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The Paradox of Poverty: Socio-economic aspects of population growth
274
WORLD
DEVELOPMENT
of whole food, the nutritive energy content, and the quantity of crude protein. They do this, on an averaged basis, for UK farms of various sizes and types, for UK crops and livestock, for fisheries, and for a variety of other systems at differing stages of industrialization. The appendices are largely methodological in character, and range from discussion of the whole energy -analysis approach to detailed consideration of the treatment of certain general inputs such as fertilizers. Following the recent rise in oil prices, we have witnessed an outpouring of work on energy budgets and energy analysis. Much of it has been i&judged, and many economists have become thoroughly disenchanted with the whole approach. It would be a great pity if Mr. Leach’s thoughtful book were to be dismissed unread as the offspring of a discredited species. He is very far from treating energy as the sole scarce resource. His aim (or one of them) is rather ‘to explore some of the all-important relations between energy, land and labour usage in food production using physical quantities to which any present or projected monetary costs can then be put’. Thus, while adopting an input-output methodology, he is unable to use the highly aggregated published tables since along with their aggregation, these have current values embedded in them. Instead, he relies on the work of Chapman et al. on the 1968 Census of Production Reports which contain detailed physical input-output information. While Mr. Leach’s intentions and line of attack are both laudable, it is a pity that he should see them, and stress that he sees them, as being somehow outside of economics. ‘Economics, and hence ail activities based on its guidance, has no real mechanism for coping with resource depletion’. He sees it as essentially myopia, necessarily limited to today’s prices and perceptions of value; hence the ‘conventional calculus’ of economics will fail to catch many of the most relevant factors in its net and be a poor guide in situations such as the present which offer a ‘challenge to the broad-
ness and subtlety of our vision’. This judgement seems divisive and mistaken. Myopia is an occupational disease of human beings, and economists certainly suffer from it; but economics as a discipline, and certainly of the form practised by Mr. Leach, is if anything a corrective. AlI this, however, is to criticize the gloss rather than the substance. And the latter provides a valuable part of the apparatus that is needed to achieve Mr. Leach’s aim. It must be stressed that it is only a part. Data are required on other physical relations than those considered in the book. In particular, and most difficult, information is required on the possibilities for physical substitution in the face of possible changes in relative prices. In this respect the energy budgets suffer from the same drawback as most other standard input-output compilations; they refer to system averages rather than to incremental relations. The broad conclusions of the study are that the UK ‘food industry’ - it is stressed that it is not enough to analyze agriculture alone - is very energy-intensive; indeed it is on a par in this respect with heavy engineering. A main cause, as is now well known, is the concentration on animal products. (Illustrative of this concentration is the estimate that only 8 - 13% of agricultural land in the UK is devoted to providing food direct to man, as opposed to indirectly via animals.) Further, that it is unrealistic for developing countries to attempt to model their agricultural and food-related activities on these lines; and hence that alternative routes to agricultural development must be found. It is in this last respect that Mr. Leach has least to offer, though he does stress the advantages of bioconversion and possibly more direct use of solar power. He has, however, made a large contribution in stressing the importance of this question, and providing much of the data that will be needed in the effort to answer it. D. L. Bevan St, John’s Co’ilege, Oxford
The Paradox of Poverty: Socio-Economic Aspects of PopuIation Growth. Edited by Scarlett Epstein and Darrell Jackson (India: Macmillan, 1976; for the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex; E3.00 + Sop postage). Professor Epstein combines social anthropology with economics and political science. She believes that to build a model on a macro-scale, one has to begin by finding out what happens at the micro-scale through as many field studies
as possible. The wisdom of this approach would appear obvious; yet it is rarely adopted by planners. The data on which action is taken by the agencies promoting family planning in the developing countries are very scant, and are
BOOK REVIEWS
often biased by the assumption that motivations are the same in various parts of the world,. irrespective of socio-economic levels. Too many children, family planners maintain, make the poor poorer and lead the nation to bankruptcy. Hence countries like India give a high priority to sterilization programmes. These programmes are not always popular. Professor Epstein argues that this suspicion of the poor makes very good sense in countries where there is no social security or old age benefits. The main capital formation of the poor is children. Poverty breeds many such paradoxes. Professor Epstein has set up an ingenious project to study these paradoxes at the grassroots in eight villages in Kenya, Nigeria, India and Sri Lanka. Her field workers are Ph.D. students from the countries where they are working but they have all been trained at the Institute of Development Studies for one year and they all use the same multi-disciplinary techniques to collect their data. This provides, for the first time, the opportunity to make quantifiable cross-cultural comparisons. The Paradox of Poverty is the first publication of this on-going project and presents, in the form of a symposium, the preliminary findings of Professor Epstein’s team. Some of these findings are interesting indeed. Thus, in rural Bengal it takes a fertile woman until she is past thirty before she has ensured one son-survivor, and socially, as well as economically, such a son is the key to parental security. Professor Epstein, therefore, argues that to concentrate on teaching contraception to young couples in rural India is not productive and that money spent on providing old age pensions would be much more effective in reducing the number of children. In Roman Catholic Malta, the birth-rate dropped by more than half in the two decades during which
215
infant mortality was quartered and life expectancy doubled. In the developing world life expectancy has increased considerably, but infant mortality is still too high to provide a motivation to plan or reduce the size of the family amongst the poorer sections of society. In Africa various cherished ideas, ranging from parental immortality to supremacy of one’s tribe, require dynamic reproduction; so dynamic, indeed, that when the Kikuyus felt threatened, they took an oath against birthcontrol and sent their women back to the clinics to have their loops removed. Birth-rates in Africa are so high that a population increase of 3.5% p.a. is common; the Luyias manage a staggering 4.2%. In Sri Lanka, where the birthrate is also high and daughters inherit like sons, a case is given where it took a mere three generations for an estate to be divided into 384 parts. In the Punjab, where the Green Revolution is making the richer peasants richer, the influx of landless labourers from neighbouring areas keeps agricultural wages down so that the poor stay poor. Another of poverty’s paradoxes is that those who would gain most by educating their children are those least able to afford to send them to school because child labour is part of their subsistence and because they cannot afford the fees; yet, as the paper on the Igbo of Nigeria shows, nothing is as productive of wealth as education. Now that Professor Epstein’s team has gone back to the field it will produce a steady stream of follow-up data. This will be practically useful as well as academically interesting for until they know what motivates fertility decisions and what effect large families have on the social structure, planners will continue to plan in ‘Wonderland’. Taya Zinkin
WORLD
DEVELOPMENT
of whole food, the nutritive energy content, and the quantity of crude protein. They do this, on an averaged basis, for UK farms of various sizes and types, for UK crops and livestock, for fisheries, and for a variety of other systems at differing stages of industrialization. The appendices are largely methodological in character, and range from discussion of the whole energy -analysis approach to detailed consideration of the treatment of certain general inputs such as fertilizers. Following the recent rise in oil prices, we have witnessed an outpouring of work on energy budgets and energy analysis. Much of it has been i&judged, and many economists have become thoroughly disenchanted with the whole approach. It would be a great pity if Mr. Leach’s thoughtful book were to be dismissed unread as the offspring of a discredited species. He is very far from treating energy as the sole scarce resource. His aim (or one of them) is rather ‘to explore some of the all-important relations between energy, land and labour usage in food production using physical quantities to which any present or projected monetary costs can then be put’. Thus, while adopting an input-output methodology, he is unable to use the highly aggregated published tables since along with their aggregation, these have current values embedded in them. Instead, he relies on the work of Chapman et al. on the 1968 Census of Production Reports which contain detailed physical input-output information. While Mr. Leach’s intentions and line of attack are both laudable, it is a pity that he should see them, and stress that he sees them, as being somehow outside of economics. ‘Economics, and hence ail activities based on its guidance, has no real mechanism for coping with resource depletion’. He sees it as essentially myopia, necessarily limited to today’s prices and perceptions of value; hence the ‘conventional calculus’ of economics will fail to catch many of the most relevant factors in its net and be a poor guide in situations such as the present which offer a ‘challenge to the broad-
ness and subtlety of our vision’. This judgement seems divisive and mistaken. Myopia is an occupational disease of human beings, and economists certainly suffer from it; but economics as a discipline, and certainly of the form practised by Mr. Leach, is if anything a corrective. AlI this, however, is to criticize the gloss rather than the substance. And the latter provides a valuable part of the apparatus that is needed to achieve Mr. Leach’s aim. It must be stressed that it is only a part. Data are required on other physical relations than those considered in the book. In particular, and most difficult, information is required on the possibilities for physical substitution in the face of possible changes in relative prices. In this respect the energy budgets suffer from the same drawback as most other standard input-output compilations; they refer to system averages rather than to incremental relations. The broad conclusions of the study are that the UK ‘food industry’ - it is stressed that it is not enough to analyze agriculture alone - is very energy-intensive; indeed it is on a par in this respect with heavy engineering. A main cause, as is now well known, is the concentration on animal products. (Illustrative of this concentration is the estimate that only 8 - 13% of agricultural land in the UK is devoted to providing food direct to man, as opposed to indirectly via animals.) Further, that it is unrealistic for developing countries to attempt to model their agricultural and food-related activities on these lines; and hence that alternative routes to agricultural development must be found. It is in this last respect that Mr. Leach has least to offer, though he does stress the advantages of bioconversion and possibly more direct use of solar power. He has, however, made a large contribution in stressing the importance of this question, and providing much of the data that will be needed in the effort to answer it. D. L. Bevan St, John’s Co’ilege, Oxford
The Paradox of Poverty: Socio-Economic Aspects of PopuIation Growth. Edited by Scarlett Epstein and Darrell Jackson (India: Macmillan, 1976; for the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex; E3.00 + Sop postage). Professor Epstein combines social anthropology with economics and political science. She believes that to build a model on a macro-scale, one has to begin by finding out what happens at the micro-scale through as many field studies
as possible. The wisdom of this approach would appear obvious; yet it is rarely adopted by planners. The data on which action is taken by the agencies promoting family planning in the developing countries are very scant, and are
BOOK REVIEWS
often biased by the assumption that motivations are the same in various parts of the world,. irrespective of socio-economic levels. Too many children, family planners maintain, make the poor poorer and lead the nation to bankruptcy. Hence countries like India give a high priority to sterilization programmes. These programmes are not always popular. Professor Epstein argues that this suspicion of the poor makes very good sense in countries where there is no social security or old age benefits. The main capital formation of the poor is children. Poverty breeds many such paradoxes. Professor Epstein has set up an ingenious project to study these paradoxes at the grassroots in eight villages in Kenya, Nigeria, India and Sri Lanka. Her field workers are Ph.D. students from the countries where they are working but they have all been trained at the Institute of Development Studies for one year and they all use the same multi-disciplinary techniques to collect their data. This provides, for the first time, the opportunity to make quantifiable cross-cultural comparisons. The Paradox of Poverty is the first publication of this on-going project and presents, in the form of a symposium, the preliminary findings of Professor Epstein’s team. Some of these findings are interesting indeed. Thus, in rural Bengal it takes a fertile woman until she is past thirty before she has ensured one son-survivor, and socially, as well as economically, such a son is the key to parental security. Professor Epstein, therefore, argues that to concentrate on teaching contraception to young couples in rural India is not productive and that money spent on providing old age pensions would be much more effective in reducing the number of children. In Roman Catholic Malta, the birth-rate dropped by more than half in the two decades during which
215
infant mortality was quartered and life expectancy doubled. In the developing world life expectancy has increased considerably, but infant mortality is still too high to provide a motivation to plan or reduce the size of the family amongst the poorer sections of society. In Africa various cherished ideas, ranging from parental immortality to supremacy of one’s tribe, require dynamic reproduction; so dynamic, indeed, that when the Kikuyus felt threatened, they took an oath against birthcontrol and sent their women back to the clinics to have their loops removed. Birth-rates in Africa are so high that a population increase of 3.5% p.a. is common; the Luyias manage a staggering 4.2%. In Sri Lanka, where the birthrate is also high and daughters inherit like sons, a case is given where it took a mere three generations for an estate to be divided into 384 parts. In the Punjab, where the Green Revolution is making the richer peasants richer, the influx of landless labourers from neighbouring areas keeps agricultural wages down so that the poor stay poor. Another of poverty’s paradoxes is that those who would gain most by educating their children are those least able to afford to send them to school because child labour is part of their subsistence and because they cannot afford the fees; yet, as the paper on the Igbo of Nigeria shows, nothing is as productive of wealth as education. Now that Professor Epstein’s team has gone back to the field it will produce a steady stream of follow-up data. This will be practically useful as well as academically interesting for until they know what motivates fertility decisions and what effect large families have on the social structure, planners will continue to plan in ‘Wonderland’. Taya Zinkin