Third World Poverty

Lawrence E. Bruce Jr.’s “Third World Debt Is a Real Killer” (Op-Ed Page, Dec. 22) posits only the latest conventional wisdom on why Third World children die of starvation. This is not to argue with the truth of Bruce’s facts: the .022% of gross national product in overseas aid--less than any other industrial nation is grossly inadequate and stingy, compared with the 2% of GNP that went to Europe as the Marshall Plan.

Also the point that “industrial nations must open their trade channels to more imports from the developing world” suggests that international trade summits should be convened, not for the purpose of seeing that everyone gets a piece of the international trade pie, but to end the obscenity of children dying because food is a business. Adequate food--food to keep body and soul together--should be a birthright on a planet whose peoples universally claim to revere life as sacred.

The one point that was missing from Bruce’s very comprehensive outline of the relationship of hardship to economics is any mention of overpopulation. It is time to actively combat the myths about overpopulation since to accept them is to condone suffering that multiplies with every year. I do not believe that poor women are anxious to have children so that they will have someone to help them survive in old age. This idea certainly has some validity in many if not all parts of the developing world where children do work with their families all of their lives. But not in these years of emergencies. It has been used too long as an excuse for failure.

Now we must take responsibility; we who have the wherewithal to provide birth-control pills and condoms are committing a sin of omission if we do not. Zero Population Growth is one of a handful of organizations operating on a shoestring. When it was inaugurated in Los Angeles in 1968 the world was 3.5 billion. Now it is 5.5 billion. No amount of food, no amount of foreign aid, no amount of irrigation, no amount of scientific genius can overcome the ignorance of those who don’t want to know. And so it is ignorance that has to go.

Let it be well known: President Reagan cut aid to family planning just when family planning was beginning to make headway. Was it because greed knows no sufficiency of mass markets and cheap labor?

Whatever reason, help family planning, help Zero Population Growth and help UNICEF. No one can feed an ever-increasing number of mouths. And no one is.

MARY JANE TAYLOR

Los Angeles