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| -Image generated by Microsoft Bing AI |
How we got here
As you can see from the following graph, until the Industrial Revolution in the C18th populations remained small and static – under 1 billion globally, since the beginning of agriculture and were constantly kept in check by war, famine and disease.
Many children died at birth or in infancy and many mothers died
in childbirth which meant not only that fewer children reached reproductive age, but that
although many women did indeed have large numbers of children, others did not live long enough to do so.
With improvements in technology, medicine, diet, sanitation and income, people lived longer and populations began to accelerate rapidly.
Advances in shipping and the acquisition of foreign territories also meant that
food and raw materials could come from distant lands to sustain larger
populations and many people were also able to migrate to less crowded places.
Some 1-2 million Irish people for example, are believed to have emigrated to the USA and Australia following the The Irish Potato Famine which lasted from 1847 to 1852. At least another million people died of starvation. Though the immediate cause was the result of having two bad seasons, more subtle factors were also to blame.
In the first instance, the whole country had become dependent upon the potato ever since Sir Walter Raleigh first brought it from the New World in 1589. They were easier to grow and required far less space than traditional crops and thus allowed the population to flourish. Between 1687 and 1841, Ireland's population shot up from just over 2 million to more than 8 million (Livi-Bacci, (1992), Blackwell, "A Concise History of World Population,"p.68).
By the time the famine occurred, every available niche had been planted to potatoes. Soil
was even carried to rocky mountain tops to feed the
burgeoning population. Furthermore, they planted only one strain, so when the potato blight came as a result of extraordinarily wet weather, it took out the entire crop. In consequence, the
population of Ireland fell to 4 million in the space of very
few years. An additional factor was that due to foreign land ownership, much of Ireland's produce was still being sent to Britain, even as the Irish were starving.
In other European countries which were also affected by bad weather and potato blight, it sowed the seeds of revolution and change.
Not many places can support large scale agriculture and much of that produce goes to feed large numbers of people in other countries. According to conservative estimates the population already exceeds the number of people the country can support sustainably and most certainly not without contributing to further extinctions which are already among the most rapid in the world. From what I have seen, this may also be true of countries such as Chile and Bolivia.
Why we should worry
Although birth rates have fallen in many countries, the
inbuilt momentum – that is, the number of people who are already here and are reaching reproductive age, means
that at this rate population numbers will not stabilise until 2080 and not
start to fall until 2100, by which time they will have reached 10.7 billion. It is not just a question of having physical space on which to put them.
As a writer in Population Matters* put it. "People aren't just Tetris blocks you can stack up somewhere." They need things like food, water, housing and electricity, not to mention all their other wants and needs such as education, public transport, cars and other consumer goods, though the impacts will not be felt equally either within or between societies. Wealthy countries and individuals will be able to continue to purchase the resources of others for a time, but the cracks are already beginning to show.
They show themselves in protests about land use and rising food prices, in people queuing at food banks, in conflicts between neighbouring countries, in competition for housing and resources, in more pollution, declining water quality, declining health, and in rising maternal mortality and shorter lifespans, even in wealthy countries.
We see it in mass migrations and mass extinctions, and of course climate change, brought on by unsustainable consumption, fossil fuel use and the growing need for energy. Unfortunately, when we import much of what eat and use, we do not see the impact this is having in the exporting countries or on the environment.
*Population Matters is
a UK based international Non Profit Organisation helping countries to
transition gracefully and without coercion towards sustainable populations in order to protect nature and improve people's lives.
Didn’t people predict population collapse in 1960’s and it didn't happen
- In the first instance, people were warned through the 1968 report called "The Limits to Growth" by the Club of Rome -a global think tank which used early computer modelling in an effort to solve humanity's problems. It's major findings and recommendations were subsequently published by researchers Anne and Paul Ehrlich as book entitled "The Population Bomb" which became one of the most influential books of the C20th.
- Facing famine in 1975, India used coerced and forced sterilisation as a condition of help from the World Economic
Forum. In 1976 alone, 6.2 million men were sterilised, rising to 8.2
million in 1977 with as many as 5,664 vasectomies being performed in a single day. It also caused around
700 deaths due to the use of unsterilised equipment and poor
aftercare.
In both China and India, there were violations of human rights and given the preferences for male children in most Asian countries, it has resulted in a huge imbalance between the sexes in China and a very great fear of government intervention in reproduction in India, so that despite falling birthrates, India in now estimated to have overtaken China as the world's most populous country in mid 2023. Draconian as these measures may seem, and despite some drawbacks, reducing its population has allowed China to improve the living standards of most of its people. It ended its One Child policy in 2016.
This contrasts sharply with countries which did not take such steps, particularly in parts of Africa such as Rwanda, which were instead wracked with repeated famines and civil wars as people competed for land and resources. [Incidentally, there's been an immense turnaround for Rwanda in recent years which we will discuss next time].
- Secondly, there were huge improvements in birth control. Following the recommendations of the report and the book, sex education and information about birth control and family planning were widely disseminated. The contraceptive pill became widely available in the 1970s and many countries legalised abortion. This meant that couples could now decide how many children they wanted or how many they could feed, clothe and support.
- Also in response to the report and the book, agronomists began developing higher yielding strains of rice and other staples in what was known as the ‘Green Revolution.” This meant that far more food could be grown in the same space. However, the rice was found be deficient in certain vitamins and and required large quantities of fertiliser, pesticides and of course, water. The reliance on monocultures and a small number of high yielding cultivars brings its own risks, just as it did during the Irish Potato Famine. Furthermore, scientists such as Norman Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in this field doesn't believe that this miracle can be achieved again:
- Industrialisation and Urbanisation also played a major role.
At the beginning of the 20th century
most people were employed in agriculture but with factory work promising a
better way of life than virtual serfdom, thousands flocked to cities. This left
agriculture shorthanded for which it compensated by becoming highly mechanised, which in
turn displaced more farm workers who then also migrated to cities.
Whereas in
traditional forms of agriculture many hands make light work and it doesn’t cost much more to raise more
children, in the emerging urban centres where everything must be bought, this becomes much more expensive and
makes each extra child more costly to raise, thereby giving families more
incentive to limit the number of children.
As far as societies went, more
people being able to join the workforce generally meant an increase in living standards, both for
individuals and society as a whole – bringing improvements in health, sanitation
and education. However,
if population growth outstrips the capacity of a city to provide employment, infrastructure, housing and so on, it can quickly lead to poverty, civil unrest, declining health and
environmental degradation. This appears to be what is happening in some African countries and parts of Latin America. See for example, what Wendo Aszed, founder of Dandelion, Africa, says about Kenya:
“Kenya is becoming a desert. There’s pressure on the environment because we use charcoal and firewood. The larger the family, the more it consumes. There’s no provision to plant trees because trees cost money. If nothing is done soon there won’t be any resources left. Communities are beginning to realise that it’s better for the eco-system around them if they have smaller families”
-Quoted in Population Matters
- Cultural and Social Change. The advent of universal
education not only meant that women married later and thus had fewer children
in their lifetime, but it also gave
women more choices than simply marrying and having more and more children. Less time spent in childrearing meant the ability to earn an income outside the home and thus being able to provide more favourable conditions such as better food, more education and better healthcare for their children as well as for themselves.
Where growth and development have gone hand in hand, we have
traditionally seen a demographic transition from high birth rates and high
mortality, followed by a temporary population surge and then a gradual decline in population
growth. Because of modern medicine - vaccines and other efforts to eliminate diseases such as malaria, fewer children were dying in childbirth and
infancy, so their parents did not need to have as many to ensure that they
would be taken care of in old age. One of the ironies of China's One Child Policy is that the one child is now having to take care of four grandparents.
Why Not Let Nature Take its Course?
As with climate change, I would rather take preventative action and be wrong than wait for nature to solve the problem and be right. Nature’s solutions are usually brutal. As we've seen they take the form of famine, disease, war and unrest or simply result in an ever diminishing quality of life for all, none of which are pretty.
This makes recent American legislation overturning a woman's right to determine how many children she should have - forced reproduction in effect, all the more puzzling unless we look at who's promoting it and why.
- Some economists argue that declining populations will have a negative impact on the economy in the short term, especially as populations age and live longer, but this very shortsighted. There are other ways of overcoming this than running roughshod over people’s human rights. There are also concerns that in some regions and occupations there will be labour shortages in consequence. In Australia this has been particularly noticeable in agriculture and rural areas, in construction and in aged care, but there are other solutions to those problems, which don’t involve making more people than we can take care of. We shall talk more about these in the next post.
- Some cultures and religions also still favour large families. While this may increase their own strength and power, it is not necessarily beneficial to the individuals, the health and welfare of the children or society at large, as we've seen in many cases already. However, many strongly Catholic countries such as Spain, and Portugal have successfully reduced runaway population growth and others such as Mexico, Argentina, Italy and Ireland have recently gained the right to abortion.
- More xenophobic elements fear that the influx of migrants and refugees will overwhelm the existing population and outcompete them, for jobs, housing and influence, and even in the reproductive stakes, given declining fertility and falling sperm counts in many developed countries. Perhaps nature is solving the problem itself.
- Lastly, there are also business interests which favour large numbers of poor people. Strong competition for jobs and housing for example, keeps wages down and rents up, and the wheels of commerce turning. It also leaves people open to even worse forms of exploitation, such as the sex tourism in the Philippines, or the selling of children or organs in several countries - see for example Brazil, Moldova, and other parts of Eastern Europe and Asia, because people can see no other way to survive.
Why would anyone want more children in that scenario? The next wave of industrialisation in the form of AI, automation and robotics is
going to make even more people unemployed and desperate unless we change how wealth,
goods and services are distributed. Nor do we need cannon fodder for armies any longer. Instead, we need skilled technicians,
analysts and remote systems operators, and a lot of people who are good at diplomacy.
Nor is it just about numbers. As Danny Sriskandarajah, from Oxfam remarked:.
"The over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fuelling the climate crisis and putting the planet in peril.”
- From Population Matters
In Part II We'll talk about effective forms of population control, if on the one
hand we do not want social or environmental collapse, but also don’t want forced
sterilisations, procreation bans, or a licensing system
either.
Thanks to Bing AI for links, references and some thoughtful discussion points
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