. Despite all this effort Singapore government found it difficult to raise the population growth. Although the number of marriages increased, the birth rate did not rise and sat at 7.72/1000. Another policy that has had limited success is that of Indian anti-natalist policy. India's population is estimated to be around one billion; India has one of the highest population growth rates in the world at 1.4%. Its main source of lowering the birth-rate was through investing in population education and family planning (increase usage of contraception). In spite of this India still have a very high growth rate and look to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2030, result shown that in 2001 India grew by 180 million people; more than the population of Brazil. Furthermore the policy has also caused many unwanted side effects. These two policies are therefore by some extent proving the statement is in fact true.
On the other hand, there have been some effective policies that have been very beneficial to the government’s aim of controlling their population. To illustrate this would be the world’s most serve and controversial family planning programme: China’s One Child anti-natalist Policy. Introduced in 1979 the impact was dramatic with the birth-rate falling from 33% in 1970 to 17% in 1979. The policy was that families in urban areas were by law only allowed one child; however there were some means to which this could be broken. Those who violate the policy would face fines of around $15,000 a huge sum for the average earner in China. The birth-rate as of now is 12.31/1000 with the birth-rate in 1980 21.04/1000 showing clear evidence of the drop. China is expected to reach a 0 population growth by 2050 making this policy achieve its original aims of lowering the birth-rate of china in 50 years to 10/1000. In this event this disproves the statement and shows that China was able to affect their population growth in their favour. An additional policy that was in some way effective in controlling the population of that nation would be that of Romanian’s pro-natalist policy introduced in 1966. Romania had a decreasing birth-rate at the time and a rather high child mortality of 72.20 with 60 % of pregnancies resulted in abortions or infant mortality. Romania started banning abortions, also contraception was taken off the market and only available through the black market. Those not married by the age of 25 are faced to pay 8-10% extra penalty taxes, with the legal age of marriage going down from 18 to 15. The pronatalist policy succeeded to a great extent in its first year mainly due to there being police in clinic to assure that doctors would not conduct illegal abortions the population increased from 2,73,687 to 5,27,764 in just one year. After the first year it started to fail again because the police were sent back to their normal jobs and doctors started to perform illegal abortions. With the policy falling to the back pages of the newspapers and the government’s files. Nevertheless, the huge change in population size visibly shows the success of the policy.
On the whole it is clear that not all policies are flawless and work. At the end of the day it comes down to how strict and forceful the government is going to be in its rulings, and that how much commitment it is willing to put into the case. Furthermore, something that must be noted is that not all countries have the finical access that other nations have. China had a huge budge to implement their policy while the majority of countries that face a rising population are LEDCs and hence lack the capital and this customarily leads to a failed policy. Moreover, a system that I have not noted is one of using migration to control a population size for instances USA which implements strict border regulations to control its population numbers, controlling migration would be a better solution for countries that are strongly influences by religion or one that is strongly democratic. In addition policies normally lead to many negative side effects such as gender inequality in China, and although the population size may be brought to the level in which the government wants is it right to call the population policy effective if it consequently creates so many other damaging issues. In the words of Noam Chomsky ‘You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by its consumption’.