29 minute read
Issue 1787- February - 14/02/2020
Weekly news
and was subsequently replaced by Rishi Sunak. The reason why Javid resigned was because Johnson told him that he could keep his post under the condition that he fires all his advisors, a condition that Javid said no minister would accept.
New Emergency Terror Law Passes in UK House of Commons In response to the latest terror attack in Streatham, south London, the House of Commons have debated and passed a new emergency terror law which would stop the release of those accused of terrorist offences from being released
Boris Johnson Undertakes Major Cabinet Reshuffle, Sajid Javid Resigns from Treasury Post For the first time since winning the December 2019 general election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has conducted a major cabinet reshuffle. New faces in the government include Anne-Marie Trevelyan who replaces Alok Sharma as International Development Secretary and Brandon Lewis replaces Julian Smith as Northern Ireland Secretary. Some familiar faces have remained in their posts, Matt Hancock is still the Health Secretary, Michael Gove is still the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Dominic Raab is still the Foreign Secretary, and Priti Patel is still the Home Secretary. The most surprising change happened after Sajid Javid resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer
halfway through their sentences. The law passed unopposed and will apply to England, Wales and Scotland, it has now moved on to the House of Lords for debate. Under the new law, those convicted of terror attacks would only be released if they served at least twothirds of their prison sentence and with the agreement of the Parole Board.
First Coronavirus Case Hits London A GP surgery in Islington, London has been closed this week as it being disinfected after a woman who contracted the coronavirus came to seek treatment. This follows two similar closures in Brighton and one in Taunton, Somerset. The woman arrived at the practice in an Uber, however the driver is not considered to be at risk of having the virus since the journey only lasted 15 minutes.
EU Health Officials Hold Emergency Meeting on Coronavirus Health Ministers from the EU 27 met this week to discuss meaures that need to be taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus throughout the continent. While speaking to DW, German Health Minister Jens Spahn was pleased with the steps EU countries have taken to stop the virus from moving further: “So far, in Europe and the European Union, detection and containment is working,” How did warn, however, that the situation might easily grow worse if preventative measures falter in China: “But we have to admit, that’s today. It could get worse before it gets better, because as long as it’s not under control in China, these regional epidemics can transform into a worldwide pandemic.” One of the major objectives of the meeting was to safeguard the free movement of people while simultaneously contain
ing the virus.
Turkish and Russian Backed Forces Clash in Idlib Northwestern Idlib remains one of the last rebel strongholds in Syria, and Russian backed Assad regime forces have been advancing to recapture the region for the past few months. However, this week Turkish backed forces have been clashing with Russian forces, causing many civilians to be displaced in the process. Turkey and Russia have had continued talks in an attempt to halt further escalation, but no ceasefire has been negotiated by both sides. Turkey accuses the Russians of targeting civilians, something Moscow denies. If no ceasefire is negotiated soon, then only further civilian displacement will occur.
Bernie Sanders Wins New Hampshire Primary, Pete Buttigieg Narrowly Comes in Second Progressive Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders scores another major victory in the race for the party’s pres
idential nomination, as he won the New Hampshire primary by gaining 25.7 percent of the vote share. Pete Buttigieg could also be pleased with the results as he gained 24.4 percent of the vote share. As it stands it seems that the Democrat nomination race will be a two horse race between the progressive wing of the party represented by Sanders, and the establishment wing of the party represented by Buttigieg. Furthermore, it was a bad night for former Vice President Joe Biden, in spite of him showing early promise in polls he came in fifth in the primary scoring a mere 8.4 percent of the vote share.
over story C
Part Two
Of Cannibals
by Bryn Haworth
I’ve always had a lot of time for sceptics. In some cases, you had to have a lot of time. There was the one who landed up in a ditch and refused to come out till someone could prove he was actually in it. Mind you, I may have made this particular sceptic up; when I enter the words ‘sceptic’ and ‘ditch’, Google is convinced I’m interested in septic tanks. The man had one of those polysyllabic Greek names. I may have to drop a line to the prime minister on the subject, as the man uniquely qualified to discuss classical thinkers and ditches.
Suffice to say that from an early age, perhaps thirteen, I was trained in the art of scepticism. This is a blatant fib. What I mean is that certain teachers, some of whom were considered subversive for their pains, introduced me to the art. The fact that they kept getting the sack did nothing to deter me. The authorities in my secondary school were so dodgy, I took the idea of scepticism and ran with it.
In some of the classes we had what they called ‘balloon debates.’ I was never sure about the balloon bit – my attention must have wandered momentarily when that was explained – but the principle of the thing was that you were selected to defend or attack a controversial view, such as the pros and cons of fox hunting. If that sounds hackneyed, it was a rural school; there were far worse subjects of controversy to be had. You then displayed your oratorical skills with equal pertinacity, whether you took the namby-pamby view that foxes ought to be treated in a humane fashion, or else you advocated that they be taken to a place of execution and ripped into as many pieces as a famished pack of beagles could contrive. With a skill like that, I might have gone on to become a lawyer or a politician.
Sadly, I lacked the gift for dispassionate eloquence. We can’t all be bastards. For one thing, it would obviate the concept of bastardy. The only bastards left would be actual bastards, like William the Bastard, though he complicated things by more than living up to his birth certificate.
Not ma belle
environment (my school) that positively obliged any thinking person to doubt the legitimacy of anything, I arrived at a kind of climax in my thinking with the discovery of solipsism. I became convinced that I was the centre of the universe. Worse, that I was the only reality in the universe. I know, it sounds demented, but consider the rigours of my environment. Of course, it was not the most original conclusion for a sixteen-year-old to have reached, that my centre was nowhere and my circumference everywhere, but how many sixteen-year-olds really think it through the way I did? They mostly content themselves with being egocentric. Child’s play. Me, I thought, therefore I was. Besides, having the advantage over Descartes of possessing a youthful body pumped full of hormones, I also felt, therefore I was. In the end, as any life coach will tell you, it all comes down to self-belief.
All this trawling of my past to say this: though I hadn’t heard of him back then, I was already primed to fall in love with Michel de Montaigne, and I don’t mean by mistaking him for a girl. Anyone whose motto was ‘What do I know?’ would have fully equipped me to survive a Norfolk grammar school in the 1970s. What a pity he wasn’t there to hold my hand in the manner of Virgil guiding Dante through the inferno, I might actually have emerged half sane. I think I first heard about Montaigne somewhat later, in relation to a translation of his essays by John Florio, a contemporary of Shakespeare. There is a strong possibility that the bard actually read the particular essay whose title I have stolen: a passage of The Tempest is lifted, virtually word for word, from Of Cannibals. I also wonder if Hamlet was one of Montaigne’s avid readers, given how closely the soliloquy resembles an essay. The very word ‘essay’ appears to have been Montaigne’s idea, derived from the French verb to try, and the soliloquys are clearly attempts to make sense of things, as well as being very inward. That inner musing, along with the open-mindedness that came from reading sceptics of the classical age, gives the essays their distinctive freshness. It’s the intellectual equivalent of that draught of beer after the trek across the desert in ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ (1958).
Yup, that is what you need after reading most philosophers. Try any of them if you don’t believe me. Try Heidegger, with the added bonus of being able to read his liberal apologists bending over backwards to excuse his politics. There is nothing pretentious or tendentious or obscurantist about Michel. He writes, somewhere, that you can put a man on the highest throne in the world, he still has to sit on his arse. With attitudes like that, it’s obvious what a dim view Heidegger would have taken of him.
It helps that Montaigne was not an academic. He had far too strange an upbringing (having to speak Latin with his own parents, par
over story C
exemple) to wish that on himself. But he was studious, as well as unafraid of his own company. The tower where he worked still survives. Overhead, on the ceiling of his study, tags and mottos were painted along the beams. According to the Wikipedia entry on his room the walls were once decorated with paintings of mythical scenes, like Venus with Adonis, Venus discovered by Vulcan having it away with Mars, Venus in the Judgement of Paris, Venus… You get the picture. I can almost hear the estate agent: “Here we have the study. Of course, nowadays a more neutral look is in favour.” The Wikipedia entry rather coyly attempts to explain this wall-to-wall sauciness:
‘One of the central themes of the paintings gathered in the space seems to have been nudity, a question metaphorically at the heart of the writing project of the Essays’
Yeah right. I don’t know, was the man made of flesh and blood? Because if you surrounded me with this kind of thing, it would definitely not be calculated to keep my mind on my homework. I suppose it accounts for his lack of apparent prudishness when it came to the nakedness of the Brazilian natives. For all I know, he sat at his desk in his birthday suit. Somehow, despite these adverse conditions, Montaigne managed to keep his mind on his work, thus demonstrating that not all Renaissance types were as bad as Raphael.
In fact, so fond was the Frenchman of his solitary studies that he retired from the world in his late thirties to pursue knowledge. Unlike a similarly sequestered genius of our age, he did not emerge to wreak havoc in the civil service. He did his public duty when called upon, and otherwise he enjoyed his own company. Despite being a devout Catholic, he would skip mass when he was busy, though he made sure he was able to hear it through ‘conduits’ connecting his study to a nearby chapel.
At least, this is what I’ve been able to glean from my own extensive and largely solitary reading, hidden from the world and living on a diet of ready-made M&S chicken curries. This modest lifestyle makes Montaigne look like Boy George on a Friday night. But conduits? Maybe. In all candour, what do I know?
On a visit to Rome in later years, this (fairly) good Catholic would present his collected essays to Sisto Fabri, who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. Montaigne asked to be forgiven for referring to the pagan notion of Fortuna quite so much. Oh, and for being far too soft on Julian the Apostate. Now Fabri was acquainted with Giordano Bruno, a man who would not have known he was awake unless he’d referred to Fortuna and been soft on Julian the Apostate several times before breakfast. Perhaps mildly disappointed, Fabri sent the essayist away with the instruction to follow his own conscience.
This was not particularly helpful advice and certainly didn’t justify the long journey to Rome. Montaigne had a natural inclination to follow his own conscience. It was this same inclination that had led him to write the book in the first place. Still, he could console himself that he hadn’t been excommunicated for heresy. In those days, you wouldn’t want to upset the Master of the Sacred Palace.
12 14/02/20 Ice Cold in Alex
Michel’s tower
I say ‘in those days’ because these were turbulent times by any standards. For most of the essayist’s adult life, the country was caught up in what came to be known as the religious wars. The seventh of these was raging at the time of his book’s publication. Three million people are believed to have perished, through violence, famine, or disease in the struggle between Catholics and the Huguenots (who were Calvinists), and atrocities were committed by both sides. However, just eight years before the essays became available, the St Bartholomew’s Massacre had shaken Paris and other French cities. For three days, anarchy reigned in the capital as Protestants were rounded up and butchered – men, women and children – and their bodies dumped in the Seine. Christopher Marlowe found the events so shocking he wrote a play. Even Ivan the Terrible deplored the violence. Philip II of Spain, on the other hand, ‘laughed, for almost the only time on record.’
One can easily imagine Montaigne’s reaction. He was as humane temperamentally as he was humanist intellectually. Equally respected by the heads of the warring factions, King Henry III (Catholic) and Henry of Navarre (Protestant), he was unimpressed by the ‘passionate intensity’ around him, but the retiring philosopher was in a potentially compromising position. With Jewish grandparents on both sides and a mother who had converted to the Protestant cause, a desire for compromise must have come naturally to him, but there was more to this than a healthy instinct for self-preservation. In the essay Of Cannibals, he notes how ‘everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.’ Whenever he makes explicit comparisons between the so-called ‘savages’ and the violence of his ‘civilised’ countrymen, the latter appear more barbaric: ‘I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb in racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbours and fellow citizens, and, which is worse, under colour of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead.’
He takes eating in a wider sense here, as a form of killing by increments. In a further aspersion on his own times, he wishes that the ‘savages’ in the New World had been discovered long ago, when people like Lycurgus and Plato were still around, since the happy simplicity of their lives far exceeded the Golden Age of the ancient poets and the best attempts of
over story C
philosophers to imagine a perfect society. The implication is that no one now living in Europe could have the intellect, or perhaps the decency, to see this perfection for what it is, let alone emulate it, so far had civilisation degenerated.
Of Cannibals is not a neutral ethnographic essay. It is a bitter satire on Montaigne’s supposedly Christian contemporaries who, despite a professed love of God, are nonetheless ready to treat each other so cruelly. In a sign of the divisions that prevailed, the Frenchmen who wrote about the tribes they had encountered on the shores of Brazil came from opposite sides of France’s religious war. André Thevet, whose book ‘The New Found World’ came out in 1572, was a Franciscan priest. Jean de Léry, who published his ‘History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil’ in 1578, was a Protestant Huguenot. The religious conflict had followed Léry across the Atlantic, forcing him to take refuge with the Tupinambá and thus perfectly illustrating Montaigne’s point about the relative barbarism of Europeans. Thevet may have been the first European to describe the peanut, but he also had personal experience of the Tupinambá tribe and spoke of the way they treated their captives before tucking into them:
‘On the final day before his or her execution, the prisoner is chained to a bed and is the
subject of a ceremony in which community members gather and sing of their death. Finally, the condemned man or woman is brought to a public place, tied up, hacked to pieces, and consumed by the local populace.’
The same thing happens to any children these prisoners had sired in the meantime. Montaigne mentions the prisoner being despatched with swords, but, apparently, he preferred to pass over the issue of his offspring. Insufficiently Arcadian, perhaps, or else he was just more sceptical than his fellow Catholic. In the midst of a vicious civil war, it is hardly surprising that the attitude of the natives to violence of this sort fascinates Montaigne. He clearly admires their valour. They are fearless in battle:
‘The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful, and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running away, they know not what it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his house.’
If they are captured, however, it is entirely beneath them to entreat or beg for forgiveness. They would far rather be killed and eaten than show any cowardice in the face of death. This
St Bartholomew›s Day Massacre
Cannibal feast, as witnessed by Hans Staden, 1557
valour of the Tupinambá relates, crucially, to their motives for making war:
‘If their neighbours pass over the mountains to assault them, and obtain a victory, all the victors gain by it is glory only, and the advantage of having proved themselves the better in valour and virtue: for they never meddle with the goods of the conquered, but presently return into their own country, where they have no want of anything necessary, nor of this greatest of all goods, to know happily how to enjoy their condition and to be content.’
The essay is very insistent on this, as if its writer knows the reader will scarcely be able to get their head around the idea:
‘Their disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labour or concern, with all things necessary, in such abundance that they have no need to enlarge their borders. And they are, moreover, so happy in this, that they only covet so much as their natural necessities require.’ This lack of any concept of gaining territory or booty by war, owing to the complete sufficiency of their existing resources, means there is a moral purity to their aggression. It is based entirely on a desire for glory. In keeping with the polemical thrust of his essay, Montaigne insists on such ideal qualities. They do a lot of dancing and singing, and not a great deal of labour. They are artless because they have no need of ingenuity. This is crucial to the argument, as Montaigne sees little value in European expertise:
‘Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.’
His disdain for art is founded on a satirical contrast with ‘mother nature,’ and this leads to an upturning of the usual dichotomies, so that
‘…they are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself… whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order.’
Thus, according to this reasoning, cultivation has created aberrant phenomena, and a countryside that has little of nature left in it. Human intervention has upset the order of nature. This is a radical rejection of civilisation in all its smugness. And then we get this – the passage that may well have caught Shakespeare’s eye and which still has the power to arrest us now. He is describing the life of the Tupinambá in negative terms here, according to what they do not have:
‘there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine;
over story C
the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of’
This idealism is not only familiar from The Tempest. It smacks of a long tradition. Voltaire’s utopia will also be set in the Americas, as will Samuel Johnson’s, but the one utopian writer who might be said to have beaten everybody to it was Thomas More. In his book, which gave us the very word ‘utopia’, people live the simple life and gold is employed to fetter criminals, or even to make chamber pots, thus instilling a proper contempt for the material. In Candide, the citizens of El Dorado use precious jewels to pave their streets. The purpose of the ideal of a society in harmony with nature was to counter the moral decline of a civilisation where amassing great wealth had become the sole motivation. Even as the Europeans were pillaging the newly-discovered continents, their moralists were questioning the fundamentals of colonialism. But to this day, the descendants of those first European visitors have not had their fill of gold. Tens of thousands of ‘garimpeiros’ (artisanal gold miners) are threatening the lands of the Yanomani tribe whose territory straddles the borders of Brazil and Venezuela. Gold mining is a filthy and destructive business.
Clearings are cut into forests, mining ponds are carved into the earth, and the mercury used in extraction is dumped in rivers, poisoning fish stocks and water supplies. Almost all this mining is illegal, but Bolsonaro, the new Brazilian president, has expressed far more support for this group than previous state leaders. It is to some extent a personal issue – Bolsonaro’s father was a part-time gold miner, and the president has said he himself panned for gold while serving in the army.
“Bolsonaro is a garimpeiro,” says Davi Kopenawa, shaman and leader of the Yanomami tribe. “It explains the way he thinks, always trying to explore more land. He has a sickness in his head. He doesn’t think about others, or about the future.” Kopenawa is arguably the most prominent
16 14/02/20 Davi Kopenawa surrounded by children in Demini, Brazil. Photograph: Survival International
voice of the more than three hundred different indigenous groups in Brazil. He has been to the West and seen for himself some of what Montaigne was describing, hundreds of years before. Here, for instance, is the shaman’s verdict on New York:
‘Multitudes of people move very fast […] They look at the ground all the time and never see the sky. Yet while the houses in the centre of the city are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people there have no food and their clothes are dirty and torn. They looked at me with sad eyes. These white men are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. How can they think they are so smart? They do not want to know anything about these needy people. They reject them, and let them suffer alone. They are happy to keep their distance and call them “the poor”.’
It is almost as hard to imagine Montaigne in modern New York. He would have had no difficulty empathising with the sentiments of a visiting forest-dweller. Apparently, there still lingers – in some remote places, peopled with ignorant idealists! – the assumption that property should be held in common. The French sceptic was one of the first, and one of the very few, people in the West who could hear the voice of a happier past, before his species was split in half and estranged from its fellow humans, not just over religious differences, but existentially, as if occupying two different planets:
‘…they have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of one another [and they] observed that there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.’
There, in one long-dead cannibal’s words, is the rationale behind gated accommodation.
olitics P
How to Diffuse Egypt’s Population Time Bomb Lessons from Bangladesh
by Yasmine El-Geressi
Egypt’s population reached 100 million on Tuesday as a counter installed atop the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) ticked over into nine digits for the first time, highlighting the threat of overpopulation in a poverty-stricken country where many live in crowded megacities.
The North African country retains its position as the most populous Arab nation and Africa’s most populous country behind Ethiopia and Nigeria. Already plagued with energy, water and wheat shortages, overcrowded schools and hospitals, as well as dwindling foreign currency reserves and high unemployment, a population growth rate of at 2.5 million people per year is a crisis of potentially epic proportions. At the current rate, Egypt’s population will increase by 70 million by 2050, adding pressure to an economy already reeling from the political and security turmoil since the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak. The government sees the population boom as a threat to its economic reform plans. Every year, 800,000 young Egyptians enter the labour market, where unemployment is officially 10 percent. To create enough jobs, this would require 7.5 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP), compared with the government’s forecast of up to 5.9 percent for the current fiscal year.
While many countries are struggling with rising populations, in Egypt the pressures are compounded by the fact that 97 percent of its people live on just 8 percent of its territory, crowded along the Nile valley and Nile Delta, with smaller numbers along the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts. In Cairo, a megalopolis of nearly 20 million inhabitants, a population density is around 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, or nearly times that of London. President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi even regards the population crisis “a challenge as critical as that of terrorism.” ”TWO IS ENOUGH“
An Egyptian family prepares a cabbage meal for lunch in the province of Fayoum. (Reuters)
Last month, the government ceased to provide financial support to a family after their second child as part of the government’s first familyplanning campaign aiming to challenge traditions of large families in rural Egypt. The programme, which began in 2018, targets more than 1.1 million poor families with up to three children and comprises a poster campaign as well as growing a network of mobile and fixed family planning clinics across Egypt handing out contraceptives. Posters covering the walls of Egypt’s metro show an Egyptian 50-pound note, worth about £2.20, torn into five. “Would you rather divide this into five, or into two?” is asks. Mothers are invited to seminars with preachers who say that Islam allows family planning, and doctors who answer questions. The aim is to reduce the fertility rate from 3.5 children per woman to 2.4 by 2030. Meeting that target would mean 8 million fewer births over
the next decade.
Decades ago, Egypt had a family-planning programme supported by the US. The fertility rate fell from 5.6 children per woman in 1976 to 3.0 in 2008 while the use of contraceptives went up from 18.8 percent to 60.3 percent. Large amounts of contraceptives were made available and ad
olitics P
vertisements increased demand for birth control. But because Egypt was relying on donor support, when that assistance went away, family planning was neglected. In the six years between Mubarak’s forced departure during the Arab Spring and alSissi’s initiative, family planning projects were not well funded, and the birthrate started rising. By 2014, the fertility rate had gone back up to 3.5. The US is supporting family planning again, providing more than $19 million for the five-year project ending in 2022 and $4 million for a smaller private sector project ending in 2020. Those amounts are significantly lower than the $371 million the US spent on family planning in Egypt between 1976 and 2008.
LESSONS FROM BANGLADESH
Bangladesh is particularly interesting for Egypt because of a similar religious context and a history of the same societal and health services challenges. A specter of doom was created around Bangladesh at its birth in 1971, when it earned the epithet of “basket case” from Henry Kissinger. But the Muslim-majority country – home to over 160 million people - made remarkable strides in reducing its fertility rate over the past five decades. By halving its fertility rate from a high of 6.3 children per woman between 1971 and 2004,
Bangladesh holds lessons for both high fertility countries and for those who foretell a bleak future for those countries.
“Bangladesh has well-developed practices of pluralism, community engagement and multi-sectoral collaboration, which have helped make its Family Planning program and its Population Policy a success. The country has experienced a dramatic decline in fertility and mortality rates. The government has placed women at the center of the development agenda. It worked with local nongovernmental organizations that helped the country achieve success in family planning and address population challenges,” said World Bank Country Director Qimiao Fan.
Since it became an independent nation in the early 70s, Bangladesh has been implementing family planning programs, in an attempt to keep a check on rapid population growth. With the help of foreign and domestic donors, the poor South Asian country adopted a program that involved reaching out to village women at the grassroots level. This included a door-step delivery of contraceptives to women who had traditionally been in seclusion. Female health workers, specifically recruited and trained for the purpose, went house to house, educating women on the benefits of having a smaller
View of the Old Cairo, its minarets and historical sites. (Getty)
family and distributing contraceptives. Although social and economic improvements have played a major role in increasing demand for contraception, the provision of services and information has been shown to have had an independent effect on attitudes and behavior. As a result, the use of contraception in Bangladesh rose from a mere 8 percent in 1975 to over 61 percent in 2011, according to the World Bank. The control over childbearing also improved both women’s health and the health of their children.
Furthermore, improved basic healthcare services also reduced the child mortality rate. This decline has contributed to a drop in the fertility rate, as if people think some of their children will die, they want to have several to make sure that some survive. However, if they expect them to live, they are more inclined to invest in their education to maximise their potential in life.
For example, Bangladesh introduced a successful immunisation program kept children healthier and their mothers freer. A total sanitation drive had salutary impact on health, hygiene and privacy. A drive against diarrhea was undertaken partly to control epidemics that followed extreme weather events like floods and cyclones.
And an increase in girls’ education meant that younger mothers were better able to care for themselves and their children, compared to previous generations. Education gives women more decision-making power about how many children to bear – and girls who go to school tend to get married later, which statistics show means that they are likely to have less children. Experts believe that Bangladesh’s media, particularly public broadcasters, also played an important role in raising public awareness of the benefits of having fewer children, by highlighting that it helps parents to take better care of their children as well as causes less of a financial burden.
