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LITR 4632 Literature of the Future online text |
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U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century’s End
By
JUSTIN GILLIS and
CELIA W. DUGGER
New York Times, 3 May 2011
The population of the world, long expected to
stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep
growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the
United Nations projected in
a report released Tuesday.
Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more
than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion,
the report said — a sobering forecast for a continent
already struggling
to provide food and water for its people.
The new report comes just ahead of
a demographic milestone, with the
world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years
after it surpassed 6 billion. Demographers called the new projections a
reminder that a problem that helped define global politics in the 20th century,
the population explosion, is far from solved in the 21st.
“Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody
— it’s as simple as that,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population
Council, a research group in New York.
“Is it the end of the world? No.
Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off
with a smaller population.”
The projections were made by the
United Nations population division,
which has a track record of fairly accurate forecasts. In the new
report, the division raised its forecast for the year 2050, estimating that the
world would most likely have 9.3 billion people then, an increase of 156 million
over the previous estimate for that year, published in 2008.
Among the factors behind the upward revisions is that
fertility is not
declining as rapidly as expected in some poor countries, and has shown a slight
increase in many wealthier countries, including the United States, Britain and
Denmark.
The director of the United Nations population division, Hania Zlotnik, said the
world’s fastest-growing countries, and the wealthy Western nations that help
finance their development, face a choice about whether to renew their emphasis
on programs that encourage family planning.
Though they were a major focus of development policy in the 1970s and 1980s,
such programs have stagnated in many countries, caught up in ideological
battles over abortion, sex education and the role of women in society.
Conservatives have attacked such programs as
government meddling in
private decisions, and in some countries, Catholic groups fought
widespread availability of birth control. And some feminists called for less
focus on population control and more on empowering women.
Over the past decade, foreign aid to pay for contraceptives — $238 million in
2009 — has barely budged, according to United Nations estimates. The United
States has long been the biggest donor, but the
budget compromise in
Congress last month cut international family planning programs by 5 percent.
“The need has grown, but the availability of family planning services
has not,” said Rachel Nugent, an economist at the Center for Global
Development in Washington, a research group.
Dr. Zlotnik said in an interview that the revised numbers were based on new
forecasting methods and the latest demographic trends. But she cautioned that
any forecast looking 90 years into the future comes with many caveats.
That is particularly so for some fast-growing countries
whose populations are projected to skyrocket over the next century. For
instance, Yemen, a country whose population has quintupled since 1950, to 25
million, would see its numbers quadruple again, to 100 million, by century’s
end, if the projections prove accurate. Yemen already depends on
food imports
and faces
critical water shortages.
In
Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, the report projects
that population will rise from today’s 162 million to 730 million by 2100.
Malawi, a country of 15 million today, could grow to 129 million, the report
projected.
The implicit, and possibly questionable, assumption behind
these numbers is that food and water
will be available for the
billions yet unborn, and that potential catastrophes including
climate change, wars or epidemics will not serve
as a brake on population growth. “It is quite possible for several of these
countries that are smallish and have fewer resources, these numbers are just not
sustainable,” Dr. Zlotnik said.
Well-designed programs can bring down growth rates even in the poorest
countries. Provided with information and voluntary access to birth-control
methods, women have chosen to have fewer children in societies as diverse as
Bangladesh, Iran, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
One message from the new report is that the AIDS epidemic, devastating as it has
been, has not been the demographic disaster that was once predicted. Prevalence
estimates and projections for the human immunodeficiency virus made for Africa
in the 1990s turned out to be too high, and in many populations, treatment with
new drug regimens has cut the death rate from the disease.
But the survival of millions of people with AIDS who would have died without
treatment, and falling rates of infant and child mortality — both heartening
trends — also mean that fertility rates for women need to fall faster to curb
population growth, demographers said.
Other factors have slowed change in Africa, experts said,
including women’s lack of power in their relationships with men, traditions like
early marriage and
polygamy, and a dearth of political leadership.
While about three-quarters of married American women use a modern contraceptive,
the comparable proportions are a quarter of women in East Africa, one in 10 in
West Africa, and a mere 7 percent in Central Africa, according to United Nations
statistics.
“West and Central Africa are the two big regions of the
world where the fertility transition is happening, but at a snail’s pace,” said
John F. May, a
World Bank demographer.
Some studies suggest that providing easy, affordable access
to contraceptives is not always sufficient. A trial by Harvard researchers in
Lusaka, Zambia,
found that only when women had greater autonomy
to decide whether to use contraceptives did they have significantly fewer
children. Other studies have found that general education for girls plays a
critical role, in that literate young women are more likely to understand that
family size is a choice.
The new report suggests that
China, which has for
decades enforced restrictive population policies,
could soon enter the
ranks of countries with declining populations, peaking at 1.4 billion in the
next couple of decades, then falling to 941 million by 2100.
The United States is growing faster than many rich
countries, largely because of high
immigration and higher
fertility among Hispanic immigrants. The new report projects that the
United States population will rise from today’s 311 million to 478
million by 2100.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.
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Instructor's comments:
When I was born in 1951, app. 150 million Americans and 3 billion world.
Now app. 300 million Americans and 7 billion world.
Resources don't increase as fast as consumers.
Many more overwhelming numbers, has never seriously slowed down except in developed nations.
(1960s-70s, U.S. was on verge of stabilizing, but eased immigration restrictions.)
Japan, Italy, Scandinavia, other European nations have declining populations (except for some immigrant workers).
In a generation or two, we'll be 10-12 billion people on Earth.
Earth can sustain app. 3-5 billion people. (At current scales, we're using up future resources.)
How do we get from 10 billion to 4 billion people, especially when life-spans are increasing?
Question:
Why don't we talk about it? If it's a big issue, why the conspiracy of silence? (i.e., even if you know about it, you agree not to talk about it except to special audiences)
Three big reasons:
Evolutionary impulse to propagate one's genes.
Religious impulse to "increase and multiply" God's chosen.
Nearly everyone wants to be rich. It takes a lot of working people to make a
rich person.
Discussion easily trends racist or racial. Pope J-P2: Always white people talking about too many black or brown people.
Provisional answers:
Biblical: GENESIS 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply"
Evolutionary imperative: for a species to thrive, it must feed and procreate (Not to be crude, but the biological reason most people instinctively want to have sexual relations is that your parents and their parents did too.)
Profit motive: It takes a lot of working people and growing markets of consumers to make and support a rich person.
Realtors especially oppose population control b/c of smaller market for housing.
Liberal solution: variety of birth control options inexpensively available + women's education
Conservative solution:
Mainstream conservative: As long as abortion isn't involved (consighed to black market like drugs), government shouldn't be involved in private family decisions.
Fundamentalist / Family values conservative: Birth control frees women from motherhood, destabilizes family.
Boom-bust capitalism requires constantly growing markets and low-wage workers. "It takes a lot of working people to make a rich person."
Default solution: As economies develop and families climb economic ladder, they have fewer children and care more for the 1-3 they have.
Demographic transition:
The demographic transition (DT) is the transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as a country develops from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economic system.
aging populations in First World / Developed World, post-fertility . . . old people need young people to work, pay into Social Security
young populations in Third World / Developing World . . . young people need jobs and expect to have children of their own