David Attenborough - eugenicist

****

I was very tempted to title this comment "David Attenborough - fascist" but people might misunderstand my point. Others - via the fine medium of Twitter suggested: "David Attenborough - fabian" in recognition of all those social democrats and pseudo-liberals (and apologists for mass murderers) like Sidney & Beatrice Webb, G B Shaw, H G Wells and J M Keynes who were in favour of government intervention to stop the masses from breeding.

However, I thing that "David Attenborough - eugenicist" will suffice for that is what he is:

"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so,” warns David Attenborough in an interview in the new issue of Radio Times magazine. “It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde,” says the natural history broadcaster.

And it's not us Western white folk - we're fine (or more pertinently failing to meet replacement levels meaning, but for immigration, negative population growth). It the huddled masses in Africa:

“We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.”

 A less kind blogger might sniff a little racism there!

Now David Attenborough - along with the other posh eugenicists in organisations like Friends of the Earth and the Green Party - has a pretty loose association with actual facts about population and indeed about famine in Ethiopia - true there are food shortages most years in this country but no objective observer - or even the development industry - identifies population pressures as the cause.

The real problem for nasty eugenicists like Attenborough is that economic growth, trade and open markets - by making us richer - are the means to 'control' population. Coupled with sending women to school rather than to arranged marriages. Here are the facts that the eugenicists ignore:

...in the next few years (if it hasn't happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country's population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000-05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India.

Attenborough and his posh eugenicist mates can sod off. Humankind doesn't need him to sort its population growth - getting richer and better educated is doing the job just fine.

....

Why we should question the value of bilateral aid

I’ve always believed in the value of international aid, that it is right that wealthy nations should assist less wealthy countries. I absolutely believe that, most of the time, governments are better placed to provide emergency assistance than private individuals or private organisations.

However, the problem with bilateral aid – where country X gives money to country Y – is that it becomes quickly a tool of realpolitik rather than a genuine act of philanthropy. Even where, as is the case with the UK, the use of aid as, in effect, an exporter subsidy is no longer allowed we can see how decisions relating to aid become wrapped up in other considerations – votes on international bodies, support for military action, clamping down on migration, and even investment decisions in the home nation.

The idea that Government is a benign, innocent compared to non-governmental bodies or international bodies is a complete misperception. And this self-interest extends to the people employed – the hundreds of people administering our huge aid contribution to nuclear armed India will be working tirelessly to try and prevent that subvention being cut.

Finally bilateral aid has to go via the government – there is no alternative as it is a sovereign transfer. And this means that, however well meant the decision to support a struggling place might be, the corrupt government there will take its cut of the aid before it arrives with those it is intended to assist.

Sadly, we do not apply ourselves enough to these considerations, to making the aid we give effective. Instead – much like the “I buy fair trade” argument – we shout around about how big the budget is rather than about the real outcomes of the work funded by that budget. I really don’t care whether the UK spends 0.5% or 0.7% of GDP on aid – what I care is that the money actually does some good.

Taking this view doesn’t make me some kind of moral leper, someone who doesn’t care about the development of Africa or the suffering of the world’s poor. Indeed, those who advocate increased aid budgets but support the subsidising of western agriculture should look to their own contradictions – the Common Agricultural Policy does more damage to Africa than our aid programmes do good. And much the same can be said for other market distorting actions of the developed world – the structure of financial regulation (making it ever more difficult for developing countries to build a financial sector – even massive countries like India), the subsidising of basic industries, the dumping of production surpluses in the name of “aid” and much else besides.

If we really cared about helping Africa transform we would start removing these barriers, we would concentrate on opening up our home markets to the products of poorer countries, we would incentivise moving production upstream (processing and packaging the coffee in Ethiopia rather than Banbury maybe) and we would concentrate our aid on disaster relief, educating women and disease prevention.

Instead we choose to wave and shout about how good we are and how much money we spend. I find this sad.

...