The Philippine Online Chronicles

October 31^st marks the symbolic birth of the 7 billionth person in the world. All over the globe, pictures of babies have been sprouting captioned as the 7 billionth baby. The entire hype over the 7 billionth kid is born by publicity over people's simple fascination for large and even numbers – 7,000,000,000 with all its zeros seems so much more significant than any other number, the same way November 11, 2011 experienced its moment of fame, as if any other date can be capriciously rewinded and repeated.

First things first: population studies, though in vogue in our statistics-loving culture, is still a hazy field. Even the United Nations, which has chosen a Filipino girl as the 7 billionth kid, knows that it's representative child is symbolic at best – census and population studies are generally inaccurate because of technical and logistic limits – imagine the amount of resources needed just to count each person in the world. As with all things involving the social, the margin of error is significant and to a large extent insurmountable.

Return of the Malthusian panic

One of the heavily underlined points behind this 'special' birth is the issue of overpopulation. The crucial point, however, is the extent to which overpopulation is actually an issue. Population as an issue has taken the brunt and has been turned into the scape goat for many social ills, the logic being: with so many people in our global village (read: small world, limited resources, finite space), naturally food, housing, and other resource shortages will take place. As anyone who has packed traveling bags knows, you can only fit so many shirts in your luggage. Seemingly utterly logical then that too many people is bad for the planet. Of course, no one wants to blame the little kids sleeping cutely on their mother's bosoms. Few, however, seem ready to save the kids from blame by actually pointing the problem on something other than over population.

Resource vs Management

Perhaps the most important point when it comers to the issue of population is the balance between resource and management. The food crisis is usually correlated with rising populations, but this is another instance of victim blaming. Again, the logic underlining this prophecy is that too many people contribute to the diminution of the limited resources not just in food but also in water, housing, and even social services. This is the Malthusian panic reincarnated, under the outdated assumption that people multiply exponentially while resources such as food grow arithmetically. What the Malthusian panic-mongers conveniently leave out the picture is that we are no longer living in the 17^th century, and that the tremendous advances in science and technology have not only prolonged human life (to bolster arguments that the population should be controlled precisely because people don't die quick enough) but have also revolutionized agriculture

Even with other factors such as the ever-present climate change in the story, there is still enough slices in the pie for our population. The issue is whether the slices are distributed. As the mantra of the Occupy Wall street movement succinctly points out, the issue is that the 1 percent has the share of the 99 percent. In the United States where the Occupy movement is presently centered, the representatives of the 99 percent are still relatively well-fed. If the American 99 percent can live with relatively high standards of living with their meager 1 percent, imagine how prosperous the entire globe would be if the global 99 percent got their 99 percent.

Science and the population

Overpopulation is a also convenient platform for proselytizing and moralizing on science because science and overpopulation studies go hand in hand. We know that there are a lot of people in the world precisely because of advancements in science that has allowed organizations and governments to conduct better census and surveys than before. The other link between overpopulation and science is the growing fear that the advances in medicine may be unjustly prolonging human lives. With all the fancy things that medicine brings, news of aging populations have become salient. Octogenarians which were once a rare breed now have institutions and industries to themselves, such as nursing homes and the other quintessential Filipino job: care-giving.

The unnoticed side of the coin is that medicine's advances does not correlate with its accessibility. Though a lot of things now come with a cure, the cure is nowhere cheap, which is precisely why companies such as Pfizer are billion dollar industries and why medicine patenting and research is lucrative. So inaccessible is health care that in the Philippines, Congress has yet to pass the reproductive health bill to ensure that more women will have control over their bodies in one of the most difficult things to do: form a human being inside them for nine months. If anything need be said about science and health care with regards to population, it is that people need it, more of it, and cheap.

The 7 billionth kid is a symbol with a misplaced referent. Indeed, it is wrong to even include overpopulation statistics as an indictment against RH bill detractors such as the church, because family planning should not be about overpopulation but about whether the woman or the couple feel responsible and adequate enough for the daunting task of bringing up not just a fetus, but a human being. The 7 billionth kid is not a testament to a crowded planet but one made anxious because of economic manipulation.

The accurate referent for the symbolic seven billionth is the way by which resources are managed and controlled today. It is not that resources are scarce, but that resources are hoarded. Once one factors in the spirit of privatization and profiteering prevalent today, the issue is demystified as another ploy for the rich to get richer: by limiting resources and spreading rumors about overpopulation and food crises, the market turns malleable and receptive to price hikes. If there is one thing that the rice crises in the Philippines tells us, it's that the issue isn't whether there is rice or not, but who hoards it.

Screencap from the youtube video.