WASHINGTON: A major new study is suggesting that US policies on family planning and agricultural trade might contribute to setting the stage for conflict in developing countries.

Released on Wednesday by Population Action International (PAI), the report calls on foreign policy and national-security officials to pay more attention to demographic factors in preparing for future conflicts.

Based on a review of 25 years of scholarly research covering 180 countries, the study concludes that a combination of high population growth, rapid urbanisation and land or water scarcity appear to be the key ingredients for upheaval in poor countries.

The 100-page report, ‘The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict After the Cold War’, focuses primarily on the so- called ‘demographic transition’ — the process by which the populations of countries go from short lives and large families to longer lives and smaller families.

Countries that advance through that transition are far less likely to experience civil conflict, it concludes.

Costa Rica, Thailand and Tunisia, for example, have all made the transition and are less vulnerable to internal conflict as a result, while countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Nepal — all with disproportionately high numbers of young adults, rapidly growing cities and scarcities in water and cropland — are far more likely to suffer conflict, adds the report.

Besides the latter three, the report lists 21 other countries whose demographics and resource scarcities point to future upheaval, most of them in West Africa, East Africa, the Middle East and South Asia — regions that largely overlap with US plans to beef up its military assets in carrying out its “war on terror” and securing access to key energy resources.

“There are many benefits to societies in shifting toward lower rates of both birth and death, but the idea that the demographic transition could actually reduce the risk of violent civil conflict is new to the security community,” said Robert Engelman, vice president for research at PAI, who co-authored the report.

“We were surprised by the strength and consistency we found in the associations between population dynamics and civil conflict in the last decades of the 20th century, and we’re predicting these associations will be evident in the first decades of the 21st as well. That’s a powerful concept for the future of global security in a frightfully uncertain world,” he added.

The administration of US President George W. Bush, which is on record as supporting many of the recommendations that follow from the report’s analysis, such as investing in female education, might not be pleased with some of the other conclusions.

While the administration has maintained relatively high levels of spending for family-planning programmes, anti-abortion forces have succeeded in getting it to impose restrictions on how that money can be spent.

The result is that many international and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and clinics that provide family-planning services are no longer receiving US aid.

In addition, US farm subsidies supported by the administration, as well as agricultural subsidies of other western governments, have reduced global prices, making it impossible for millions of small farmers in poor countries to compete, and thus forcing them off their lands and into cities, fuelling rapid urbanization, according to development groups.

On average, according to the report, a decline in the annual birth rate of five births per thousand people corresponded to a decline of about five per cent in the likelihood of civil conflict during the decade that followed.

As countries have progressed through the ‘demographic transition’, it adds, they became less vulnerable to internal upheaval. Thus, countries that were in the earliest phase of transition were about eight times more likely to experience conflict compared to those in the latest phase.

“While this association does not suggest direct causation,” the report said, “the relationships found here are striking and consistent”.

Demographically high-risk states might still be able to avoid conflict, if other factors are present, suggests the study.

These factors might include the ease with which people can emigrate to a nearby country — such as the immigration of Mexicans to the United States; the sending of remittances earned by emigrants abroad to family members back home; land reform, or creating new urban employment.

The demographic factors most closely associated with the likelihood of civil conflict during the 1990s, according to the report, were a high proportion of young adults (ages 15-29) and a rapid rate of urban population growth.

The report found that countries in which young adults comprised more than 40 per cent of the adult population were more than twice as likely as countries with lower proportions to experience conflict. In addition, states with urban population growth rates greater than four per cent were about twice as likely to suffer conflict as countries with lower rates.

Countries with low availability of cropland or renewable fresh water were about 1.5 times more likely to experience civil conflict as those in other categories, added the report.

While much recent literature has focused on water scarcities as a major potential cause of both civil and inter-state wars, land scarcities resulting from unequal distribution or the settlement of outsiders into traditional ethnic homelands have been much more prominent in fomenting recent civil conflicts, it said.

These kinds of factors — rapid urbanization, and per capita land or water scarcity — are not the only ones that contribute to conflict, PAI stresses. Non-demographic factors like historic ethnic tensions and incompetent or arbitrary governance might also play an independent role, or compound the risks of conflict for countries that are vulnerable for demographic reasons.

The report also does not arrive at a definitive conclusion on whether high death rates among working-age adults — a characteristic of countries, mainly in southern Africa, with high HIV/AIDS infection rates — also contribute to civil conflict, although it appears self-evident that the loss of key professionals, the weakening of military and security forces and the rising number of orphans would contribute to instability.

In addition to calling for greater support for family-planning programmes and female education that would accelerate the demographic transition in poor countries, the report calls on the international military, intelligence and diplomatic communities to use their influence to promote demographic transition in vulnerable countries.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.