It’s time to revisit the Cairo Consensus
First online: 7 July 2021
Christopher
Tucker
Chairman, American Geographical Society
tucker@americangeo.org
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DOI: 10.3197/jps.2021.5.2.63
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Tucker, C. 2021. 'It’s Time to Revisit the Cairo Consensus'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 5(2): 63–73.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2021.5.2.63
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Just over a quarter century
ago, the so-called ‘Cairo Consensus’ was forged, fundamentally improving how
governments worldwide, international organisations, and the NGO community
approached women’s reproductive health and reproductive rights on the world stage.
Yet, the deafening silence this consensus offered on issues of runaway
population growth has had massive repercussions on the world we live in today,
with the ever-increasing human footprint fuelling climate change and ecological
destruction on a scale that was entirely predicted. Given what we know now
about how empowering, just and ethical strategies focused on women and girls
can effectively bend the global population curve, it is time that we revisit
the Cairo Consensus.
Keywords:
Cairo Consensus; population growth; ecological destruction; women’s
empowerment; fertility reduction; sustainable population.
Putting the Cairo Consensus in
context
In
the Fall of 1994, in Cairo, the United Nations’ International Conference on
Population and Development convened voices from around the world to reformulate
the UN’s thinking around issues of population and development. At this
formative event, much progress was made in how the world grappled with these
issues, particularly related to women’s reproductive health and reproductive
rights. The so-called ‘Cairo Consensus’ was forged, placing women’s health,
empowerment, and rights at the center of discussions around population and
development. This was a huge step forward in our global thinking about the
centrality of women and girls to the fate of our global community, and to the
notion that women’s rights are human rights.
One
important issue was lost in the shuffle – runaway population growth. From 1994
forward, there was a formalization of the American diplomatic silence on issues
of runaway population growth that had begun under President Reagan, permeating
deep into the United Nations community. This was an enormous change in
direction. This topic of runaway population growth had been a mainstay of UN
World Population Conferences in 1954 (Rome), 1965 (Belgrade), 1974 (Bucharest),
1984 (Mexico City), and even as far back as 1927 (Geneva) under the League of
Nations. The global community had watched with grave concern as the world
population more than doubled between 1900 and the 1965 conference (from 1.6
billion to more than 3.3B), with another doubling projected by the end of the
20th century. Serious attention had been paid to the issue by world leaders,
resulting in a 1967 statement by world leaders signed by 30 heads of state
including US President Lyndon Johnson that cast a spotlight on runaway
population growth, and the criticality of international family planning to
human rights, global development, and international security (Dunlop, 2000).
So,
what happened between 1967 and 1994 – other than the addition of more than 2
billion more people to our planet in this very short period of time? How did
the intense focus on runaway population growth lead to utter silence on the
issue in the world of international affairs?
Some
participants in the Cairo process attribute it to an oversight, with experts in
reproductive health playing more prominently in the process and simply
overlooking the historical focus on population growth as they worked hard to
bring focus to their important issues. Others attribute it to an effort to turn
the page on a dark chapter of history that had brought racist, eugenicist,
nativist, and paternalistic impulses to the population discussion. Still others
attribute it to an active lobbying effort by the Vatican to shape the
population discussions they had opposed for decades. No doubt a swirl of
dynamics led the Cairo Conference to institutionalize what became known as the
Cairo Consensus. In turn, this consensus shaped strategies within the UN’s
various institutions, by national governments, by major foundations and NGOs
over the following decades – leaving the issue of runaway population growth
unaddressed as it spiralled out of control at a critical moment in human
history, and the history of our planet (Sinding, 2016).
Shedding the dark past of
population debates
The
historical turn embodied in the Cairo Consensus was in no small part an attempt
to shed the dark past of population debates that had shaped international
development for decades. One does not have to look hard to find plenty of
unsavoury undertones and overtones in the population debates of the 20th
century. To this day, one can still find those whose animating concerns around
population dynamics are racist, eugenicist, nativist, and paternalistic.
The
history of this dark past is, of course, complicated, fraught with
misinterpretation and wilful misrepresentation, and grounded in some
inescapable truths. It is useful to examine two historical moments that
collided to produce such a complex set of controversies that they are
frequently re-adjudicated to this day.
As
far back as 1912, Margaret Sanger, who popularised the term “birth control,”
advocated contraception as a means of avoiding “back alley abortions” (Cox,
2005). Seeing the connection between contraception and working-class women’s
empowerment, Sanger came to believe that a transformation toward women’s
equality would only be possible if they were liberated from the risk of
unwanted pregnancy. Her initiative on this issue, of course, was in the midst
of the suffrage movement and early American feminism. Additionally, early on
during her time in England, Sanger came to share the concerns of English
Neo-Malthusians around overpopulation. Sanger’s insights and advocacy forever
transformed the future for women and families around the world. Moreover, she
will always be labeled a firebrand for being early and outspoken in her own
unique mix of feminism, anti-religion, sexual frankness, and social activism on
issues of race, class, and fertility.
Still,
her public association with eugenicist organizations forever tainted her
legacy, and equipped opponents of family planning with an effective rhetorical
weapon with which they could attack the entire enterprise – to this day.
Sanger’s relationship with the eugenics movement was complex — part strategy
and part ideology. Yet, many historians now believe that Sanger opposed eugenics
along racial lines, and opposed eugenicists’ notions that poverty, criminal
behaviour and other social problems were hereditary. Indeed, she saw
intentional family planning as a tool that empowered the downtrodden, rather
than a tool for weeding out ‘bad genes’ (Chesler, 2011; Latson, 2016).
It
was Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, who in 1883 captured the
minds of elites in America, England, Germany and beyond with his twisted
reading of Gregor Mendel’s pea plant breeding experiments and Darwin’s survival
of the fittest. Galton provided a scientific veneer to the notion that many
social ills were caused by the genetic proliferation of the wrong sort of
people. Galton postulated that this problem could be addressed with the
introduction of eugenics – a term he coined in 1883. It is no surprise that he
also introduced the phrase “nature versus nurture.” In America, the Carnegies,
Rockefellers and Harrimans became acolytes of this worldview, and funded the
practice and teaching of eugenics. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell,
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and many other prominent citizens were outspoken
supporters. Scientific American published articles in support of the concept.
The American Museum of Natural History hosted conferences on the subject. The
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory had a Eugenics Record Office, which was an
epicenter of research in the field, and home to Harry Laughlin, perhaps the
most influential eugenics advocate in America. Eugenics became taught in
schools, celebrated in exhibits at the World’s Fair, preached in pulpits,
advocated by respected scientists at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton,
and implemented in state and Federal policy. Thirty-two states passed
eugenic-sterilization laws during the twentieth century. The Immigration Act of
1924 excluded eugenically undesirable races from entry to the United States.
And Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the seminal case Buck
v Bell “It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate
offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can
prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind” (quoted in
DenHoed, 2016).
Race
theory and race science, based on faked and untested data, served eugenicists’
racist goals. Mixed with a pre-existing Neo-Malthusian strain of thought, this
led to a dark interpretation of who was responsible for perceived
overpopulation, and how it should be dealt with.
This
moment in Western thought informed decades of gruesome theory and action,
culminating in Nazi Germany’s abominable atrocities, but by no means solely
restricted to the Third Reich. Credible and exhaustively cited historical
analysis has even rooted Nazi eugenics in British and American thought
leadership. Perhaps this is why eugenicist thought, and its racist, nativist
and paternalistic impulses, continued on past WWII, before the label was widely
abandoned by the mid 20th century. It is the deeply held suspicions of those
who rightfully oppose these impulses that often motivate them to avoid or
actively oppose discussions of runaway population growth – even long after
humanity has exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity.
More
recently, of course – and with different cultural origins – thoughtful and
righteous objections have been raised over China’s One Child Policy and
policies by other authoritarian regimes that have sought to harness coercive
measures to oppress women or eradicate minorities through the use of forced
sterilization or forced abortion. In the wake of the Cairo Consensus, proper
attention was paid to the inhumane practices being embraced under the guise of
“population control,” which disproportionately affected women and girls around
the world. In some cases, a connection could be drawn to old eugenicist
thinking in Western cultures, repackaged by the dominant racial or ethnic group
in power in non-Western nations. In other cases, similar oppression by
authoritarian regimes has been undertaken with no need for philosophical
foundations, though delivering the same effect.
This
dark history has led many who are firmly ensconced in the Cairo Consensus to be
deeply averse to re-opening discussions about runaway population growth. Others
avoid population discussions in the hope that the global population curve will
bend as global health and wealth improve – as the great Swedish physician and
health statistician Hans Rosling insisted it would. To be comfortable with a
Rosling-esque worldview, one must avoid the fact that humanity long ago
overshot our planet’s carrying capacity. Others, particularly from the climate
action community, demand that we avoid population discussions, and focus
entirely on consumption and carbon emissions. They correctly point out that the
developed world, which indeed is guilty of creating the vast majority of the
historic carbon burden on our climate, should not be allowed to shift the blame
on to poor, Black and Brown communities around the world, who consume far less
per capita, just because of their fertility rate. Yet, they fail to grasp
the rate at which the developing world is projected to join the global middle
class over the next decade, taking on a decidedly bigger per capita human
footprint. As such, we should all be concerned about population growth
even if it is consumption in the developed world that has led to our
environmental crisis (Hickel, 2018; O’Neill, 2018).
Lessons learned and embracing
our future
Because
of the dark past of population debates, it is far too easy to ignore runaway
population growth despite the ample scientific evidence that humanity’s size
and our rate of growth is crushing our planet and undermining its ability to
support us as a species. This dark past makes an already awkward discussion
about runaway population growth downright unpalatable. It enables a sort of
intellectual cowardice – letting some advocates for the reduction of humanity’s
carbon footprint ignore the inexorable realities of runaway population growth.
It allows valid claims of racism, colonialism, and paternalism to be wielded as
a means of silencing those who raise issues of runaway population growth. This
is a particularly potent argument in a world that continues to be filled with
racism, and a future where most Western populations are already below
replacement value fertility, while large parts of Africa, Asia, and South
America are projected to grow their populations substantially over the coming
decades (Vollset, et al, 2020).
In
any discussion of population dynamics, we must learn from this deeply troubling
past and its echos into our present. Despite this reality, we must also embrace
the lessons that have been learned about the just, ethical and empowering
strategies available to us which could bend the global population curve. We
have learned that the empowerment of women and girls leads to the reduction in
fertility rates. In many geographies where women and girls are empowered,
educated, integrated into the workforce and given access to family planning
technologies, that they are allowed to harness for their own bodily autonomy,
we see below replacement value fertility (Sachs, 2005). This is because
such factors lead to smaller, educated, and prosperous families – a virtuous
circle in development that naturally bends the fertility curve in the
geographies where these factors take hold.
This
means that there is a real nexus between the truths elevated in the Cairo
Consensus and the building blocks required to bend the global fertility curve.
This makes it all the more mysterious that the Cairo Consensus was devoid of
any real notion how many people the Earth can support, and the need to shift
fertility norms in a way that can bring our species into balance with our
planet. If it were not, the Cairo Conference deliberations would have begun
with a discussion of whether the 5.6 billion souls inhabiting the planet in
1994 exceeded our planet’s carrying capacity. And reasonable discussions would
have been had around feasibility of near-term reductions in consumption, given
the projected population growth already baked into our demographics. This would
have immediately led to a discussion not only of the empowerment of women and
girls, and a focus on reproductive health and women’s rights as human rights.
It would also have led to a real discussion about the need to shift reproductive
norms away from the norm of children having children, to a more modern
fertility norm of relatively small families. The Cairo Consensus would have
rallied around the need for small, educated and prosperous families with
healthy and empowered women and girls. But, this is not the form that the Cairo
Consensus took, and now humanity has hurtled from 5.6 billion to 7.8 billion
with no end in sight and with nothing less that the fate of our planet and our
species at stake.
If
Cairo had truly been a conference on population and international development –
rather than a much needed effort to recenter the empowerment, reproductive
rights, and welfare of women and girls on the world scene – a frank discussion
would have occurred about the actual fertility rate (e.g., the current slope of
the curve) and the path toward not only bending the global fertility rate to
below replacement value, but the time horizon by which this change must occur
if we were to avert climate catastrophe and ecological destruction. In 1994,
both climate catastrophe and ecological destruction loomed large.
I
have proposed a goal of achieving a total fertility rate (TFR) 1.5 by 2030, to
not only help us avert 1.5C in temperature rise, but also to begin lightening
the overall human footprint (not just our carbon footprint) at a rate that
could bring our species into balance with of our planet’s carrying capacity
soon after 2100 (Tucker, 2020). Whether my assumptions and calculations are
correct should be something debated and decided in any adjustment to the Cairo
Consensus. Whatever the actual resulting population decrease, aspiring to
an average global fertility rate of 1.5 by 2030 would massively increase the
prospect of averting ecological catastrophe and widespread misery – especially for
the poorest in the world. Perhaps another such goal is more appropriate.
I welcome the debate.
Updating how the United Nations
thinks about population
In a
way, it is unfair to saddle the Cairo Consensus with sole responsibility for
the UN’s failure to properly consider runaway population growth in our
collective global strategies for achieving long term sustainability. The UN
did, after all, spearhead the development of the Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), which also were silent on issues of population. Nevertheless, one can,
perhaps, blame the Cairo Consensus’ silence on population growth for shaping
the fundamental assumptions underlying the UN’s SDGs. The SDGs weirdly take the
UN’s population projections as immutable, with 17 goals that the global
community must collectively meet even as humanity continues to grow in numbers
and in its massive ecological footprint. Goal 5 does call for Gender Equality,
which is a useful hook for a larger discussion around fertility and population
dynamics. But, other than that, the SDGs are silent on this issue. Of course,
so many of the SDGs are actively being undermined by runaway population growth.
An
18th SDG, focused on ending runaway population growth, stabilizing population,
and decreasing it to a lower more sustainable population plateau would go a
long way to helping in the achievement of the other 17 SDGs. Alas, it seems
that the SDG process is considered unchangeable, even as we observe global
society overshooting its SDGs, year after year. The day that the SDG community
begins openly discussing runaway population growth and its deleterious effects
on our planet and our global society will be a watershed moment.
The
UN could also contemplate the creation of a United Nations Framework Convention
on Population Growth, as was proposed by planetary health activist Rob Harding.
Modelled on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this
approach would allow us to recognize that we (e.g., humanity) have exceeded our
planet’s carrying capacity, and that we are accruing long term ecological debt
that is threatening our planet and its ability to support us as a species
(Harding, 2018). Such a Framework Convention on Population Growth would allow
us to collectively set goals for bending the global population curve in a
particular time frame. Goals, after all, are nothing without a target date for
their accomplishment.
Again,
my goal of 1.5TFR by 2030 would only be a proposal that would have to be
negotiated in this context. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change has negotiated targets for carbon emissions. Yet, it completely failed
to appreciate the role of runaway population growth in fuelling climate change.
History will look back on this failure with contempt. As a UN Secretary General
who is so passionate about climate action, António Guterres could help empower
the global community by advancing this proposal for a United Nations Framework
Convention on Population Growth.
It is
easy to anticipate that climate activists and global leaders might simply call
for amending the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to include
population references. However, this is much bigger than climate. Remember, the
UN is also the home for the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, led by the UN
Environment Program (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations (UN FAO), with the aim of restoring degraded and destroyed ecosystems,
contributing to efforts to combat climate change and safeguard biodiversity,
food security, and water supply. Runaway population growth is not just fuelling
climate change, it is annihilating natural habitats at an alarming rate. Our
collective carbon footprint is only one small part of our much larger human
footprint. And, to properly grapple with runaway population growth, a
substantial agreement with many moving pieces would be required. It is not as
simple as setting targets. Population issues touch every single Sustainable
Development Goal, and every aspect of human rights discussions across the UN
and its member nations.
We
have it at our fingertips to embrace just, ethical, and empowering strategies –
particularly focused on women and girls – that can help us bend the global
population curve, but all nations would need to agree to them. It is abundantly
clear that the international community should build on the Cairo Consensus by
establishing a UN Framework Convention on Population Growth.
Establishing new fertility
norms for a sustainable future
Any
agreement would, in effect, call on the self-conscious establishment of a new
species-wide fertility norm. To some geographies, where below replacement value
fertility has already become the norm, this will be no real imposition. To
others, the establishment of a norm that is substantially lower than the TFR in
their region will be quite a heavy lift. However, when in this discussion
people are led to realize that fertility is not some exogenous factor or
inexorable process, the dialog will get interesting. This global dialog will
lead them to realize that if only women and girls are empowered, educated,
integrated into the workforce (at the appropriate age), and given access to
family planning technologies that allow them bodily autonomy, then not only
will fertility drop, but the multiplicity of benefits tied to education will be
unleashed, and economic prosperity will abound. Furthermore, ecological
calamity will no longer loom large. Small, educated and prosperous families
capable of making deliberate choices about their impact on our planet will
become the species wide norm. What a change that will be.
Norms
are not policy mandates. They are not “population control”. If we have learned
anything over the past century, such mandates and policies do not work. Only
empowering strategies deployed at global scale can work. And these can only
work when implemented within a global discussion about the kinds of fertility
norms that could help humanity live within the ecological constraints of our
planet, in the here and now. The 2020s are a fundamentally different moment in
time than 1994, when the Cairo Conference was held. The global community has
come to appreciate acutely the burden humanity’s growing numbers have come to
place on our fragile and finite planet – including the global community of
scientists (Ripple, 2019). By situating the welfare and rights of women and
girls at the center of our approaches to international development, the Cairo
Conference did us all a favour. By sidelining discussions around runaway
population growth, the Cairo Conference did us all, and our planet, a huge
disservice. We now have the opportunity to collectively make a course
adjustment that could mean the difference between prosperous sustainability and
oblivion.
The
time for action is now.
Chesler,
E., 2011. Was Planned Parenthood’s founder racist? Salon. 2 November.
Cox,
V., 2005. Margaret
Sanger: rebel for women’s rights. Philadelphia:
Chelsea House Publishers.
DenHoed,
A., 2016. The forgotten lessons of the American eugenics movement. The New Yorker, [online] 27 April.
Available at:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement
[Accessed 9 June 2021]
Dunlop,
J., 2000. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, statesman and founder of the Population
Council. Population Today,
28(6), p.3.
Harding,
R., 2018. A proposal for a United Nations framework convention on population
growth. Mother Pelican,
14(2) [online] Available at:
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv14n02supp1.html#section9 [Accessed 9 June
2021]
Hickel,
J., 2018. Is it possible to achieve a good life for all within
planetary boundaries? Third World Quarterly, 40(1), pp.18-35. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2018.1535895.
Hickel,
J., 2019.The contradiction of the sustainable development goals: growth versus
ecology on a finite planet. Sustainable Development, 27,
pp.873– 884. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1947.
Latson,
Jennifer. 2016. What Margaret Sanger Really Said About Eugenics and Race. Time
Magazine. October 14th.
O’Neill,
D.W., Fanning, A.L., Lamb, W.F. et al., 2018. A good life for all
within planetary boundaries. Nature Sustainability 1, pp.88–95.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0021-4
Ripple,
W.J., Wolf, C., Newsome, T.M., Barnard, P., Moomaw, W.R., 2020. world
scientists’ warning of a climate emergency. BioScience, 70(1), pp.8-12.
https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz088
Sachs,
J., 2005. The end of poverty: how we can make it happen in our
lifetime. New York: Penguin Press.
Sinding,
S.W., 2016. Reflections on the changing nature of the population movement. The Journal of Population and Sustainability,
1(1), pp.7-14.
Tucker,
C.K., 2020. We know how many people the Earth can support. Journal of Population and Sustainability,
5(1), pp.77-85.
Vollset,
S.E., et al., 2020. Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios
for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for
the Global Burden of Disease Study. The Lancet,
396(10258), pp.1285–1306. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2