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| Ardeshir Cowasjee |
A TEACHER is lecturing on population: “In Pakistan, every 10 seconds a woman gives birth to a baby.” A smart-alec student stands up and responds: “We must find her and stop her!”
Many of us feel as does the student. Four weeks ago, this column dwelt on the perils of an exploding population and drew substantial reader feedback. While most tended to agree that uncontrolled increase in the populace was the ‘ultimate cause’ of the chaos in which we now find Pakistan, others blamed the political leadership’s non-governance, or the increasing gap between the rich and poor, or the lack of education, or moral/social disintegration, or other related factors, all of them, in some way, ‘proximate causes’.
Let us take the effect of population increases on the problems of mankind. A graph of historical world numbers is like a hockey stick; a fairly horizontal line from the time of transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, with an upward turn around the end of the 19th century, rising straight upwards from the mid-20th century: 10000BC = five million, 1AD = 150 million, 1825AD = one billion, 1900AD = 1.6 billion, 2000AD = 6.1 billion, 2011AD = seven billion.
This has brought about the evolution of ‘crowd diseases’. Humans were brought into close contact with animals and infected by their microorganisms when hunter-gatherer man slowly began to adopt agriculture and domesticate animals some 12,000 years ago. Numerous parasites were readily transferred from animal species to humans, posing a threat to human health. The origin of many animal-induced diseases in man’s long history is thought to be relatively recent and linked to humans increasingly living in close proximity to one another.
Some animal-generated diseases were eventually restricted to humans, and no longer live in the soil or in animals. Among the infectious childhood diseases that visit human habitations as epidemics are measles, rubella, mumps and whooping cough.
As Jared Diamond explains in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, “…the rapid spread of microbes, and the rapid course of the symptoms, means that everybody in a local human population is quickly infected and soon thereafter is either dead or else recovered and immune. No one is left alive who could still be infected. But since the microbe can’t survive except in the bodies of living people, the disease dies out, until a new crop of babies reach the susceptible age — and until an infectious person arrives from the outside to start a new epidemic”.
Diamond explains that these are known as ‘crowd diseases’ , as “ …to sustain themselves, they need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and is sufficiently densely packed, that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the disease would otherwise be waning”.
Another ‘crowding’ dilemma is the role of densification of population in the evolution or control of crime, the subject of much study. On the one hand, high density offers greater opportunities for crimes, and promotes thievery. On the other, densely peopled areas offer natural surveillance that has the effect of reducing violent crimes because supposedly witnesses are more abundant and events are more likely to be reported to the law-enforcement personnel.
French sociologist Émile Durkheim had it that densely populated areas and their inhabitants would be exposed to increased conflict between individuals and higher crime rates, and they would experience more breakdown or change in social order, i.e. large numbers of people cannot coexist amicably in small areas, thus leading to inner-city conflict, urban poverty, fighting over scarce resources, and the like.
An Iowa university dissertation on Durkheim’s theories recommends:
“ …[I]n alleviating social breakdown the US government should reduce its excessive spending on military actions and spend more time and money implementing policies that relieve the unemployment problems in the country, since they are most closely linked with social breakdown. “More government policies need to be enacted that create jobs in areas with high population density, since density and unemployment have a significant correlation and often occur together.
“I also would recommend that the US government initiate more welfare programmes in areas with high density and unemployment to help ease the conflict and poverty situations that can exist among individuals in these areas. I feel that federal, state and local governments need to take steps to reduce social inequality to further reduce breakdown of social order.
“The best way to do this is to initiate policies that help the poor and unemployed individuals in an area, especially if that area is heavily populated with disadvantaged individuals of this sort. More policies that help minority individuals also need to be enacted, since their members experience disproportionately more poverty, homelessness and unemployment than [majority members].”
It goes on to recommend that city planners should avoid constructing tall buildings with many compact living spaces in order to cut down on population density, and an increase in protective law enforcement in highly dense areas since crime is likely to occur there.
Much of this applies to our troubled urban areas of Pakistan, especially the tormented city of Karachi. The killing grounds of this metropolis, increasingly populated by unemployed, angry young men, are threatening to consume everyone who lives here with violence and crime. The 60 per cent projected increase in Karachi’s population over the next 20 years will break its back.