DEVELOPMENT: Population Explosion Not Over, Warns U.N.

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 27 1998 (IPS) - The United Nations is dispelling the myth – propounded recently by some U.S.think tanks – that the world’s population explosion is over.

Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), admits that fertility rates are on the decline. But that does not mean the population problem is coming to an end, she says.

“We still have high growth rates in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe,” Sadik told IPS and added it is “dangerous” to rush to “hasty and ill-conceived” conclusions.

Joseph Chamie, Director of the U.N.’s Population Division says it also is misleading to say that the population debate is over. “Not only did the population debate continue, but it was multifaceted, addressing issues other than growth and size.”

Chamie says the complex population issue included, among other things, the determinants and consequences of fertility, mortality, morbidity, international migration, urbanisation, internal distribution and age structure.

Addressing the U.N. Commission on Population and Development early this week, Chamie debunked several “population myths”currently in circulation saying the population explosion is not over, nor is the population debate.

Chamie says there also is a false notion that “population growth is progress” and that “the solution to population and development problems is simply more money.”

The outburst from U.N. officials responds to several recent press commentaries, including one in the New York Times by Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. Wattenberg argues that not only is the population problem coming to an end but that the prospect of an emptier planet is creating its own set of problems.

“Mounting evidence, from rich nations and poor, strongly suggests that the population explosing is fizzling,” Wattenberg says. “Never before have birth rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long all around the world.

“Five children per woman. Then four. Then three. Then less than three. In estimating the population for the year 2050, demographers were caught with their projections up. Suddenly, worldwide, 650 million people were missing. Many more will be missing soon. They will never be born.”

Nicholas Eberstadt of the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that some of the world’s best demographers have begun “a dramatic reassassement of the world’s demographic future.” “They are now seriously considering the possibility that the world’s population will peak in our lifetime, and then commence an indefinite decline.”

He says that negative population growth would have major implications for governments, especially for those nationwide, tax- financed pay-as-you-go pension programmes that are the central feature of the modern welfare state. “In virtually all of today’s industrial democracies, such programmes were established in periods of relatively high fertility and relatively rapid population growth.”

The Washington-based Population Institute, on the other hand, dismisses this view as “a knee-jerk reaction to a downward revision of annual world population growth.” The Institute’s president Werner Fornos says “it is precisely the kind of elitist poppycock that has been preached for years by voices emanating from reactionary institutions whose pervese credo is to coddle the comfortable and ignore the afflicted.”

The key to the world’s demographic future, Fornos said, is the reproductive behaviour of three billion young people – equal to the entire world population as recently as 1960 – who will enter their child-bearing years within the next generation.

Chamie says the relatively rapid growth of the world’s population is not over. At present, the world population is 5.9 billion, and by the middle of 1999, it will reach six billion. During the next 50 years, the world’s population is expected to pass nine billion and is not likely to stop there.

According to a U.N. study on long-range population projections up to the 21st century, under the medium-fertility scenario, (which assumes fertility will reach replacement levels of slightly above two children per woman in coming decades) the world population will reach 10 billion by 2100, 10.8 billion by 2150, and will stabilise at slightly under 11 billion people around 2200.

However, the ultimate world population size of nearly 11 billion persons, according to the medium fertility scenario of these projections, is 0.7 billion persons fewer than previously published by the United Nations in 1992, mainly due to larger-than- expected declines in fertility in many countries.

Chamie says that population growth does not necessarily bring about progress and development, as commonly believed. The indefinite growth of population is unsustainable in the long run, he says.

Although financial resources are necessary, more money in itself is not sufficient to ensure progress in resolving population and development problems, Chamie says. “To resolve those issues, account would have to be taken of political, social and cultural considerations.”

Research shows that while income has a significant impact, health depends more on simply income. For instance, despite the constraints imposed by low levels of income, it has been demonstrated that some low-income countries can achieve low mortality levels. In at least six countries – China, Cuba, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Sri Lanka and the state of Kerala in India – life expectancy approximated that of developed countries, Chamie says.