International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 33, Number 2, pp. 428-430
IJE vol.33 no.2 © International Epidemiological Association 2004; all rights reserved.
Essay Review |
Population policy: ‘Under the Banyan tree’.
A political determinant of starvation and violence of enormous magnitude
School of Medicine, University of Leeds, 5 Ashwood Villas, Leeds, LS6 2EJ, UK. E-mail: m.h.king{at}leeds.ac.uk
Under the Banyan Tree: A Population Scientist's Odyssey. Sheldon J Segal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 242, £22.95 (HB). ISBN: 0-19-515456-8.
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This book sees educating girls as the panacea for the world's population problems—and so it might have been, had there been time! It takes its title from a group of Indian schoolgirls whom the writer saw scribbling on their slates in the shade of a banyan tree. It forgets that ancient Indian proverb ‘Nothing grows under the banyan tree’. What now so urgently needs to grow there is an approach to population control that is effective when a community is already demographically trapped and when it is too late for the fertility lowering effect of female education to be the major method, because the time it needs to work has already been lost. A community is demographically trapped when it has exceeded the carrying capacity of its fragile ecosystem, and when it has no new land to migrate to, and when its economy produces too few exports to
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  J. C Caldwell Commentary: Maurice King versus Sheldon Segal: an unnecessary battle Int. J. Epidemiol., April 1, 2004; 33(2): 430 - 431. [Full Text] [PDF]
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