Population Rises 1.5 Million a Year, Threatening Nation : Egyptian Growth: Arithmetic of Disaster

CAIRO — Tomorrow there will be 4,166 more Egyptians than there are today.

This is the pace at which Egypt’s population is growing--4,166 people every day . . . 125,000 every month . . . 1,520,000 every year. At this rate, Egypt’s population of 51 million will top 70 million by the turn of the century and double in less than 30 years.

These figures represent the arithmetic of a potential disaster that sociologists have long warned is looming over Egypt, threatening to sap its meager resources, to overload the already inadequate services and structures of its crowded, crumbling cities and add to political instability and social unrest.

“The economic crisis, the housing crisis, the food crisis--all these problems will ultimately defy solution unless the population problem, the crisis underlying them all, is somehow solved,” a birth control expert says.

The problem is doubly pressing because Egypt is mostly desert, and the vast majority of its people are crammed into only 4% of its land--the slender, sinuous valley of the Nile River.

Scarce Farmland Lost

It has been estimated that 100,000 acres of precious farmland along this serpentine strip are lost every year to encroaching settlement, shantytowns and other forms of so-called “informal housing”--a euphemism for the expanding girdle of slums around Cairo and other major cities. A net food exporter a decade ago, Egypt must now import more than 50% of its food at a cost of $10 million a day.

How, family planning experts ask, will Egypt foot the bill for these imports in the year 2000, when, if present trends continue, there will be less agricultural land and 20 million more mouths to feed?

“Population growth in Egypt is like a terrible cancer,” a Western diplomat said not long ago. “It is spreading and consuming the one vital organ on which this country’s life depends, the fertile land of the Nile Valley and delta.”

Complex Reasons

Yet for a complex set of reasons--religious, political and cultural--the government has been reluctant to campaign forcefully for birth control, although it has a family planning program, and the United States and other international donors are willing to finance it.

Indeed, the fact that a family planning program exists at all in Egypt is due in considerable measure to the largesse of U.S. and other Western agencies. Since 1974, they have allocated more than $132 million to birth control programs here. The Egyptian government, by contrast, spends only about $3 million a year of its own money on birth control--less than a third of what it spends on one day’s food imports.

Funding is not the real problem, however. According to Lennie Kangas, former director of the population office of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Cairo, a “perfectly adequate” birth control program for a country of Egypt’s size could be run on a budget of $25 million a year--or what Kangas likes to call “one fighter plane equivalent.”

Finger Points at Government

The real problem, Kangas and other Western experts say, is the combination of apathy and ambivalence that pervades the Egyptian government--in this case the ministries of planning and health--from the top down. The last health minister, who was dropped from the government in a recent Cabinet shuffle, “never once said in public that family planning had any priority here,” one expert said.

President Hosni Mubarak, the first Egyptian leader to make population control a national priority, has been “unwavering” in his support for family planning efforts, Kangas said, “but unfortunately he has not been able to bring the bureaucracy along with him.”

One result is that, despite a well-established infrastructure for birth control programs in the form of about 3,000 government-run clinics and 5,000 pharmacies that dispense birth control devices, Egypt has failed to make use of much of the money it has received for family planning.

A $25-million loan from the World Bank in 1978 was finally canceled because Egypt had used only two-thirds of it; the rest was forfeited. Half of an $8-million population grant from Britain was similarly lost when British officials, “exasperated by the lack of activity,” reclaimed the unspent portion, a Western official said.

“What’s so appalling about it is that the government let all this money slip through its fingers at the same time it was appealing to Egyptians to contribute their jewelry to clear up the national debt, and no one in the Ministry of Planning or the Ministry of Health seemed to care,” the official added.

The reasons for this apathy arise from a combination of religious, social, cultural and political sensitivities.

In Egypt, as in many other developing countries, family planning runs up against traditional values that measure a man’s prestige by the obvious manifestations of his virility and a woman’s worth by the number of children she can bear him, especially sons.

“This is a society that also places a high value on virginity,” Kangas said. “And what that translates into is marriage very young, because a woman who is 16 or 17 is more likely to be a virgin than a woman who is 24 or 25.”

Long Reproductive Cycles

Early marriages mean long reproductive cycles. Studies have shown that nearly half of the women in Egypt marry before age 17.

Religion reinforces these values and, in the case of Islam, politicizes them.

Egypt’s Islamic fundamentalists preach that attempts to reduce the birthrate are part of an American-Israeli plot to wipe out the Muslims of the world. To them, the more people Egypt has, the sooner the secular government will fall, opening the way for a religious establishment that will rule according to sharia, the Islamic body of law. Numbers are not the problem, the fundamentalists reason, because if people live according to God’s law, “Allah will provide.”

The Mubarak government is extremely sensitive to this sort of criticism.

“This is a government that is facing a lot of social and economic problems that it has not been able to solve,” a Western diplomat said. “It is a government that is very much on the defensive. It is a government that, on top of everything else, cannot afford to appear anti-religious.”

Some critics argue that the American aid agency’s high profile in Egypt’s birth control programs has added fuel to the fundamentalists’ fire and made it more politically difficult for the Mubarak government to identify itself with family planning efforts.

Ibrahim Shukri, the leader of the opposition Socialist Labor Party, has called on the government to renounce the U.S. assistance and pay for family planning programs out of its own pocket, to “put an end to the rumors” about “Imperialist-Zionist” plots to rob Muslim men of their virility.

Even some U.S. officials concede that the American approach to family planning in Egypt has been counterproductive.

Using the Wrong Pitch

“We’ve been pushing population control down the throat of the Egyptian people and this has created resistance,” one U.S. expert said. Because Americans “tend to view the world in economic terms,” the expert added, “we’ve tried to sell the Egyptians on birth control by telling them that fewer children mean more material goods”--a sales pitch many Egyptians, especially the devout, find offensive.

“If we had focused instead on family health, and on the way spacing births reduces child mortality rates, we might have had more success,” the expert said.

All this is not to say that Western-financed family planning programs have not had a positive impact. Indeed, Egyptian officials, somewhat defensively, point to surveys that indicate that 30% of all married women in Egypt now use some form of contraception, an increase of 6% in the past six years.

However, the surveys show the problem is that these same women start to practice birth control only after they’ve had an average of nearly seven children each.

“The good news,” Kangas said, “is that Egyptian women are finally beginning to get the message. The bad news is that they’re getting it much too late.”