Curbing population: an opportunity missed.

• Author: Doer, Edd

THERE IS strong agreement among most experts on ecology and population that accelerating environmental degradation (deforestation, desertification, topsoil erosion, overexploited fisheries, declining fresh water reserves, nonrenewable resource depletion, renewable resource overuse, increasing waste accumulation, etc.) and unchecked population growth will add up to a planetwide catastrophe in our children's lifetimes. The world as a whole must achieve population stabilization with-in the carrying capacity of its physical resources.

The United Nations International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo Sept. 5-13, 1994, was intended to set the countries of the world on the road to solving the population/ecology problem. With population growing by more than 1.7% per year (over 90,000,000 more mouths to feed every year) on a planet with finite and dwindling resources, something has to be done if nature is not to resolve the situation through the time-tested means of starvation, disease, and violence.

Whether the high hopes of the Cairo delegates will be realized is an open question. Yet, what the conference tried to set in motion should have been started 20 years ago and would have had a better chance of success had a golden opportunity not been missed deliberately.

On April 24, 1974, Pres. Richard Nixon ordered the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Agriculture and the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Agency for International Development to prepare a study on the "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests" in National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200. A 227-page report was completed in seven months and submitted to the White House. It is worth examining certain highlights:

* "In some overpopulated areas, rapid population growth presses on a fragile environment in ways that threaten longer-term food production, through cultivation of marginal lands, overgrazing, desertification, deforestation, and soil erosion, with consequent destruction of land and pollution of water, rapid siltation of reservoirs, and impairment of inland and coastal fisheries."

* "Rapid population growth creates a severe drag on rates of economic development otherwise attainable."

* "There is a major risk of severe damage to world economic, political, and ecological systems, and as these systems begin to fail, to our humanitarian values."

* "Adverse economic factors which generally result from...