World Population

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Volume 4, Number 3
(1994)

The United Nations International Conference on Population and Development was held in Cairo, Egypt from September 5-13, 1994. This was the fifth in a series of international conferences on population since 1954, including Belgrade 1965, Bucharest 1974 and Mexico City 1984. This was the third under U.N. auspices.

Writing for The Sciences magazine, Nathan Keyfitz says, "One of the most vital matters facing humankind is the expansion of the population within a fixed natural ecology and the urgent need for the kind of economic growth which will relieve the stubborn poverty that still exists."

There is a new urgency since exponential growth in both population and consumption is threatening the world's ability to develop in a sustainable manner. Consider the fact that we are adding one billion people to the worlds population every 12 years. Over the next 50 years the world's population is projected to soar from 5.6 billion to 9.6 billion, or more, and 96 percent of that growth will be in developing nations, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere.

The rate of growth of the human population does not allow for sudden variations, except through widespread mortality crises or massive, authoritarian manipulation of fertility. Compared with other animal species, human reproduction is slow, sexual maturity is late, fertility low and the number of old individuals large. All these factors give human population considerable inertia. Even in the unlikely event that we managed to immediately reduce world fertility to a level of simple replacement (on the order of two children per couple) and maintain this level in the future, the world population, due to the effects of its present age distribution and to the expected increase in life expectancy, would continue to grow for approximately a century before leveling off at a level which would almost double the present figure. Currently 32 percent of the population in developing nations is under the age of 15 and is coming into the reproductive stage.

Countries in which people are well fed, in which infant mortality is low, in which women have access to education are countries in which the birth rate and the rate of increase are the lowest. There is little doubt that development brings about a decline in the birth rate. However, the world's population is growing so fast that development alone is not going to be enough. There has been an ongoing debate about whether population control led to development or development led to population control. Clearly these two approaches have to work hand in hand. Family planning has to work together with economic development.

Ecological Sustainability

A society is ecologically sustainable when it:

• Conserves ecological life-support systems and biodiversity.

• Ensures that use of renewable resources are sustainable and minimize the depletion of nonrenewable resources.

• Keeps within the carrying system of supporting ecosystems.

The Threat is Real

The greatest single threat to society, the economy, and the environment is human population growth. The world population is growing at the rate of three people per second, 250,000 people per day, or 94 million per year (the population of Mexico).

The "Progress" of Homo Sapiens

China's population is projected to reach 1.54 billion in 2025, roughly equal to the entire world population in 1960. In 2025 India's population is projected to equal that of China. India may have achieved its "green miracle" by overworking its croplands and depleting its watershed. Nigeria's population is expected to double to 180 million in the next 25 years. The earth is our production capacity and the earth's bounty is the production. When production exceeds production capacity for an extended period, the production capacity is diminished.

The pressure on natural resources increases with global consumption, which in turn depends on the average consumption and number of inhabitants. this pressure can therefore be eased either by acting on population growth or by acting on consumption growth. If we look at particular areas, we realize that the demographic factor is important in developing countries, which have a reduced and generally slow-growing rate of consumption, while in the developed countries exactly the opposite happens.

Thirty-two percent of the people living in developing countries are under 15 years of age and their fertility as adults will make an enormous difference to population growth rates in the next century and consequently to the availability of resources.

Since the per capita levels of consumption differ so widely between rich and poor countries, the paradox arises where every birth in the North puts as much pressure on resources as tens of births in the South. This is the cause of a lot of North-South finger pointing. We in the North tell those in the South to get a grip on fertility and population growth. They look back and tell us to get a grip on consumption. Ironically, a case can also be made for a reduction of fertility in the North, something difficult to suggest since Northern countries have already reduced their birth rates to below replacement levels and it seems unlikely that they could go much further in this direction.

If present trends continue, energy consumption and production of pollutants will double over the next 20 years. Today, 20 percent of the worlds population consumes 80 percent of the planet's resources and produces 80 percent of the global pollution. The real issue is not only the total number of persons, but the resources consumed and the pollution produced by each person. Population increases combined with consumption increases have serious human, economic, and environmental consequences.

A National Security Issue

Undersecretary of State, Tim Wirth, Clinton's point man on population says "We have some interest in maintaining a modicum of stability around the world. If populations grow so dramatically that their are millions of young people with no stake in what goes on in their society, that is an invitation to a kind of anarchy."

Potential for Anarchy

The cover of the February 1994 issue of Atlantic Monthly reads "The Coming Anarchy." The rest of the cover reads "nations break up under the tidal flow of refugees from environmental and social disaster. As borders crumble, another type of boundary is erected - a wall of disease. Wars are fought over scarce resources, especially water, and war itself becomes continuous with crime, as armed bands of stateless marauders clash with the private security forces of the elites. A preview of the first decades of the twenty-first century. By Robert Kaplan."

Kaplan writes that environment is the national security issue of the 21st century. "The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possible rising sea levels in critical overcrowded regions that will prompt mass immigrations and in turn incite group conflicts - will be the foreign policy change from which most others ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the cold war. Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power relationships at which we now look. Surging populations lead to environmental degradation which leads to ethnic conflict."

West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issue, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firs, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. Consider Nigeria now with a population of 90 million including that of its largest city Lagos whose crime, pollution, and overcrowding make it the cliche par excellence of Third World urban dysfunction. The population of Nigeria is projected to double in the next 25 years while the country continues to deplete its natural resources. As the burgeoning populations deplete the resources they move to the city and become the urban poor.

 Polygamy continues to proliferate in sub-Saharan Africa boosting the birth rate, the spread of the AIDS virus, and both deforestation and desertification which in turn drives people to the cities to live in slums. Of the estimated 12 billion people in the world who are HIV positive, 8 billion are in Africa.

Water Quality and Population

One of the gravest threats to water quality as a result of overpopulation is the spread of waterborne disease, especially in tropical countries. Some 25,000 people die every day from diseases carried by polluted waters such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

Water is a finite resource, the global water cycle remains constant. The amount of global fresh water, approximately .5 percent of the total water on earth has not increased since the beginnings of civilization. Yet population increases caused world water use to double between 1900 and 1950 and double again by 1990. In addition to causing immediate shortages, intense usage pressure severely damages water resources. Aquifer depletion, lowered water tables and salt water intrusion decrease the amount of water suitable for human use.

Water resources do not limit population growth. Rather, they limit the level of economic development or living standards achievable.

 A sustainable society enables its members to achieve a high quality of life in ways that are ecologically sustainable.

As urban concentrations in developing countries intensify, the amount of human waste increases while the ability to provide proper treatment and disposal decreases. Water pollution by human waste is widespread and water borne disease accounts for 80 percent of all child deaths in developing countries.

If we do not look beyond short term profits and political boundaries to solve a pending world water crises, the results will be devastating and potentially irreversible. Mass drought, starvation and political upheaval will be a given in the semi-arid third world, globally, the results will be the extermination of wildlife and habitat, toxic contamination of drinking water supplies, loss of critical farmland and a deteriorating quality of life for all.

Different Opinions

Economists have a lot more faith in science and technology to accommodate more and more growth than scientists do. Looking back at previous international population conferences, it is clear that by 1954 the chief question was whether development would by itself lead to population control, or would population control be required before development could take place.

The central focus of modern economics is on growth, the idea that increasing productivity brings employment and prosperity. with sufficient economic growth, population growth is not to be feared. The resulting wealth, economist maintain, will in turn counteract the incidental ill effects of growth. Biologists, on the other hand, see the economy as embedded in a fragile ecosphere, upon which growth acts in dangerous, inscrutable ways. The two groups agree that sooner or later both the number of people in the world and the amount of goods those people produce/consume will have to stop increasing. Beyond that, however, economists and biologists diverge radically on some fundamental questions to include:

• How urgent is it that population growth and rising productivity be curtailed?

• What sacrifices in checking growth are acceptable?

• With development, family size will eventually fall and sooner or later human population will stabilize. Is it safe to let the process take care of itself?

 "The sooner population growth ceases, the more time humanity has to redress the mistakes of past growth, the more resources it has to implement solutions, and the more options it has to decide how it wants to live in the future."

Ronald G. Ridker
World Bank

Options for Curbing Population Growth

Option #1 is inhumane. Unfortunately, on our current path it is an option which is being exercised on a regular basis and one which will account for increasingly more deaths. Many zealots even think catastrophic events are desirable or "God's will."

Option #2 is a highly charged one involving individual values, women's rights, and religious beliefs. Abortion is commonly used for birth control, when other kinds are not available. This option brings up the debate over whose fertility is being controlled and how that influences the political/racial/ethnic/religious mix. Leaders of most developing nations accept the need for family planning, but suspicions of ulterior motives never lurk far beneath the surface.

Option #3 is much less controversial. Ecologically sustainable and socially acceptable economic development is a choice that everyone can be for. That is what sustainable development is all about, "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It's about a vision where we live in harmony with nature and each other. The record shows that education and empowerment reduce fertility rates and population growth.

It is quite obvious that Options #2 and #3 will have to work in concert if we are going to head off Option #1 and if we are going to win the race, the human race to a sustainable society.

In a previous Eco-Link (Volume 4, Number 1) we pointed out that almost everything that reduces population growth is considered bad which obviously creates a dilemma. What option(s) would you chose for bringing the population under control?

Family Planning

When serving as Director For US Agency for International Developments' Office of Population, R.T. Ravenholt, M.D. wrote a concise statement of "AID'S Family Planning Strategy," which concluded:

"Regardless of what special social measures may ultimately be needed for optimal regulation of fertility, it is clear that the main element initially in any population planning and control program should be the extension of family planning information and means to all elements of the population. It seems reasonable to believe that when women throughout the world need reproduce only if and when they choose, then the many intense family and social problems generated by unplanned, unwanted, and poorly cared for children will be greatly ameliorated and the now acute problem of too rapid population growth will be reduced to manageable proportions."

Writing for the Free Inquiry Journal, Dr. Ravenholt, who is now president of Population Health Imperatives in Seattle, says, "throughout human experience until quite recently, tribal and species survival needs dictated that women reproduce with little or no constraint. But as scientific knowledge and its products evolved with accelerating speed during the 19th and 20th centuries, death rates fell. Consequently, an urgent need arose to reduce population growth to levels commensurate with available resources, in accordance with the developmental condition equation:

According to John Bongaarts of the Population Council in New York City, education, occupation, wealth, location, religious belief and social status are indirect determinants of fertility. Because they are indirect, their effect on fertility is difficult to interpret. Of the direct influences, the most powerful is family planning. Bongaarts says, "a country's contraceptive prevalence rate - the percentage of married women of reproductive age who use any contraception - largely determines its fertility rate." The data also confirms that better educated women are more likely to practice some form of contraception than are women with little or no education.

Source: Resources for the Future

*Total Fertility Rate: The number of children women are expected to have over their reproductive years (e.g. ages 15-49).

Demographic Transitions

An article titled "The Fertility Decline in Developing Countries" appeared in the December 1993 edition of the Scientific American. The article says, "demographic transition theory holds that societies are initially characterized by high fertility and high mortality, population does not grow. This phase is followed by an intermediate stage in which modernization begins and mortality is reduced but fertility remains high. This period is one of rapid population growth, only later does fertility decline. The last era, one of stable population growth, low mortality and fertility, describes most of the developed world." The article goes on to say, "The recent decline in fertility rates among developing countries does not fit this theoretical framework well with respect to timing or circumstance. Fertility rates in developing countries have fallen much more rapidly than they did during the European demographic transition. The findings dispute the notion that "development is the best contraceptive," a phrase that originated at the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest. This view held that fertility would not drop until developing economies improved."

The differences between fertility declines in developing countries today and those seen in Europe may be best explained by differences in the approaches to family planning. During the West's demographic transition, modern contraceptives were not yet invented, and the concept of family planning was not quickly accepted. The availability of effective contraception gives developing countries a major advantage over the European societies that underwent fertility declines earlier.

Survival of the Fittest?

In the closing words of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin clearly identifies evolution with virtually unstoppable progress. He writes, "As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress toward perfection." Modern biologists, however, find thoroughly unacceptable the 19th century view that the earth's history has been an inexorable march toward the goal of contemporary humanity. As the geologist and paleontologist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard has written, "This common scenario is fiction rooted in traditional hopes for progress and predictability."

To a large extent we have freed ourselves from natural selection or survival of the fittest in the traditional sense. We are not well equipped to live in the wild, yet we can live wherever we want, and we can push any other creature out of its niche if we so choose. We have controlled death to the point where our birth rate far exceeds our death rate which accounts for runaway population growth. We have no predator to worry about except ourselves. We have developed technology to carry us to the moon and back (significant in biological terms as well as scientific terms). We are the only species that can visualize our future. We need to use that vision and the technology we have developed to achieve a sustainable society.

There is no doubt about the fact that we humans are the most highly evolved creatures on earth, with brains enormous for our body size. Yet, in a world estimated to be some 5 billion years old...we just got here. Our first know ancestor is "Lucy," a female who lived on the African continent, lived just 3.2 million years ago, a blink in time considering that there were 65 million years between the dinosaurs and our arrival. Where we go from here is up to us.

What Can We Do?

Because tomorrow's parents have already been born and the impacts of fertility decline won't be felt for several decades, the world has to prepare itself to cope with a global population of eight billion in 2020. Therefore, the measures to be taken must not be confined to the sole objective of reducing fertility. Some other things we can do are:

• Preserve the dignity of the family and each of its member.
• Reduce consumption of natural resources and consumer goods.
• Give priority to investments in basic health services, sanitation and clean water.
• Make information and education accessible to all, including women.
• Protect women from coercion, maltreatment and sexual violence.

"Achieving and maintaining a sustainable relationship between human populations and the natural resource base of the earth is the single most critical long-term issue facing the peoples of the world and this issue will increasingly be the focus of international affairs for the foreseeable future."

Russell E. Train
World Wildlife Fund

Did you know?

• Every year farmers around the world are trying to feed 90 million more people with 24 billion fewer tons of topsoil.

• Desertification (i.e. land turning to desert) from overgrazing and inefficient farming methods is taking 15 million acres out of use each year.

• Increasing demand for fresh water has diminished our supplies by trillions of gallons above and below ground. In several regions of Northern China, water tables are falling by 12-15 feet per year. Parts of Mexico City are sinking as underground aquifers are pumped dry.

• With half of the world's population under 25 years of age, even the most vigorous policies will not eliminate rapid population growth and the accompanying need for large increases in production.

• Over 1.3 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, 880 million adults cannot read or write, 770 million lack sufficient food for an active working life, and 800 million live in "absolute poverty," lacking even the most rudimentary necessities. Each year about 14 million children, about 10 percent of the children born annually, die of hunger.

• World infant mortality is currently 65 per 1,000 live births.

• Approximately 75 percent of all the illiterate people in the world are women who have been denied education opportunities.

• An estimated 500,000 women die of pregnancy related deaths each year, and at least 250,000 women die each year from unsafe abortions.

• In the United States in 1991 there were 1,213,769 births to unmarried women, of which 357,483 were to adolescents ages 15-19.

• There are 1.6 million abortions per year in the United States.

• The average women in Russia has 7-8 abortions in her lifetime.

Glossary

Birth Rate: The average number of births per year per 1,000 population at midyear. Also known as crude birth rate.

Component Method: A method of estimating or projecting population change (fertility, mortality and migration are used).

Contraception: Deliberate use of methods to prevent conception or pregnancy. Also known as family planning.

Contraceptive Prevalence Rate: The percentage of currently married women of reproductive age (15-49) who use a method of contraception.

Death Rate: The average number of deaths per year per 1,000 population at midyear. Also known as crude death rate.

Growth Rate: The average annual percent change in population resulting from a surplus (or deficit) of births over deaths and the balance of migrants entering and leaving a country.

Infant Mortality Rate: The number of deaths to infants under one year of age in a given hear per 1,000 live births in the same year.

Total Fertility Rate: Births expected per woman during her reproductive years (15-49).

Vital Events: Births and deaths.

Sources

Counting Bodies, Counting Heads, by Nathan Keyfitz, The Sciences, Sept/Oct 1994.

The Coming Anarchy, by Robert D. Kaplan, Atlantic Monthly, February 1994.

Environmental Education Dossiers, published by UNESCO, Volume 3, November 1993. ISBN 1022-3304

The Fertility Decline in Developing Countries, by Robey, Rutstein, and Morris, Scientific American, December 1993.

Taking Contraceptives to the World's Poor, by R.T. Ravenholt, Free Inquiry, Spring 1994, Volume 14, Number 2.

Making Resource Use Personal and Accountable, by Peter E. Black, Renewable Resources Journal, Autumn 1993.

Population, Food and Hunger, Charles E. Kupchella and Margaret C. Hylard, Environmental Science 1989, ISBN 0-205-08520-0.

All of Us: World Population, Environmental Education Dossiers #3, UNESCO, ISSN 1022-3304.

The State of World Population, Nafis Sadik, United Nations Population Fund, 1991.

Population and the Environment: The Challenges Ahead, Nafis Sadik, United Nations Population Fund.

World Population Profile 1987, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of The Census, Library of Congress Card No: 87-647922.

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