Population Growth Is the Great Enemy : Foreign Aid: So long as current trends continue, the money we spend to alleviate poverty in the Third World is wasted.

At this moment, more than 5 billion people share our planet. By this time tomorrow, another quarter of a million will be added to that number.

More than 90% of the newcomers will be born in the Third World. Many of them will die in childhood of malnutrition or disease and most of the rest will live out their lives in countries that cannot adequately feed and shelter the people they already have.

By the year 2025, the world’s already strained and overexploited resources will have to sustain life for more than 8 billion people--an increase of 3 billion, most of them desperately poor, in just 35 years.

Besides condemning people to lives of starvation and poverty, this rapid growth in population is invariably taking a huge toll on the environment--stripping forests, eroding fragile soil and polluting and then exhausting water supplies. More and more land is becoming desert and tens of millions of people are moving every year to increasingly crowded urban slums, creating conditions that will inevitably lead to political instability and upheaval.

The harsh fact is that without a decrease in population growth rates, the outlook is bleak, both for developing countries and for our ability to provide them with any real, sustainable help. So long as current population trends continue, the billions of foreign-aid dollars we spend each year in an effort to alleviate poverty and stimulate economic growth in the Third World are simply being wasted; our generosity will always remain several steps behind the growing number of mouths to feed and hands to employ.

What can the United States do that will be of help? One good way to start would be to phase out all bilateral economic aid to developing nations (totaling in the proposed 1991 bill about $6.7 billion) and offer instead, to those countries that want it, substantial amounts of funding for family-planning programs.

In addition, we should take $1 billion a year from the money that would be saved and dedicate it to a crash project to develop inexpensive, effective and easily used methods of contraception. In many of those countries now, oral contraceptives, IUDs, diaphragms and condoms are either too expensive, rejected for cultural reasons or ineffective because they require health-care services that often are not available.

Ending economic assistance except for family-planning services is not nearly so hardhearted a proposal as it may at first seem. The truth of the matter is that our foreign-aid program does very little good in a world where a great amount needs to be done--our contribution to each country is relatively small and the effect upon the lives of its people is negligible. Our current aid projects help only a few thousand of the millions of people in a particular country; spending those same dollars on family planning would help that country provide more adequately for all its citizens.

More important, no matter how much aid is given by the United States and others, the truth of the matter is that developing countries cannot solve their economic problems without first solving their population problems. The reason is obvious: In most Third World countries today, populations are growing faster than the ability to provide food, shelter, health care, education and jobs.

If these countries cannot adequately meet the basic needs of their own people now, they surely will be less able to do so in 20 years, when their populations will have doubled. By then they will be much worse off, even after the expenditure of billions of dollars in economic assistance by us and others in the meantime.

This inevitable reality of population growth is so simple and so inescapable that our failure to recognize it is striking. Yet we mindlessly go about our business, throwing away billions of well-intended foreign-aid dollars on development projects that are not doing the supposed beneficiaries any real good.

Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world would welcome greater family-planning assistance. Surveys indicate that half of the married women in developing countries do not want any more children; millions more would like to delay subsequent births.

Providing greater amounts of family planning aid and developing new contraceptive methods would be, without question, the most constructive, cost-effective and humanitarian contributions we could make to help developing countries achieve economic and political self-sufficiency, and to better the quality of life of people around the world.

We would be sending a needed message to the entire world that all of us--rich and poor nations alike--are careening toward immense and irreversible human and environmental tragedy that can be averted only if we immediately get serious about slowing our planet’s burgeoning population growth.