Niger Is Hurt by Runaway Birthrates

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/world/africa/niger-is-hurt-by-runaway-birthrates.html

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DAKAR, Senegal — Nearly every year, the West African desert nation of Niger faces a food crisis, and nearly every year the international aid agencies, including the United Nations, send out urgent appeals for funds to feed the country’s starving millions. This year is no different. Niger, where women pick bitter green berries off scrubby trees to stave off starvation, cannot feed itself.

That unchanging reality is buttressed by another one, equally stubborn and deeply frustrating to demographers. With an average of nearly eight children per woman, Niger, by some measures the poorest country in the world, also has its highest birthrate. At current rates, the population will double in the next 15 years, to 35 million from over 17 million.

Does that make sense for a country that is perennially on the brink of mass hunger — one that is far from having the resources to feed its current population, let alone one twice as big? Obviously not, say the demographers. And yet precious little is being done about it, they say. A lack of commitment by aid agencies and officials to family planning means that birthrates and contraceptive use are hardly budging.

Elaborate plans have been drawn up over the years, but little has changed, said Jean-Pierre Guengant, an emeritus research demographer at the Sorbonne in Paris who has specialized in the Sahel region for many years.

“It’s like a game: They say they are committing themselves, they get the money, and then they say there are ‘societal constraints,”’ Mr. Guengant said in a recent phone interview from his home on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. “It is the ‘Population Club.’ They go to seminars all over the place. But finally, they don’t have much motivation to change things. Because then the funding stops.”

Niger, with its exploding population and its vast unfertile territory, has one of the world’s lowest rates of contraceptive use, Mr. Guengant noted. The country’s women, held back by their husbands and by imams who inveigh against “Western” notions like birth control, don’t demand it.

“Not a single one of the necessary conditions” for reducing the country’s out-of-control birthrate is in place, Mr. Guengant said. What is offered in terms of contraception is insufficient, he said. “The demand isn’t there, and the political commitment is not there, either,” he said.

Indeed, the “Sahel Humanitarian Response Plan 2014-2016,” a 45-page United Nations report released this year, doesn’t even mention contraception or family planning, though it does go on at length about the urgency of Niger’s food needs and speaks of “further deterioration” in the country’s situation.

The plan lists five “humanitarian priorities” for Niger and its suffering and impoverished Sahel neighbors. Family planning is not one of them. And yet in its latest humanitarian bulletin for Niger, the United Nations notes that over five million people are now living in the country’s “food-insecure” zones. The United Nations’ hat is held out to the West, again. This time the demand is for over $2 billion in emergency aid for countries in the region.

“We can’t solve the drivers of this crisis — we’re not the ones to do it with an emergency toolbox,” said Robert Piper, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief for the Sahel, explaining why the document fails to even acknowledge family planning. “We will be here forever unless some basic issues are fixed.”

There is no mystery about the immense benefits that Niger and its neighbors would realize if they brought their birthrates under control.

The so-called Tigers in East Asia have recorded sharply falling birthrates since the 1960s. And in a recent, influential paper titled “African Demography,” Mr. Guengant and a fellow demographer, John F. May, noted, “Human capital formation investments (for example, education and health) and job creation appear to have been greatly facilitated by a rapid decline in fertility.”

In the interview, Mr. Guengant drew this conclusion: “If you don’t get a handle on birthrates, you are going nowhere. The nongovernmental organizations have not been up to the job. Everybody looks at everybody else. Nobody has the political courage. And nothing is moving.”