‘The Titmuss Report is well-nigh Mauritius’ last chance of attaining socio-economic salvation’
From Our Archives – A Glimpse into 1961
The Meade and Titmuss Reports – Part III
By Peter Ibbotson
Last week I dealt mainly with the Meade Report, and this week I would like to deal with some of the major issues raised by the Titmuss Report.
From the outset, let me say that it would be a tragedy for Mauritius if the Titmuss Report were to be Ignored and not acted upon like so many of the reports which have preceded it. The report carries a long list of official enquiries into social conditions and problems from 1910 to 1960. No fewer than 25 appear in the list, even counting all of Dr Balfour’s reports in 1921 as a single report. Twenty-five reports in fifty years — that is, one report every two years! And, since the list starts with Dr Balfour’s 1921 enquiries, the position is actually 25 reports in 30 years or very nearly an average of one a year!
If action had followed the plethora of past reports, it is tolerably certain that the present situation, socially as well economically, in Mauritius would be nowhere near so drastic as it is. The Titmuss Report is well-nigh Mauritius’ last chance of attaining socio-economic salvation; it is a chance that must be taken; and taken quickly. In the past, as the Titmuss Report points out, “There has been no lack of pertinent enquiries. We trust that our Report will not suffer the fate of many of its predecessors.”
Later, the same report returns to the reminder of past enquiries which have been received and neglected afterwards. The documented social history of Mauritius in the last fifty years “is a history of forgotten reports. As we have read these past reports, made our own enquiries, considered anew the intentions and recommendations of previous committees and commissions, and tried to find a way through conflicting principles of justice and welfare we have been struck by the gulf between promise and fulfilment. Much has been promised; little accomplished in relation to the nature and scale of the social problems that were identified and foreseen in the past.”
The root of the evils now besetting Mauritius is, of course, as I pointed out in these columns only a few weeks ago, poverty. The spectre that stalks Mauritius is not, pace Action, the spectre of Communism; it is the spectre of destitution, the spectre of overpopulation and an even greater degree of misery and hunger than at present. The Meade Report makes suggestions and recommendations to diversify the island’s agriculture and attract new industries; those recommendations, if put into practice, would help to relieve the economic distress to some extent. But it is the major recommendations of the Titmuss Report which will go the furthest to avoid the evils which will inevitably ensue from further neglect to tackle the problems of incipient overpopulation.
A digression may be permitted. It may well be urged by opponents of the Meade Report and its suggestion of the 5 per cent ad valorem tax on sugar production that the report is the work of long-haired theorists who have no practical experience of what they are talking about. So let us look at what the hard-headed businessmen say. Here is a short extract from the economic survey of Mauritius published by Barclays DCO Bank in July 1960:
“Mauritius is a sugar island to an even greater extent than Barbados or any West Indian island. More than half the food supply of the population is imported… Some further improvement may come from more efficient production and taking marginal land into use of growing fruit and vegetables, maize and manioc and for livestock; but there is little hope of the island being anywhere near self-supporting in food owing to the limited amount of cultivable land and the rapidly growing population unless there is deliberate interference with the growing of sugar cane… some diversification of the economy is agreed to be desirable…”
So, the businessmen are prepared to envisage restrictions on unlimited expansion of sugar production; and for the reasons given by Professor Meade and his colleagues, the ad valorem tax is a better way of restricting this unlimited production than a system of licences and quotas such as is practised by certain other sugar-growing countries.
To return to the report by Professor Titmuss and his colleagues. As a whole the report is a sound, well-argued and well-based and fully workable, scheme for a system of social security. All the recommendations have been suggested and worked out for the particular circumstances of Mauritius; everyone will applaud the honest attempts made to set up such a social security system.
Little time must be lost in putting the Titmuss recommendations into effect.
But of course, the recommendations stand or fall by the one central recommendation, the most important single measure of all. That recommendation, which is the nub of the report, is of course that a family planning service shall be provided and a three-child family shall become accepted as the social norm. This is the recommendation which will attract the criticisms of the anti-family planners; will draw the fire of the irresponsible brigade of Destroyers and the witless, demagogic, peripatetic windbags who call themselves the leaders of the Destroyers.
It is clear that without an acceptance of the three-child family and a family planning service, the population cataclysm is inevitable in view of the declining death rate and the high birth rate. Professor Titmuss’ forecasts of the future population are worth repeating as is his stark conclusion: “the likelihood of the population of Mauritius reaching one million longs before the end of the century is as certain as anything can be in the field of population forecasting. The prospect, indeed, if present trends continue is a population approaching three million by the end of the century”.
Perhaps the opponents of family planning and a family planning service are able to view that prospect with equanimity; I know that I am not. Three million people on 720 square miles — 42,000 to the square mile! Where would they all live? On the top of Pieter Both? How would they all get a living? If half the island were under sugar cultivation, that would mean 84,000 to the square mile on the rest of the land; 84,000 to the square mile — that is to say, the whole population of Port Louis today cramped and squashed into an area one mile long and one mile wide. Possible? No, you will say; and I will agree with you. But that is what will have to happen if the opponents of family planning have their way and the number of births continue to rise and rise… as it inevitably will as and when the girls born in the immediate post-war births boom begin to bear their own children.
To avoid such a population explosion is absolutely necessary and the only way to avoid it is to introduce a widespread family planning service. This is no time for scoring debating points about how such a service would operate if all the Roman Catholic doctors and nurses opted out on religious grounds; this is no time for further abstruse debate about Old or New Testament condemnation of family planning; this is no time for moral abstractions about ‘natural’ or artificial means of contraception. On the other hand, the time has come for everyone to say with one voice “Family planning is necessary to save Mauritius. We will have a family planning service. We will; we will; we will.” And, alongside the family planning service will come all the other social benefits adumbrated in the Meade Report.
What do the projections for future population growth reveal? Professor Titmuss developed three forecasts based on different demographic assumptions: (A) constant fertility and declining mortality; (B) declining fertility and constant mortality; and (C) rapidly declining fertility combined with declining mortality. (In simple terms, fertility refers to births and mortality to deaths.) Based on these assumptions — particularly Scenario C, which assumes the widespread adoption of the three-child family — the Meade Report projected the future population.
It is clear from this population forecast that the lowest population in 1972 comes from the adoption of the three-child family, that is for the widespread adoption of family planning. Moreover, family planning gives the smallest increase in the number of children by 1972… a rise of only 19 per percent over the 1957 child population; and this rise could be coped with in the island’s schools. An unchecked rise in child population (which would come if family planning were not adopted) would cause chaos in the schools and a probable breakdown in the education system.
By 1972 there will be a 50% increase in the working population, and all the suggestions in the Meade Report will have to be put into operation if these extra workers are to be employed. All the implications, in the same report, underlying criticisms of practices in the sugar industry will have seriously and deeply to be studied too; in the past, as the Titmuss Report reminds us, the sugar barons have sought to evade their responsibilities to the community being satisfied with extracting profits from the sweat of the workers without being prepared to do something for the worker’s welfare; but that time, when the sugar industry could attempt to insulate itself from the people’s predicament, is past. All must pull together for the sake of the future of Mauritius; and all must realise that Professor Tit-muss is quite right when he says that only family planning can save Mauritius.
* * *
Sugar — Jamaica and Barbados
Mauritius is not the only sugar-producing island where the actual production of sugar varies according to whose land it is grown on. It might be of interest to small growers in Mauritius to learn about conditions in at least two other sugar-producing islands in the West Indies — Barbados and Jamaica.
In Barbados, where 80 per cent of exports consist of sugar or sugar products (especially fancy molasses), about 46,000 acres are planted with sugar cane, representing slightly more than 40 per cent of the island’s total area and well over half of its total arable land. Most cultivation is carried out on estates of over 10 acres, which are mainly owned by private families that settled in Barbados more than 200 years ago. There are about 240 such plantations, covering just under 37,000 acres, or more than three-quarters of the total cane acreage.
About 30,000 peasant smallholdings account for the remaining 10,000 acres under sugar cane — an average of three peasant growers to each acre. The 37,000 plantation acres produce about 1,350,000 tons of cane annually, while the 10,000 peasant acres produce about 270,000 tons. This represents an average yield of 37 tons per acre on the plantations, compared with 27 tons per acre on the smallholdings. Seventeen sugar and fancy molasses factories process the crop.
Sugar is Jamaica’s principal crop. Fifty-eight per cent of it is grown on estates with their own factories (there are 18 factories in all). Last year, the estates had 73,000 acres under sugar cane and produced more than 2,500,000 tons of cane. (Just under 10 tons of cane were required to produce one ton of sugar.) The average yield was about 35 tons of cane per acre, having risen from 26 tons per acre in 1939 as a result of improved cultivation methods.
There are about 22,000 small farmers who, last year, harvested approximately 80,000 acres of sugar cane. From this larger acreage, they produced only 1,800,000 tons of cane — more land than the estates cultivated, but a substantially lower total output. The small farmers’ average yield was about 22 tons of cane per acre, a figure that could be improved through more efficient cultivation and more adequate use of fertilisers. A yield of 22 tons per acre provided the small farmers with a gross return of about £50 (Rs 660) per acre.
8th Year – No 341
Friday 17th March, 1961
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 31 July 2026
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