Population control not redistribution In a 2012 Newsweek profile, Melinda Gates announced her intention to get “family planning” back on the global agenda and made the dubious claim that African women were literally clamoring for Depo-Provera as a way of hiding contraceptive use from “unsupportive husbands.”
Boasting that a decision “likely to change lives all over the world” had been hers alone, she announced that the Foundation would invest $4 billion in an effort to supply injectable contraceptives to 120 million women – presumably women of color – by 2020.
It was a program so ambitious that some critics warned of a return to the era of eugenics and coercive sterilization. Bill Gates, at one time an avowed Malthusian “at least in the developing countries” is now careful to repudiate Malthus in public.
Yet it is striking that Foundation publicity justifies not only contraception, but every major initiative in the language of population control, from vaccination (“When children survive in greater numbers, parents decide to have smaller families”) to primary education (“girls who complete seven years of schooling will marry four years later and have 2.2 fewer children than girls who do not complete primary school.”)
In a 2010 public lecture, Bill Gates attributed global warming to “overpopulation” and touted zero population growth as a solution achievable “[i]f we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, and reproductive health services.”
The argument is disingenuous: As Gates certainly knows, the poor people who are the targets of his campaigns are responsible for no more than a tiny percentage of the environmental damage that underlies climate change.
The economist Utsa Patnaik has demonstrated that when population figures are adjusted to account for actual per capita demand on resources, e.g., fossil fuels and food, the greatest “real population pressure” emanates not from India or Africa, but from the advanced countries.
The Gates Foundation is well aware of this imbalance and works not to redress it but to preserve it – by blaming poverty not on imperialism but on unrestrained sexual reproduction “in places where we don’t want it.”
From Malthus to the present day, the myth of overpopulation has supplied reliable ideological cover for the ruling class as it appropriates ever greater shares of the people’s labor and the planet’s wealth.
As argued in Aspects No. 55, “Malthus’s heirs continue to wish us to believe that people are responsible for their own misery; that there is simply not enough to go around; and to ameliorate that state of wretchedness we must not attempt to alter the ownership of social wealth and redistribute the social product, but instead focus on reducing the number of people.”
96 In recent years BMGF’s publicity apparatus, exploiting Western alarm about “climate change,” has helped create a resurgence of the overpopulation hysteria last experienced during the 1970s in the wake of Paul Erlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb.
Yet the sheer scale of BMGF’s investment in “family planning”” suggests that its ambitions reach beyond mere propaganda.
In addition to the multibillion dollar contraception distribution program discussed previously, BMGF provides research support for the development of new high-tech, long-lasting contraceptives (e.g., an ultrasound sterilization procedure for men as well as “non-surgical female sterilization”).
Meanwhile the Foundation aggressively lobbies Third World governments to spend more on birth control and supporting infrastructure. While subsidizing steep cuts in the price of subcutaneous contraceptives. These initiatives lie squarely within the traditions of Big Philanthropy.
The Rockefeller Foundation organized the Population Council in 1953, predicting a “Malthusian crisis” in the developing world and financing extensive experiments in population control.
These interventions were enthusiastically embraced by US government policymakers, who agreed that “the demographic problems of the developing countries, especially in areas of non-Western culture, make these nations more vulnerable to Communism.” Foundation research culminated in an era of “unrestrained enthusiasm for government-sponsored family planning” by the 1970s.
Less discussed but amply documented is the consistent support for eugenics research by US-based foundations, dating from the 1920s, when Rockefeller helped found the German eugenics program that undergirded Nazi racial theories, through the 1970s, when Ford Foundation research helped prepare the intellectual ground for a brutal forced sterilization campaign in India.
Why have foundations invested so persistently in actual technologies and campaigns for population reduction? In the absence of a definitive explanation, two possibilities are worth pondering.
PART 2: will come out next week, before it does ask yourself is BILL GATES trust worthy.
