This morning I received an emergency e-mail appeal from Mercy Corps.  Warning that “a perfect storm” of factors “is pushing global food prices up dramatically,” it appealed for help:

In Niger, prices of bread, powdered milk and wheat flour have spiked, exacerbating the West African nation’s precarious food situation.  Last December, more than three million Nigeriens didn’t have enough food to meet their minimum nutritional needs; today, shortages are pushing the country closer to famine.

Left unsaid in the appeal is the fact that Niger is tied with Guinea-Bissau for the highest total fertility rate in the world.  On average, a woman in Niger will have seven children over her lifetime.  Despite the threat of famine, Niger’s population is projected to rise from 14.2 million in 2007 to 26.3 million in 2025 and 53.2 million in 2050. 

The simple truth is that some of the countries hardest hit by the food crisis are among the least sustainable and fastest growing in the world.  Earlier this week, the Washington Post ran a feature story (“Birthrates Help Keep Filipinos in Poverty”) about the Philippines and the food crisis.  The story reports that:

There are many reasons why this country is poor, including feudal patterns of land ownership and corrupt government. But there is a compelling link between family size and poverty. It increases in lock step with the number of children, as nutrition, health, education and job prospects all decline, government statistics and many studies show.

Birth and poverty rates here are among the highest in Asia. And the Philippines, where four out of five of the country's 91 million people are Roman Catholic, also stands out in Asia for its government's rejection of modern contraception as part of family planning.

The great tragedy in the Philippines and many other countries severely affected by the food crisis, there are many couples who want to control their fertility but who do not have access to modern contraceptives, and their governments are not always to blame.  International support for family planning has been in the decline for more than a decade.

Tod Preston of Population Action International wrote a compelling blog post yesterday (“Family Planning in the Philippines: A Global Wake-Up Call for Policymakers”) that details the declining real dollar support for family planning and reproductive health services in the Philippines and elsewhere.  He concludes:

The great tragedy in all of this -- “outrage” might be a more accurate term -- is that the cuts in FP funding are depriving women and men, many of them impoverished, of something they fundamentally want: that most basic ability to choose how many children to have and when to have them. And by depriving them of this reproductive right, we’re contributing to an increasingly unsustainable and impoverished world.