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What similarities do you observe in the lives of the zabbaleen in urban Cairo and the Shipibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon? What are the underlying causes of the respective crises faced by the zabbaleen and the Shipibo?  How do demographic factors such as fertility, mortality, and migration influence human interaction with the environment in both ethnographic contexts? 

Family Planning, Amazon Style

Publication info: Natural History ; New York  Vol. 101, Iss. 12,  (Dec 1992): 30.

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ABSTRACT (ABSTRACT)
 

Amid the cultural changes confronting the Shipibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon, high fertility is imposing new

hardships. The fertility problems of the Shipibo, a matter that is political and not scientific, are detailed.

FULL TEXT
 

Amid cultural change, high fertility imposes new hardships on an Indian people

“When you come back, don’t forget to bring tootimarau,” Chomoshico called to me. I was leaving the Shipibo Indian

village of Manco Capac, on the banks of the Pisqui River in the Peruvian Amazon, where I had been doing medical

research. Chomoshico was nearing the end of her eleventh pregnancy. She already had seven living children.

Neither she nor her husband wants more. “Enough. Clothes cost,” they told me. “I’m tired of having children,” she

said. “I almost died with the last one.” Her husband has tuberculosis.

Tootimarau means “medicine to keep from being pregnant”–birth control. I knew I could promise Chomoshico

worm medicine for her children’s parasites, and I might be able to bring her vitamins and iron for her pregnancy,

even medicine for tuberculosis. But while I could informally provide other kinds of medical care, I could not arrange

to bring her birth control without risking reprisals from politicians who are against it. The Shipibo have been asking

me for tootimarau for more than twenty-five years, but I haven’t been able to arrange any yet. I can only refer them

to a Peruvian doctor in Pucallpa, many days away by canoe. Most can never get there. The men even pull me aside

to ask if I know about an operation to “fix” men–vasectomy–and, again, I tell them the name of my medical

colleague in Pucallpa.

In the same village, a few weeks before, a young girl had died on her thirteenth birthday trying to give birth to twins.

And in that girl’s natal village, just up the river, I had just seen my first case of flank starvation among the Shipibo

Indians, with whom I had worked as a physician and scientist since 1964. The starving man had tuberculosis. His

family, which would normally have taken care of someone so ill, was away working for a logging company.

Chomoshico’s desperate request for birth control, the death of the thirteen-year-old girl, and the plight of the

starving man are all related. The Shipibo’s own high fertility, uncontrolled by any effective means, is compounding

the problem of the population pressure created by an influx of outsiders, who are moving into Shipibo territory and

destroying the natural resources.

The Shipibo Indians who live along the Ucayali River and its tributaries, such as the Pisqui, notice that the fish are

getting smaller and harder to find, and that the game animals they rely on during the rainy season–when fish are

almost impossible to catch–are more elusive than in the past. Palm leaves for thatching roofs seem scarcer, and

people have to trek long distances, sometimes a mile or more, to gather firewood, once available a few steps away.

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People are aware that their own village is growing, that they do not know all its inhabitants, that the village school

is crowded. Sometimes they have to go all day without eating fish. The Shipibo word for fish, piti, is also their word

for food: a Shipibo without fish is truly poor.

In this crisis, the Shipibo are not alone. The Peruvian government has urged desperate people from the crowded

coastal cities and Andean communities to settle and live in the jungle “paradise.” They have. Pucallpa, the major

port on the Ucayali, the “highway” river that becomes the Amazon, was probably an aboriginal Shipibo settlement

(its Shipibo name means “red earth”). In the 1940s, just before the trans-Andes highway was put through to

Pucallpa from Lima, the settlement’s population was about 2,500. When I first visited Pucallpa in 1964, the

population had grown to about 25,000. It was a raw, dusty, frontier town with dirt streets and Saturday night

gunfights. More than 250,000 people live there now–a hundredfold increase in fifty years.

With the local waters already depleted, fishing boats from Pucallpa speed downstream more than 150 miles, where

they take all fish more than two inches long with drift nets, pack the fish in ice, and start back up the river. The

smaller fish are discarded to rot. There is not much left for the Shipibo, for the mestizo colonists from elsewhere in

Peru, for the large fish, for the alligators, or for the wading birds that used to line the shores of the Ucayali. Areas

around Pucallpa that were covered by canopy rain forest in 1964 now look like Oklahoma. The hundreds of bird

species that enlivened the forest have been replaced by emaciated cows. Swamps filled with fish are replaced by

causeways carrying buses and motorcycles. Twenty years ago, a traveler camped on the beach of the Ucayali

River could not sleep for the sounds of fish splashing and alligators hunting them. There aren’t enough fish to keep

one awake now; the traveler is kept awake by the whine of fishermen’s outboard motors.

Instead of living by subsistence fishing and horticulture, as the Shipibo principally do, their new neighbors exploit

the environment to make money. First come the timber cutters, followed by cattle ranchers, commercial fishermen,

and the farmers of bananas, rice, and other cash crops. The resultant deforestation and flooding have eliminated

some crops and game animals that were sources of food for the Shipibo in the rainy season. The Shipibo

themselves are drawn into the money economy and sometimes sell products from scarce animals (such as water

turtle eggs) in order to get cash.

The Shipibo painfully admit that, although they work much harder than before, they don’t have enough money for

clothes (which they used to make by hand from woven cloth) and schoolbooks for their children (not a factor thirty

years ago). They now have to buy food at times, even though it was previously plentiful.

The Shipibo (and the closely related Conibo) are the dominant indigenous people of the upper Peruvian Amazon.

They have survived there for about a thousand years, but only by battling fiercely with other tribes and exhibiting a

pragmatic tenacity in the face of colonization. Before the European conquest, they may have numbered more than

50,000. By the early twentieth century, fewer than 3,000 remained. Somehow they escaped the further decimation

or complete extinction that befell many other Amazon tribes exposed to European diseases, enslavement,

intertribal warfare sponsored by rubber tappers, and other openly genocidal attempts to rid the Amazon of its

native inhabitants. Their population is now about 30,000 and growing.

The last smallpox epidemic was in 1964. But now, in addition to the modern plagues of tuberculosis and cholera,

the Shipibo have a new health problem: high fertility, which places pressure on resources and takes a heavy toll

among Shipibo women.

In the past the Shipibo controlled their birth rate and population growth in a variety of ways: by sexual abstinence,

by abortion (using pressure on the uterus), by infanticide, and by the use of herbal contraceptives. Knowledge of

these contraceptives was passed down through the generations from mother to daughter, from grandmother to

granddaughter. But several things happened to interrupt this tradition. The horrifying epidemics that wiped out

whole villages following European contact prompted shamans in related tribes to forbid the practices of infanticide

and abortion. The Shipibo shamans may also have taken this step, but more likely, Christian missionaries played a

role in disrupting the cultural traditions that controlled fertility. In 1697, the Shipibo massacred a group of

Franciscans who were insisting that the Shipibo give up polygyny (multiple wives). Today, the custom remains

strong in some parts of the Shipibo culture area but is declining in villages close to centers of Western influence.

Even though polygyny allows some men to have more offspring than others, it permits women to have fewer

children with longer intervals between births. This arrangement has several important effects: it allows women to

recover from each pregnancy; it allows children to gain maturity before being weaned and placed on a diet of all

solid foods; and it reduces the total number of children borne by individual women. The result for the group is that

women have a better chance of recovering from pregnancy and therefore of living longer, and child survival is

better.

These advantages of polygyny are often cited by members of traditional societies, whose strategy is, not to have

as many children as possible, but to have as many as possible that survive to adulthood. A final result of polygyny,

paradoxically, is that community fertility could be restrained.

My acquaintance with Shipibo methods of controlling fertility began in 1964, when I was a third-year medical

student from the University of Colorado. I had just finished working intensively for several months at the Hospital

Amazonico “Albert Schweitzer” near Pucallpa, and had traveled to the Shipibo village of Paococha to learn about

native ideas concerning the nature, treatment, and control of disease. A Shipibo friend who was helping me,

Ambrosio, came to me one day to tell me that his wife was bleeding to death: she had just had a baby. Ambrosio

asked me to see her, and I treated his wife for retained membranes and postpartum uterine atony (relaxation of the

uterus). She recovered, and he asked me what he could do for me. I told him I would like to learn about medicines

that women use to control pregnancy. His aunt Julia was the local expert.

From Julia I learned that Shipibo women have several such herbal preparations. One of the most common is called

tootimahuaste (tooti means “pregnancy,” ma means “not,” and huaste means “herb”). Taken as a tea during three

successive menstrual periods, it is supposed to cause sterility.

In 1969, for my master of public health thesis, I returned to the village to conduct a more formal census and collect

the inhabitants’ reproductive histories. I asked the Shipibo women in my survey if they knew about these

medicines and if they used them. They roared with laughter at the idea of a male gringo asking these intimate

questions in their language. Then they usually told me that they knew about them; many had used them. Some of

the women had seriously harmed themselves by using highly toxic natural substances in a desperate attempt to

control

fertility.

At first I was puzzled to find that women who had used the herbal contraceptives had more children, on the

average, than those who hadn’t. This turned out to be because older women, who had already had many children,

were more likely to have used the herbal contraceptives. But my doubts about the effectiveness of the traditional

contraceptives were renewed when I analyzed the results of my two population studies in 1964 and 1969. The

Shipibo in Paococha turned out to have the highest fertility ever recorded for a human group, with a woman having

an average of ten births during her reproductive life.

Moreover, their rate of population growth was nearly 4.9 percent per year, with the population doubling every 14.5

years. Such a population explosion had to be fairly recent, for if such a rate had been in effect for very long the

population would have been huge. The phenomenon could not be completely explained by better medical care

(some of which I had provided) and a declining death rate. Either the herbal contraceptives didn’t work, or I wasn’t

getting all the information.

There were two other factors. By 1969, a large extended family from down the Ucayali river, at the periphery of the

Shipibo territory, moved into Paococha. Several of the men had multiple wives. (The local, “downtown” Shipibo

assured me that, unlike themselves, the new family was composed of salvajes–savages–and that they practiced

the old ways, including polygyny.) Because missionaries and schoolteachers discouraged it, this family structure

was becoming rare.

The second factor was suggested to me when I remembered that the Shipibo always observed certain taboos,

including “dieting,” when taking medications of any kind. I asked the women what they did when they took

tootimahuaste. They replied that one cannot eat salt, honey from the forest or other sweets, ripe bananas, and

certain kinds of fish. And a woman taking tootimahuaste may not have sex. This would mean an abstinence of

three months or more. Right away, I suspected what epidemiologists call a “secondary noncausal association”

between the use of herbal contraceptives and fewer pregnancies.

Postpartum sexual abstinence is often linked with polygyny in tribal societies. The woman who has just given birth

may not sleep with her husband for a period of time, which may be from three months to three years. During that

time her husband sleeps with one of the other wives. In Shipibo tradition, it is not uncommon for a man to have

two or three wives. Because women in polygynous marriages might be better able to observe the sexual

abstinence associated with herbal contraceptives, and because this might help these women have longer birth

intervals, I speculated that a decline in the practice of polygyny could be contributing to the community’s high

fertility.

To be sure of this, I had to determine that, on average, the birth intervals were indeed longer for women in

polygynous marriages than for women in monogamous manages and that fertility was actually lower for the

former than for the latter. Further, I wanted to determine if the rates of polygyny differed among the villages, and if

so, whether less polygyny is associated with lower or higher community fertility. By studying Shipibo villages that

were separated by long distances and had different levels of cultural contact with Western society, I could

compare the relationship between polygyny and fertility.

Up on the Pisqui River, Shipibo lives are more traditional than in the Shipibo villages lining the Ucayali. The Pisqui

is much smaller and fluctuates more quickly than the Ucayali. It contains fewer fish and other edible wildlife. The

Pisqui Shipibo live more by hunting and gathering than their Ucayali brethren. They are more isolated from outside

influences, and have been since at least early colonial times.

In 1983 and 1984, I studied eight Shipibo villages in different states of cultural transition. Six of the villages were

as much as sixty miles up the Pisqui. The results of the study showed that polygyny is generally more common on

the Pisqui, and that longer birth intervals occur in the polygynous unions there. In some Pisqui villages, 45 percent

of the women were in polygynous marriages, whereas in Paoyhan, a new Shipibo village on the Ucayali, only about

5 percent of the women were in this kind of union.

Comparing the birth interval lengths and fertility of all women, regardless of their villages, I found that, on average,

the birth intervals for women in polygynous marriages were thirty-four months–four months longer than those of

women in monogamous marriages. And most significant, women in monogamous marriages had 1.3 more children

during their reproductive lives than women in polygynous marriages. Accordingly, in villages where polygyny was

more common, the average intervals between births were longer and community fertility rates were lower.

The most acute health problem for the Shipibo, as both they and I see it, is epidemic disease–tuberculosis, cholera,

and influenza, to mention a few. These diseases carry off the older people who know the cultural traditions, and

they carry off many children. But the long-term problem is high fertility, which is placing pressure on the

diminishing resources. Weakened by increasingly poor nutrition, the Shipibo are more vulnerable to epidemics. In

their case, population growth means poverty and disease.

For Shipibo women, high fertility means sickness and death. They have an extremely high rate of cervical cancer,

which is probably related, among other things, to early childbearing and many pregnancies. I estimate that the

maternal mortality ratio–the proportion of women who die from pregnancy and childbirth–is roughly one for every

hundred live births, one hundred times higher than in the United States.

A larger question raised by studies such as mine is whether we really understand how fast the world’s population

is growing and will grow in the future. The Shipibo are essentially not counted in the Peruvian census, and neither

are their mestizo and other Shipibo neighbors. Numbers sent to the government offices are highly inaccurate (but

then I, for one, never received a U.S. census form in 1990).

From my experiences in Latin America, I would speculate that official census counts are missing at least one in ten

people and perhaps every fourth person. Some of those groups excluded appear to have population growth rates

of more than 3.5 percent. If this is true–and if it is similarly true in other parts of the developing world–world

population growth rates may not only be higher than official estimates but may also grow higher as traditional

societies like the Shipibo experience rapid cultural change.

Human population growth is not new. But there was a time, long past, when it took 100,000 years for world

population to double. Soon after agriculture was invented, the doubling time dropped to 700 years. Now our

population is doubling every 35 to 40 years. What happened?

While there are many answers, one emerges from this study and others like it: many human societies that

controlled their fertility in the past have lost the tradition of doing so in the frenzy of modern cultural change. The

old methods that reduced births have not yet been replaced by the new technologies of fertility control. The result

is chaos, suffering, more cultural change, and in some cases, even more rapid population growth. Where will it

stop?

For the Shipibo it stops when the beloved yoshanshico (grandmother) dies of tuberculosis and takes with her the

ancient Amazon traditions of pottery making and weaving and knowledge of the plants and seasons. It stops with

the loss of half the village’s children to a measles epidemic. It stops with the death of a beautiful thirteen-year-old

girl in childbirth. It stops when the village chief, a vigorous and intelligent young man, dies of cholera. It stops

when the legendary hunter of piache, a giant fish once commonly found in Amazon lakes, returns after three days

in the bush with his canoe empty and his harpoon unused. His family gets by on another meal of banana porridge.

It stops when the bright but superfluous young men and women of the village leave for the city, where they can get

low-level jobs and survive. Their village education, which kept them from the forest and from learning their

environment and own culture, has given them only minimal skills for life in town, where they sometimes conceal

their cultural identity to get jobs.

It stopped for Ambrosio’s wife when she died, exhausted, trying to give birth the next time, at the end of her twelfth

pregnancy. The previous child proved to be mentally retarded, probably the result of a two-day labor and difficult

delivery. For Ambrosio, a friendly man with a mischievous smile and quick wit, it stopped when he died from

tetanus two years later. For Julia, who became one of my dearest friends in life, a woman who had outlived two

husbands and thrown out several others, who was fiercely independent and could hunt and fish with the men, who

was a skilled artist and walking library of Shipibo culture, it stopped when she started coughing blood and bled to

death in a few minutes in front of her horrified family. The Shipibo are being forced to choose between buying

tuberculosis medicine for people like Julia and building schools for their children.

For me, there are few things as delightful as the sound of Shipibo children laughing. The Shipibo love their children,

and it shows. But what is ahead for people like Chomoshico and her husband and children? The inexorable

arithmetic of population growth is upon them, and the consequences for their environment and families are plain

to see. As a public health physician, I cannot help noticing that the Shipibo’s fertility problems are inseparable from

their other health problems and the changes going on around them. I also cannot help noticing that each family,

with few exceptions, wants to limit its fertility but has no safe, effective means of doing so. That is not a scientific

issue, but a political problem that neither I nor the Shipibo can solve.

DETAILS

Subject: Social conditions &trends; Fertility; Birth control; Native peoples

Location: Amazon Basin

Company / organization: Name: Shipibo Tribe; NAICS: 921150

Publication title: Natural History; New York

Volume: 101

Issue: 12

Pages: 30

Number of pages: 8

Publication year: 1992

Publication date: Dec 1992

Publisher: Natural History Magazine, Inc.

Place of publication: New York

Country of publication: United States, New York

Publication subject: Mines And Mining Industry, Earth Sciences–Geology, Museums And Art Galleries,

Biology–Entomology, Metallurgy, Archaeology, Sciences: Comprehensive Works,

Astronomy

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Family Planning, Amazon Style

Gender, Population, Environment

Author(s): Sally Ethelston

Source: Middle East Report , Sep. – Oct., 1994, No. 190, Gender, Population, Environment
(Sep. – Oct., 1994), pp. 2-5

Published by: Middle East Research and Information Project, Inc. (MERIP)

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Gender, Population,
Environment

Sally [helston

The Cairo neighborhood of Manshiet Nasir reflects

social and demographic circumstances common to

most countries in the region: rapid population growth

and increasing urbanization; scarcity of land, water

and other economic resources; and limits on women’s

social and economic autonomy.

Miriam lives with her family in Manshiet Nasir, orig? inally a squatter settlement at the foot of Cairo’s
Muqattam hills, now largely a brick-built community of
small apartment buildings and box-like single family
homes. Most now have piped-in water and electricity. Her
family is one of the thousands of zabbaleen (garbage col?
lector) families comprising a large Christian minority
among Manshiet Nasir’s mostly Muslim residents. They
live in a two-story, warehouse-like structure perhaps 25
feet high and about 20 feet square. Off to the side of the
main living space, a narrow room has just enough space
for a loom; a walled-in area behind the house is home to
the family’s 18 pigs.

Miriam is 17, and not yet married. What distinguish?
es her from many of her neighbors is the loom in her home,
and the fact that she is literate in Arabic and beginning
to learn English. Walking through the neighborhood,
Miriam is an enthusiastic guide to her community?point?
ing out a recycling workshop housing a machine for crush?
ing plastic for re-use, the veterinary clinic established
by the zabbaleen association, and a daycare center for
young children.

Through a convergence of local community activism and
international assistance, the zabbaleen and other residents
of Manshiet Nasir have witnessed some important changes
in their lives. Improved pumping systems ensure that a
majority of residents have access to potable water; immu?
nization campaigns have all but eliminated tetanus and
other vaccine-preventable diseases among women and chil-

Sally Ethelston is an editor of this magazine and works with Population
Action International.

Cairo outskirts.

dren. Tacit government recognition of the settlement means
that residents can, in effect, buy and sell property.
Voluntary organizations such as the Association for the
Protection of the Environment (Gama’at himayat al-bi’at
min al-talawuth) sponsor projects for women that combine
teaching functional literacy with ways of earning money?
thus the loom in Miriam’s home.1

Despite these improvements, Manshiet Nasir is still an
urban environmental nightmare. Zabbaleen women sort
through the garbage collected by their husbands and chil?
dren with bare hands, fearing that gloves will slow down
their work and add to their onerously long day. And the
refuse of modern-day Cairo?replete with deteriorating
batteries, broken glass and hospital waste, mixed in with
the food waste that goes to feed the pigs?poses a great
threat to public health. Among the tasks assigned to chil?
dren is the disassembling of used plastic syringes from
Cairo’s many hospitals.

Any garbage that cannot be reused in some way ends
up back in the Manshia’s narrow pathways until it is taken
to be burned. It covers the asphalt and mud streets with
a thick, soft and often slippery layer of trash. Inadequate
sewage systems overflow frequently, further endangering
the health of residents.

Middle East Report ? September-October 1994

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Manshiet Nasir can be viewed as one extreme of urban
environmental hazard in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Manshia reflects social, economic and demographic
trends and circumstances common to most countries in the

region: rapid population growth and increasing urban?
ization; scarcity of land, water and other economic resources;
and limits on women’s social and economic autonomy.

Many governments in the region view one or even all
of these factors as obstacles to economic and social devel?

opment, but often their policy responses have been ambiva?
lent. Programs aimed at slowing rates of population growth
have tended to focus solely on female reproductive behav?
ior through the provision of modern contraceptives, pay?
ing far less attention either to men’s roles in reproductive
decisions or to women’s other health needs. In addition,
governments often fail to take into account other fac?
tors that influence women’s reproductive choices, such as
their education, job opportunities and overall status.

Equally important is the failure of some governments
to persuade their citizens that slowing population growth
has benefits for them as individuals. Few have effective?

ly communicated the extent of natural resource limitations
in the region. And citizens’ general alienation from their
political systems reinforces their suspicions that efforts to

Middle East Report ? September-October 1994

Kristie Burns

slow population growth are merely another way in which
governments seek to protect the lifestyles of wealthy elites
by reducing pressures to achieve greater social and eco?
nomic equity. “Why is it easier to insert Norplant in a
woman’s arm than to tell a man in Mohandissin not to drive

his Mercedes?” asks Aida Seif al-Dowla, a founding mem?
ber of Al-Mar’a al-Jadida (New Woman), a research and
study center.2

In some countries, such a politically provocative ques?
tion is hardly ever raised. For the oil-rich states of the region,
high rates of population growth (above 3 percent in most
cases) have been viewed as satisfactory by governments
eager to meet the demand for labor but ambivalent or even
opposed to increased women’s work outside the home. This
view persists despite very real natural resource constraints.
In Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab
Emirates, per capita annual availability of renewable fresh
water is less than one-third of the 1,000 cubic meters regard?
ed as a benchmark of water scarcity.3

Beyond the limited availability of cultivable land and
fresh water, the degradation of existing resources is a prob?
lem throughout the region. Concentrations of air pollu?
tants such as sulfur dioxide (in Istanbul) and lead (in Cairo)
are well above the levels considered safe.4 Water pollution

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POPULATION TRBUDS

COUNTRIES

Algeria
Bahrain

Djibouti

Egypt

Population Natural % Age % Married Women
Mid-1994 Increase < 15 yrs. Using Contraceptives

(annual %) Total Modern
27.9 2.5 44 36 31

2.4 32 54 30

3.0 41

58.9 2.3 40 47

45

.7 5.0 60

61.2 3.6 47 22

19.9 3.7 48 18 10

5.4 1.5 31

4.2 3.3 41 40 27

1.3 3.3 43 35 32

Lebanon

Morocco

Saudi Arabia

Somalia

Turkey

United
Arab Emirates

West Bank

Western
Sahara

3.6 2.0 33

5.1 3.4 47

28.6 2.3 40 42

36

1.9 4.9 36 8

1.0 23 26 24

18.0 3.2 43

9.8 3.2 47

28.2 3.1 46 6

14.0 3.7 48

8.7 1.9 37 50 40

61.8 2.2 35 63 35

1.7 1.9 32

1.4 4.0 50

2.8

12.9 3.4 51 10

Comparative Countries

91.8 2.2 38 53

Pakistan

United States

Zimbabwe

126.4 2.8 44 12

260.8 0.7 22 74

11.2 3.0 48 43

Source: 1994 World Population Data Sheet, Population Reference Bureau, Inc., Washington DC,

is also a serious problem due to industrial wastes, agri?
cultural pesticides and other chemicals. The quality?and
thus the productivity?of agricultural land is threatened
by salination, which is a consequence of the expansion of
irrigated agriculture in countries like Egypt and Iraq.

Awareness of these environmental problems is grow?
ing in the region, according to Mustafa Tolba, the former
head of the UN Environment Program and now the pres?
ident of a non-profit environmental consulting firm.
“Developing countries no longer see concern for the envi?
ronment as a luxury,” says Tolba.5 And environmental
“problems” are being defined more broadly to encompass
such concerns as health, bad housing and poor sanitation.

Yet teaching alternate, more environmentally sound
behavior is extremely difficult, according to Emad Adly,

Secretary-General of the Arab Office for Youth
and the Environment. “You can’t ask peo?
ple to dispose of garbage properly if there’s
nowhere to put it; you can’t really talk about
water conservation without the technology
to make it happen; and you can’t buy healthy
food if it is not on the market. The fact is that
there are few alternatives to the way most
people currently live their lives.”6

At the international level, as awareness
of the challenges posed by population growth
and environmental degradation has in?
creased, so has concern for how linking the
two might affect women. Particularly trou?
bling is “the implication that women are
responsible for environmental degradation
as long as high fertility rates are viewed as
a significant cause of environmental pollu?
tion.” Such a perspective reduces choices of
family planning “to a means to an end rather
than a legitimate end in itself.”7

These concerns provoked sharp debate
at the forum of non-governmental organi?
zations (NGOs) held concurrently with the
1992 UN Conference on Environment and
Development in Rio de Janeiro. By the time
of the summit, population had been down?
graded from primary importance to a num?
ber of “cross-cutting” issues; and the Vatican,
with the help of a few countries, succeeded in
weakening Agenda 2l’s language on family
planning such that the word “contraceptive”
never even appeared. At the NGO forum,
those gathering in the Planeta Femea
(women’s tent) went back to the beginning to
ask: Is there a causal relationship between
population increase and environmental dete?
rioration? Given the emphasis of many devel?
oping countries’ family planning programs
on numerical demographic goals, rather than
on the right of individual women and men
to plan their families, would a framework
linking population and the environment fur?

ther strengthen the emphasis on top-down, coercive pop?
ulation control? For the majority of those attending the
discussions, the answer was yes.

Two years after Rio, the International Conference on
Population and Development (ICPD) is taking place in Cairo.
Focusing on population and sustainable development, the
ICPD reflects many of the concerns raised by women in Rio,
and includes a much greater emphasis on women’s needs
and aspirations. The ICPD’s draft Programme of Action’s
more holistic approach acknowledges that population, repro?
ductive rights and health, gender equality, the environment,
and development are inseparable.

Moving beyond “family planning” is a recurrent theme
of the articles in this issue of Middle East Report. Philippe
Fargues posits changes in population structure and inter-

45

69

36
Middle East Report ? September-October 1994
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generational and gender hierarchies as sources of social
change. Challenging the accepted wisdom regarding the
Arab world’s demographic explosion, Fargues argues that
the demographic transition to lower fertility in the region
is, for the most part, well under way. The crisis is social
and political, not demographic.

Homa Hoodfar notes the success of Iran’s government
in communicating the relevance of the population issue for
that society, the international community, and individu?
als. At the same time, she emphasizes the contradiction
between the government’s programmatic emphasis on
female contraceptive methods and its reluctance to grant
greater freedom and decision-making authority to women.

Nonprogrammatic factors affecting reproductive atti?
tudes and behavior are also the focus of Youssef Courbage’s
essay. He calls attention to how varying patterns of inter?
national migration have led to the “diffusion” of contrast?
ing norms of ideal family size, which is also being affect?
ed by labor force participation of women.

Back in Manshiet Nasir, Miriam is part of the changes
in the hierarchy Fargues describes. By learning to read
and write, she has already gone far beyond her parents.
With an independent source of income, her role in such
decisions as who she will marry and how many children
she will bear will be much stronger than her mother’s. And
her travels outside Manshia?made possible by the asso?
ciation in which she is emerging as a leader?are expand?
ing her perception of the possible.

Yet the interventions that have helped bring some
change to Miriam’s life do not come cheap. While the
preparatory process for Cairo has helped resolve some of
the political tensions evident in Rio, the issue of resources
remains problematic: will those with greatest control over
the world’s wealth be willing to make available even the
limited funds explicitly called for in the draft Programme
of Action?$17 billion by the year 2000, one-third of which
is slated to come from donors? Reflecting on progress since
the Earth Summit?and other international conferences

going back almost 20 years?Mustafa Tolba, for one, has
his doubts.

“The Rio conference called for a total of $725 billion,
$600 billion of which is to come from developing coun?
tries and $125 billion in aid,” he recalls. “What is available
now? The Global Environmental Facility has gone from
just $1.3 billion to $2.0 billion in three years?an extra few
hundred million. And the same will happen in Cairo. Money,
where will it come from and where will it go? The fact is
we, as an international community, are not serious. If all
the resolutions, declarations, and action plans promul?
gated and adopted had actually been translated into deeds,
we would not have environmental problems. Instead, we
have an environmental crisis.”

Effective change also carries a political price tag. While
NGOs are expected to play a key role in pushing forward
the agenda that emerges from Cairo?as they have in
Manshiet Nasir?they cannot substitute for government
action. “Everyone is putting great hope in the role of NGOs,
but it’s too much,” says Aida Seif al-Dowla. “They are not an

Middle East Report ? September-October 1994

alternative to a corrupt government that consistently seems
to prove that it doesn’t really care about the well-being of
its people.” Following the Cairo Conference, with all its extrav?
agance and whatever the merit of its proclamations, the task
of pushing the process of change in the face of existing hier?
archies of wealth and power will remain. ?

Footnotes

1 For a more complete account of both the history and the health profile of Manshiet Nasir,
see Belgin Tekce, Linda Oldham, Frederic C. Shorter, A Place to Live: Families and Child
Health in a Cairo Neighborhood (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994). See also
Marie Assaad and Nadra Garas, “Experiments in Community Development in a Zabbaleen
Settlement” Cairo Papers in Social Science Vol. 16 Monograph 4, Winter 1993-94 (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 1994).

2 Interview, June 1994.

3 For more on Saudi Arabia’s water resources and the concepts of water stress and water
scarcity, see Robert Engelman and Pamela LeRoy, Sustaining Water: Population and the
Future of Renewable Water Supplies (Washington, DC: Population Action International,
1993).

4 WHO/UNDP, 1992 Urban Air Pollution in Megacities of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

5 Interview, June 1994.

6 Interview, April 1994.

7 Susan Cohen, “The Road from Rio to Cairo: Toward a Common Agenda,” International
Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 1993, p.61.

Women in the Middle East

Image and Reality
A Pamphlet Series from MERIP

? Women and Work
NEW! Nadia Hijab provides a thorough
overview of Arab women’s relationship with the
workplace as played out against a backdrop of
rapid social and economic change. (July 1994)

? Gender and Family
NEW! Suad Joseph explores the broad patterns
of gender and family dynamics in the Arab
world and their impact on women. (September
1994)

? Women and Politics
Sarah Graham-Brown provides an insightful,
eight-page exploration of women’s struggle for
social, political and legal rights. (May 1993)

? Women’s Rights
Ramla Khalidi and Judith Tucker explore
gender and power issues as Arab women see
them. A concise overview of women’s legal
status and political rights. (February 1992)

None of this series has appeared
in Middle East Report

Order from inside back cover under
Special Publications, or call

with credit card information 202-223-3677.

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• Contents

[unnumbered]
p. 2
p. 3
p. 4
p. 5

• Issue Table of Contents

Middle East Report, No. 190 (Sep. – Oct., 1994) pp. 1-32
Front Matter [pp. ]
From the Editors [pp. 1]
Gender, Population, Environment [pp. 2-5]
From Demographic Explosion to Social Rupture [pp. 6-10]
Devices and Desires: Population Policy and Gender Roles in the Islamic Republic [pp. 11-17]
Autonomy and Gender in Egyptian Families [pp. 18]
Demographic Change in the Arab World: The Impact of Migration, Education and Taxes in Egypt and Morocco [pp. 19-22]
Mediations: Reality Checks [pp. 23]
Update
From Ballot Box to Battlefield: The War of the Two ‘Alis [pp. 24-27]
Editor’s Bookshelf: Terrorism, Class and Democracy in Egypt [pp. 28-29]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 30-31]
Editor’s Picks [pp. 32]
Back Matter [pp. ]

Culture & Environment:
Anthropological Approaches to
Environmental Issues
ANT3CAE

WEEK 3: Population and Environment

Dr Nicholas Smith

Plan for session

• Situate the problem: population –
environment

• Definitions
• Demography – Anthropology
• Population – environment:

arguments/theories/trends
• Global population through lens of

historical ecology
2

3

Global Population: a long-
term view

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/

7

/77/World-Population-1

8

00-

21

00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/World-Population-1800-2100

Global population: UN
predictions

4

Global population continues to
rise but fertility rates

dropping

5
http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/fertility/world-fertility-patterns-20

15

6

7

8

9

Fertility rate – global decline

Influenced by:
• access to contraceptives;
• health care improvements;
• women’s access to education and

employment;
• widespread shift from rural to urban

livelihoods;
• diminishing cultural/religious pressures

for large families.
10

11

Ecological Definition:
Populations

• ‘A population is a group of
individuals of the same species that
occupy a given area and breed with
each other… populations are units
through which energy flows, matter
cycles and information is
transmitted’ (Moran 2008: 62)

12

Demography (Barfield 1997)

• Study of causes and consequences of
population growth/decline

• Quantitative emphasis: population size,
density, age structure, sex ratios, growth
rate, births, deaths, migration

• Distinctive methodological toolkit,
however invokes many of the concepts
that are used in any social/cultural
analysis

13

Anthropology of
Demography

• For anthropologists:

‘demography’s numerical concepts embody primary and
moral dimensions of human behaviour and identify
processes and structural relationships that profoundly
influence the direction of social and cultural change.’
(Barfield 1997: 110)

‘For anthropology, demography is best understood as
human population ecology sensitized to the moral and
political dimensions of human lives. (Barfield 1997: 111)

Global Population:
demographic factors

• birth rate
• mortality rate
• migration
• Conflict; disease (e.g. HIV/AIDS); famine
• fertility rate

14

Global Population: “the
demographic divide”

• “Developing” and “developed”
• “Poor”/”affluent”
• “Global north”/ “global south”
• “Core” and “periphery”

15

Global population density

16

Global population:
cartogram

17

View post on imgur.com

Arguments about the causal
relationship between

population-environment
• Thomas Malthus 18th C
• Neo-Malthusians (1970s+)
• Anti-Malthusians: Danish economist –

Ester Boserup (1960s); US economist
Julian Simon (1980s-90s)

• Biologists Ehrlich & Commoner and env.
scientist Holdren – IPAT equation (1970s)

• Population – ecological footprint (ongoing)
18

19

Thomas Malthus (1798)

• All human communities tend to increase
exponentially if enough food

• Once humans have turned enough land
into agricultural and pastoral production
struggle to meet needs of growing
population

• Limits to population growth: disease,
famine, violent conflict (=human
suffering)

Neo-Malthusians: the Club
of Rome (1972)

• An ecological version of Malthus
• Human population growing faster than

our capacity to support ourselves from
finite resources i.e. soil, water, forests.

• “Limits to growth” – “carrying capacity”
• Reducing human population will avert

catastrophe
• Focus on fertility rates in “developing”

countries
20

Neo-Malthusians: the
Population “Bomb”

(Paul & Anne Ehrlich 1972)

“The explosive growth of human
population is the most significant
terrestrial event of the past million
millennia … no geological event in a
billion years … has posed a threat to
terrestrial life comparable to that of
human overpopulation”

21

22

Earth’s resources finite,
yes; but human ingenuity

infinite (Boserup 1965)
•Population growth stimulates technological
change and agricultural intensification (not
agricultural/technological advance that enables
population growth)
•Population density results in land scarcity which
triggers agricultural intensification through
application of improved technology (e.g. better
tools, irrigation, terracing and shortening of
fallows)

23

the IPAT equation (Commoner, Erhlich
& Holdren 1970s)

• Common assumption that greater population =
greater environmental degradation

• IPAT equation: Human Impact = Population x
Affluence (per capita level of consumption) x
Technology (I = PAT)

• More people does not necessarily mean more
emissions (ecological footprint)

• Following Boserup, higher populations may lead
to less harmful environmental impact

24

Per capita global ecological footprint

Per capita global ecological footprint: WWF
Living Planet Report 2018

25https://www.wwf.org.au/knowledge-centre/living-planet-report#gs.zpbsjd

https://www.wwf.org.au/knowledge-centre/living-planet-report

Ecological footprint per
capita

• The countries with the biggest ecological footprint per person are:
• 1) Qatar (2.6 million approx.)
• 2) Kuwait (4.2 Million approx.)
• 3) United Arab Emirates (9.5 million approx.)
• 4) Denmark (5.7 million approx.)
• 5) United States (3

26

million approx.)
• 6) Belgium (11.4 million approx.)
• 7) Australia (24 million approx.)
• 8) Canada (35 million approx.)
• 9) Netherlands (17 million approx.)
• 10) Ireland (4.7 million approx.)

26

Ecological footprint per
capita

• The 10 countries with the smallest ecological footprint per
person are:

• 1) Occupied Palestinian Territory (pop: 2.7 million approx.)
• 2) Timor Leste (pop: 1.4 million approx.)
• 3) Afghanistan (pop: 35 million approx.)
• 4) Haiti (pop: 11 million approx.)
• 5) Eritrea (pop: 5 million approx.)
• 6) Bangladesh (pop: 166 million approx.)
• 7) Rwanda (pop: 12 million approx.)
• 8) Pakistan (pop: 200 million approx.)
• 9) Democratic Republic of Congo (pop: 83 million approx.)
• 10) Nepal (pop:

29

million approx.)

27

28

Population, consumption
and climate change (Wilk 2009)

• Consumer economy in ‘developed’ countries a
way of life based on moving and transforming
huge amounts of materials and energy

• US individual uses approx 60 X as much material
each year as a citizen of ‘developing’ country i.e.
Mozambique

• China and India even while consuming less on per
capita basis now rival national levels of
consumption and carbon emissions of ‘developed’
countries

Historical ecology: Mayan
population
“collapse”

29

Historical ecology
• An approach to human-environment interactions

that incorporates (past and future) long-term
perspective (often over several centuries)

• Humans as integral feature of all ecosystems
• “may be applied to spatial and temporal frames at

any resolution, it finds particularly rich sources
of data at the “landscape” scale, where human
activity and cognition interact with biophysical
systems, and where archaeological, historical,
ethnographic, environmental, and other records
are plentiful”

(http://www.herculeslandscapes.eu/blog.php?what_is_historical_ecology&id=10)
30

http://www.hercules-landscapes.eu/blog.php%3Fwhat_is_historical_ecology&id=10

31

An archaeological puzzle:
why did the Maya

population collapse?
• Maya civilisation reached its peak around

700 -800 AD
• At the time one of the most culturally rich

and densely populated societies in the
world

• Central authority collapsed and elaborate
cities fell into disuse well before Spanish
colonisers arrived

• Most popular explanation is ecological
collapse

32

Hypothesis 1: an ecological
explanation (Townsend 2000)

• Mayans attempted to live on maize as a staple
food in a tropical lowland environment while
under increasing population pressure

• Deforestation, the invasion of grasses, soil
depletion, and erosion cut productivity

• Nutrition and health deteriorate
• Vulnerability to diseases, diseases spread aided

by dense settlement
• political unrest
• Led to dispersal and depopulation.

33

Hypothesis 2: the
Malthusian explanation

(Diamond 2005)

• 5 pronged collapse of Maya civilisation:
• (1) population growth outstripped available

resources (breach of carrying capacity)
• (2) deforestation and hillside erosion: soil

nutrient loss
• (3) conflict over resources
• (4) prolonged drought (the Great Warming)
• (5) social unrest ignored by Mayan elites

34

Hypothesis 3: Maya as
intensive agriculturalists

(Sutton & Anderson 2010)

• Four major dimensions to their agricultural system:
• (1) Complex system of orchards interspersed throughout

the forest (agro forestry) for food lumber and aesthetics.
• (2) Large numbers of small terraced gardens
• (3) Complex system of chinampas in areas such as swamps

not normally thought (by scientists) to be suited to
agriculture. The canals b/w the raised fields were home to
turtles and fish, which were both eaten.

• (4) Extensive swidden agriculture

35

Hypothesis 3: Maya as
intensive agriculturalists
(Sutton & Anderson 2010)

• Maya culture ultimately collapsed in central
lowlands but survived in northern and southern
regions of Maya territory

• Collapse most likely as result of drought
• Other possible causal factors: deforestation;

shortening of swidden cycles; erosion and/or
silting of chinampas;

• ongoing warfare.

36

Summary
• Historical ecology – Can we learn from the past? (Maya example)
• Common assumption that greater population = greater environmental

degradation (ongoing influence of [neo]Malthusian perspectives)
• This view modified to an extent by IPAT equation
• More people does not necessarily mean more emissions (population

growth in context of ecological footprint); Boserup (1965) suggests higher
populations may lead to less harmful environmental impact (Maya
example)

• Population, reproductive rights and health, gender equality, the
environment and development all inter-related

• Moral and political dimension to issues of population, environment,
consumption

• Think demographically: Global population continues to rise however
global fertility is declining.

• Issue of environmental impact of any given population through lens of
political ecology yields particular insights; factors include: gender
equality; inequality; power –who holds it and who doesn’t (capacity to
make decisions and good governance); global–local forces; impact of
colonisation etc.

37

References
ABS 2008. Population Projections, Australia, 2006 to 2101, Australian Government Publishing Service:

Canberra. Catalogue No. 3222.0 .
Barfield, T. 1997. The Dictionary of Anthropology. Blackwell Publishing: Mas, USA & Oxford, UK
Boserup, E. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under

Population Pressure. Aldine, Chicago.
Brown, L. G. Gardner & B. Halweil. 2006. ‘Beyond Malthus: Sixteen Dimensions to the Population

Problem’ in Haenn, N. & R. Wilk. (eds) The Environment in Anthropology, New York University
Press; New York & London, pp.80-86.

Durham, W. 1995, ‘Political Ecology and Environmental Destruction in Latin America’. In The Social
Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America, M. Painter & W. Durham, (eds.) Anne
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Ehrlich. P. 1968, The Population Bomb. Sierra Club/Ballantine Books, New York.
Ethelston, S. 2006. ‘Gender, Population, Environment’ In Haenn, N. & R. Wilk. 2006. The Environment

in Anthropology, New York University Press; New York & London, pp.113-117.
Kunwar, R. and R. W. Bussmann 2008. ‘Ethnobotany in the Nepal Himalaya’. Journal of Ethnobiology

and Ethnomedicine, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 24-32.
Notestein, F. 1945. ‘Population – The Long View’ in P.W. Shultz (ed) Food for the World. University of

Chicago Press, Chicago, pp.
Robbins, P. (ed) 2007. Encyclopedia of Environment and Society vol. 4. Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Accessed 23 February 2017.
Stonich, S. 1993. “I Am Destroying the Land!”: The Political Ecology of Poverty and Environmental

Destruction in Honduras. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado.
Sutton. M. & E. Anderson. 2010. Introduction to Cultural Ecology. Altamira Press: London, New York
Wallerstein, I. 1974, 1980 & 1989 (vols. 1-3). The Modern World System. Academic Press, New York.
Wilk, R. 2009. ‘Consuming Ourselves to Death’ in Crate & Nuttall Anthropology and Climate Change:

from encounters to actions, S. Crate & M. Nuttall (eds.) Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California,
pp 265–276.