STANFORD University Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife Anne wrote a best-selling book in 1968, titled The Population Bomb.
It began with this statement: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Just about every prediction Ehrlich made was completely wrong. In fact, the United Nations (UN) reported last year that the percentage of the global population that qualifies as “undernourished” has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since 1968.
Ehrlich wrote in 1968, “I don’t see how India could possibly feed 200 million more people by 1980.” That sentence was removed from the 1971 edition, as India’s food self-sufficiency improved dramatically. In fact, while the number of malnourished children in India is high, the rates of malnutrition and poverty in India have declined, from approximately 90 percent at the time of India’s independence to less than 40 percent today.
The total number of living humans on Earth is now greater than 7 billion, and between 1900 and 2000 the increase in world population was three times as great as the increase during the entire previous history of humankind.
According the economist Max Roser, world history can be divided into three periods of distinct trends in population growth. The first period was a very long age of very slow population growth. The second period, lasting until 1962, had an increasing rate of growth. Now, the population-growth rate is falling and will continue to fall, leading to an end of growth before the end of this century.
According to the UN data, Chinese, Russians and Brazilians are no longer replacing themselves, while Indians are having far fewer children. If this strengthening trend continues, global fertility will fall to the replacement rate in a little more than a decade.
Total fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of live births per woman over her lifetime. The global population will remain stable if the TFR is at or above 2.3 for the world as a whole. Germany and Japan now come in at 1.4 TFR. In 1950 China and India were 6.1 and 5.9, respectively. Based on the imbalance of more men to women, effectively, China is now at 1.5 and India is at 2.45 TFR.
Certainly, in view of the planet’s limited carrying capacity, a slower birth rate is beneficial. However, this change in demographics creates its own set of problems. India is the only large economy whose work force will grow sufficiently over the next 30 years to increase economic growth. China’s pool of women of childbearing age will drop 8 percent between 2010 and 2020. Germany, Japan and Russia already have declining numbers in their work forces.
The one global region that is projected to stay in the “not too fast” (West Africa) and “not too slow” (Europe) category is Southeast Asia.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano