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The 70s were a turbulent decade across the world, defined by massive protests against the Vietnam War in USA; the Bangladesh Liberation War and the India-Pakistan Border Conflicts in South Asia; and civil wars, coups d'état, and civil rights movements in South America and Africa. But as the dust settled and the Cold War battle for hearts and minds in newly independent post-colonial nations picked up pace, American business elites and geopolitical power brokers became obsessed with a new spectre: overpopulation.
It all began with a book: 1968's 'The Population Bomb' by American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In the 1960s, Ehrlich was known for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies, but The Population Bomb, written after a 1966 visit to New Delhi, repositioned him as the 70s' foremost proponent of population control because of his predictions and warnings about the consequences of Malthusian population growth, including famine and resource depletion. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," Ehrlich ominously stated. "Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
Published at a time of tremendous geopolitical conflict and social upheaval, Ehrlich’s book argued that many of the 70s' most alarming events had a single, underlying cause: too many people, packed into too little space, taking too much from the Earth. Unless humanity reduced its burgeoning numbers — soon — all of the planet would face "mass starvation" on "a dying planet". However, according to critics, rather than science and data-backed projections, Ehrlich's neo-Malthusian premonitions were rooted in his association with rampant white supremacists and eugenicists at the Stanford University, where he worked, who proposed 'improving' the human race through selective breeding.
Although the book was initially a failure, Ehrlich's alarmist predictions and warnings — largely unfounded and later proven incorrect — found sympathetic ears at major Western institutions like the World Bank and 'philanthropic' foundations backed by names as prominent as Ford and Rockefeller. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the American advertising mogul Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilisation and other organisations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. In poorer, developing, post-colonial nations, health workers’ salaries were incentivised against the number of vasectomies and intra-uterine birth control devices inserted into women, and this encouraged abuse and exploitation. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were distributed from helicopters hovering over remote villages. And millions were sterilised — often coercively, sometimes illegally, and frequently in unsafe conditions — in nations like Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.
These concerted efforts were immensely successful at spreading this apocalyptic vision of population control across the world — particularly in India. During the Emergency of 1975, Douglas Ensminger, an official at the Ford Foundation created the infrastructure for and helped the Indira Gandhi administration conduct large-scale sterilisation programs in India, where millions of men and women in urban and rural areas alike were forced to undergo vasectomies and IUD implants in the hope of curbing the threat of population explosion.
India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi — and strong-armed by the US government — embraced population control measures that in many states required sterilisation for men and women to obtain social benefits like access to water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, and pay raises. More than 8 million men and women were sterilised in 1975 alone.
Today, such regressive population control measures are a thing of the past. Contrary to Ehrlich's predictions, famine has not been increasing but has become rarer. When The Population Bomb appeared, one out of four people in the world was hungry according to the UNFP. Today, the proportion of hungry is about one out of ten. Meanwhile, the world’s population has more than doubled in the last 50 years — and we are still here because the world has collectively learned to use Earth's limited resources more efficiently and increased global food production through modern agricultural techniques, high-yield seeds, and advanced irrigation.
To learn more about how 1920s eugenics and white supremacism fuelled the global population control project of 1970s and 80s, read 'Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World' by Malcolm Harris.
