• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 512 0

than Russia living on an area smaller than Florida. In 1955 Bangladesh had a birth rate of 6.8 children per woman. Today, fifty years later, that ratio has more than halved, to about 2.7 children per woman. On current trends Bangladesh’s population will soon cease growing altogether. Its neighbour India has seen a similar collapse in fecundity, from 5.9 to 2.6 children per woman. In Pakistan the birth rate did not start dropping till the mid-1980s, but its decline has been catching up its neighbours: it has halved in just twenty years to 3.2 children per woman. Between them these three countries account for about a quarter of the world’s population. If they had not seen their birth rates fall so fast, the world population boom would have become deafening.

Yet they are not alone. Throughout the world, birth rates are falling. There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved. Until 2002, the United Nations, when projecting future world population density, assumed that birth rates would never fall below 2.1 children per woman in most countries: that is the ‘replacement rate’, at which a woman produces enough babies to replace her and her husband, with 0.1 babies added in to cover childhood deaths and a slightly male-biased sex ratio. But in 2002, the UN changed this assumption as it became clear that in country after country the decline in baby-making went straight through the 2.1 level and kept on dropping. If anything, the decline may accelerate as the effect of small family size compounds. Nearly half the world now has fertility below 2.1. Sri Lanka’s birth rate, at 1.9, is already well below replacement level. Russia’s population is falling so fast it will be one-third smaller in 2050 than it was at its peak in the early 1990s.

Do these statistics surprise you? Everybody knows the population of the world is growing. But remarkably few people seem to know that the rate of increase in world population has been falling since the early 1960s and that the raw number of new people added each year has been falling since the late 1980s. As the environmentalist Stewart Brand puts it, ‘Most environmentalists still haven’t got the word. Worldwide, birth-rates are in free fall ... On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birth rates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping.’ This is happening despite people living longer and thus swelling the ranks of the world population for longer, and despite the fact that babies are no longer dying as frequently as they did in the early twentieth century. Population growth is slowing even while death rates are falling.

Frankly, this is an extraordinary bit of luck. Had the human race continued to turn wealth into more babies as it did for so many centuries, it would come to grief eventually. When the world population looked like it would hit fifteen billion by 2050 and keep on rising after that, there was a genuine risk of not feeding or watering that number comfortably, at least not while hanging on to any natural habitats. But now that even the United Nations’ best estimate is that world population will probably start falling once it peaks at 9.2 billion in 2075, there is every prospect of feeding the world for ever. After all, there are already 6.8 billion on the earth and they are still feeding better and better every decade. Only 2.4 billion to go.

Think of it this way. After the world population first hit a billion in (best guess) 1804, the human race had another 123 years to work out how to feed the next billion, the two billion milestone being reached in 1927. The next billions took thirty-three, fourteen, thirteen and twelve years respectively to arrive. Yet despite the accelerating pace, the world food supply in calories per head improved dramatically. The rate at which the billions are being added is now falling. The seven billionth person won’t be born till 2013, fourteen years after the six billionth, the eight