The Foreign Service Journal, April 2012

cent of U.S. corn harvests; and oil prices exceeding $100 a barrel hike the cost of transportation, fertilizer and fuel for farm machinery. Population growth also leads to po- litical, ethnic and economic conflict. Some governments banned all food ex- ports when food prices spiked last year, leading others to seek to buy or man- age farms in other countries. Burma recently pulled the plug on a dam China was building, both because the project ignored local environmental concerns and because Beijing planned to send the dam’s electric power back to the PRC. Cote d’Ivoire just resolved a series of civil wars largely fought over Christian opposition to Muslim immigrants es- caping poverty in Burkina Faso and Mali. The United States and Europe are both wrestling with how to handle millions of immigrants, some of whom allegedly have connections to terrorism. Particularly among young people in countries from Morocco to Iraq, there appears to be a correlation between sympathy for Islamist extremism and having to live without jobs or ways to start a family. Finally, countries with the highest rate of population growth also experi- ence the highest rates of environmental degradation. Money Well Spent Worldwide, about $10 billion is allo- cated each year for family planning. Seventy percent of that is spent by countries seeking to limit their own growth. Heather Boonstra, a senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher In- stitute (www.guttmacher.org)— an or- ganization dedicated to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights through an interrelated program of research, policy analysis and public education—estimates that there are at least 200 million women around the world who want to stop bearing chil- dren but lack contraceptives. She cites estimates by former USAID population officials that if U.S. aid for family planning doubled from the current level, that would meet the A P R I L 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 If humanity puts one or two billion dollars a year into additional aid for family planning, the world population could peak at a sustainable level.