February 19, 2002

Robert Engelman, Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg write on the implications of the demographic trends today

Throughout most of human history, parents had on average roughly two children who themselves survived to become parents. We know this not by demographic surveys but by the simple observation that human population grew very slowly until relatively recently. The key word here is survived. Women undoubtedly had many babies, although some women practised herbal and other means of contraception. But until recently, death rates among infants and children were so high that population growth was episodic and localized rather than consistent and global.

With the advent of better nutrition and basic public health — hand washing, sanitation, immunization, and antibiotics — enough people survived infancy and childhood by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to boost population growth to unprecedented rates. What had been a billion people around 1800 became 1.6 billion in 1900, 2.5 billion by 1950, and then 6.1 billion by 2000. Sometime in the 1960s the global rate of population growth peaked and began to decline — from 2.1 per cent a year to just under 1.3 per cent today — although the still growing population base meant that annual additions to human numbers continued increasing until recently. Even today, the planet adds about 77 million people each year, the equivalent of 10 New York Cities.

The direct cause of slowing population growth was that women began having fewer children on average as infant mortality rates declined and as modern means of contraception became available — and increasingly attractive — in most countries. This demographic revolution, however, has developed unevenly around the world. In much of Europe and in Japan, use of birth control rose so rapidly from the 1970s through the 1990s that fertility fell well below the 2.1 average of children per woman needed to replace those who die with those who are born; eventually, continuation of such low fertility will end population growth in these nations. Countries such as Italy, Spain, Armenia, the Ukraine, and Russia now have fertility rates so low that some analysts are concerned about how the nations will adjust to having many fewer working age people available to support the elderly in their aging populations. Others have countered that such trends are simply the byproduct of the combination of longer life spans and lower birth rates and that changes in tax, social security, and immigration policies can ease the transition to new population sizes and structures.

For most of the world, however, population decline is anything but imminent. Average national fertility rates are at replacement level or higher in more than two thirds of the world’s nations. Even with reasonably anticipated declines in fertility, the current population of Nigeria of about 120 million, for example, is expected to grow to between 237 million and 325 million by mid-century. The number of people living on the entire continent of Africa is projected to more than double — from 800 million to between 1.7 billion and 2.3 billion — over the same period. South Central Asia (including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan) could more than double its current population of 1.5 billion.

The stark differences between wealthy and poor nations in population trends create the conditions for an increased flow of people across international borders in coming decades. An estimated 150 million people — three out of every 100 people on the planet — live outside their countries of birth. Between 1985 and 1990, the population of international migrants grew about 50 per cent faster than world population as a whole, and given the greater migration of the 1990s and the slow down in world population growth, it is likely that the gap has grown much wider. In the late 1980s, most migration was from one developing country to another, but in the future the South-to-North axis could dominate migration.

The United Nations Population Division currently projects that today’s world population of 6.2 billion will grow to anywhere from 7.9 billion to 10.9 billion by 2050. Global population by mid-century is projected to be overwhelmingly urban, more tropical, and significantly older than it is today.

Despite this growth, the overwhelming influence on human population today is the fulfilment of parental intentions to have later pregnancies and smaller families. In 1960, women had five children on average worldwide, and more than six in developing countries. By 2000, these numbers had fallen by roughly half, in part because contraceptive usage multiplied sixfold — from 10 per cent of couples worldwide in 1960 to 60 per cent in 2000. These changes are indicators of a demographic revolution that continues today.

Demographers and population policy analysts increasingly recognize the health and circumstances of women to be among the greatest determinants of how many children parents have. When women’s education, opportunities, capacity, and status begin to approach those of men, their economic and health conditions improve. Moreover, assuming good access to family planning services, they have fewer children on average, and those they have arrive later in the mothers’ lives. An estimated 125 million women worldwide do not want to be pregnant but, like Djenaba in Mali, are not using any type of contraception. Millions more women — survey research has not produced a precise number — would like to avoid pregnancy despite their sexual activity but are using contraception improperly, in many cases because of misinformation about what would be the best method for them. Overall, the UN Population Fund estimates, 350 million women worldwide lack any access to family planning services.

A major contributor to later pregnancies and lower fertility is at least six or seven years of schooling. When girls manage to stay in school this long, what they learn about basic health, sexuality, and their own prospects in the world tends to encourage them to marry and become pregnant later in life and to have smaller families. In Egypt, for example, only five per cent of women who stayed in school past the primary level had children while still in their teens, while over half of women with no schooling became mothers while still teenagers. In high fertility countries, such as those in Africa, South Asia, and some parts of Latin America, women who have some secondary school experience typically have two, three, or four children fewer in their lifetimes than otherwise similar women who have never been to school.

Educating girls and women also gives them higher hopes for themselves — including raised self-esteem, greater decision making power within the family, more confidence to participate fully in community affairs, and the ability to one day become educated mothers who pass on their knowledge to their own daughters and sons.

Unfortunately, despite some halting progress in international and government commitments to support women’s rights, women are still much less likely than men to complete secondary school — or to hold a paying job or sit in a legislature or parliament. An estimated 75 million fewer girls than boys were enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and in all nations women still earn only two-thirds to three-fourths of what men earn for comparable work.

It is difficult to predict how quickly these less-often-discussed human numbers will change for the better. Until they improve significantly, however, women around the world will be less able to choose to have smaller families.

Excerpts from
State of the world, 2002
Edited by Linda Starke
Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington DC-20036-1094, USA Tel: (202) 452 1999. Email: wwpub@worldwatch.org 
ISBN 0-393-32279-3
265pp. $15.95

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