ON recent Shoura Council discussions of the Kingdom's population issue and the calls for controlling the national birth rate, I would like to say that although I respect the opinion of the Shoura members, we can agree to disagree on this issue. I am not going to talk about the debate currently under way on social media websites, but I will say birth control is a good thing when well-planned. However, before thinking about this option, we should design plans to solve the problems facing young men who want to get married. Some of the problems include high prices of real estate. We should also solve the problems of divorce and unemployment. I support birth control policies if such policies do not prevent population growth. Our country is large but it has a small population. It has vast resources that are envied by many, especially enemies, and therefore it is important to have a bigger population. Most countries around the world boast of their large population, with China and India excluded as the population of each of these countries exceeds 1.2 billion. Some countries are exerting painstaking efforts to increase their populations because they have vast areas of land but a comparatively small number of people, with Canada and Australia being good examples. Some countries that laid down rules for population growth suffer the problem of having more old people than young, with Japan and Europe being perfect examples. Population is one of the elements used to measure a nation's strength and a nation's ability to run its own development programs by its own citizens without the need to recruit expatriate workers from abroad, workers who have different cultural backgrounds and who might cause security and social problems to the country they arrive in. The calls for issuing directly or indirectly birth control policies in our country are not right. We live in a nation with an area of 2.2 million square kilometers and abundant natural resources. Increasing our population is an important strategy if it comes with proper planning. We need to have plans that can absorb our generations in various fields like housing, health, education, security, defense, industrial services, etc. This should be the real mission of the Shoura Council. Population growth means having more job seekers who can take and accept low-paying or unskilled jobs. This will eventually help us replace expatriate workers doing unskilled jobs with Saudi ones. Most countries around the world rely on their own citizens to fill this gap and never use or bring over workers from abroad. If we want to stop relying on expatriate workers, we should increase our population. Imagine if the annual total remittances of expatriate workers, which exceed SR130 billion, stay in the country and are spent on development projects inside the Kingdom. Only medium- and long-term Saudization policies can achieve this goal. The two holy mosques and our rich resources, as well as our small population, make countries like Iran collude with others and wish evil things on us. Iranians keep talking about their human capital; Iran has 75 million people, 1.5 million of them are in the military. Iran has built a large army supported by nuclear capabilities. It continues to intervene in the domestic affairs of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and some African countries like Eritrea. It works also on destabilizing the security of Gulf countries, particularly Bahrain. We need to have more people and military and security plans to confront Iran. Look at Israel. Although a small country, it gives valuable awards to mothers who have a large number of children. It is also building settlements and bringing back Israeli immigrants by promising to provide them with a prosperous lifestyle even though it does not have natural resources. Israel relies on an economy of knowledge and this should be our first option in the future. Our strategic plans should aim to increase our population to 45 million by 2038. It might be difficult to reach this goal with the low population growth rate over the past 15 years. Reliance on expatriate workers can lead to a wastage of the knowledge expatriates acquired here and take with them once they return to their home countries. Expatriates are the main reason we have unemployment. They control auto repair shops, gas stations, restaurants, construction sector, barber shops, hotels, car rentals, transportation, grocery shops and the majority of businesses. Most of them are unskilled and learn the job on site, meaning they receive training. Most Saudi youths look for such opportunities but they have not been offered many. There are large numbers of expatriates working in large companies and factories and we still talk about the ineffective Nitaqat program, which was introduced more than four years ago. We should look at Japan and learn from them. Japan is full of volcanic islands and prone to earthquakes and does not have natural resources but they are the second strongest global economy. They follow the English proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention”. They adopted a knowledge-based economic policy, import all raw material to make their goods then export the goods at double the prices. The Japanese population has started to age; therefore, the government has introduced plans to increase the population to strike a demographic equilibrium.
