As of October 31, 2011, the demographers at United Nations recently proclaimed, the population of the Earth reached 7 billion. Just a dozen years ago, it passed 6 billion. As disturbing as this event was, it was not nearly as upsetting as the UN’s projection that the Earth’s population will be an estimated 9.3 billion by 2050. In effect, by mid-century, the Earth, already overburdened with one India, will be asked to bear the burden of two more.
I am a trained social-scientist well accustomed to the practice of making forecasts that rest on assumptions that are accepted as unrealistic but are nevertheless used because there is no adequate quantitative information, or even worse little understanding of the nature of the processes that we abstract out of our models. Economists are notorious for making projections from models that involve a great deal of abstraction from what most people believe to be the real world. Demographers are no different.
The demographers at the UN made their projections based on a single variable, the estimated total fertility of women, the number of children a woman has over her lifetime. The Zero Population Growth rate of fertility is 2.1 in the developed world and 2.5 in the developing world (where the death rate is higher). The total fertility rate varies across space and time. In India, for example, women averaged 6 children in 1950, but only 2.6 in 2011. It is important to note that the difference between a total fertility rate of 2.1 and 2.6 children would add a projected 6 billion more people (16M vs 10M) to the planet by 2100. In Mexico the fertility rate has dropped from 7 in 1965 to 2.2. In most European countries, the rate is under 2.1 and has been for years. However, in the developed countries, to everyone’s surprise, the rate has risen from 1.35 to 1.64 over the last decade.
The UN projections are a based on a very simple model that estimates future population trends based simply in alternative assumptions about what happens to the fertility rate. For example, should average fertility drop to 1.35, the UN projects a world population of only 6 billion by 2100. If it should stay at its present level of 2.9 the UN projects a population of 57.2 billion!
When economists make projections of future GDP the presumption is that there are no limits on growth other than our human ingenuity in fashioning economic institutions that promote it. In short, there is no binding resource, or ecological constraint on the growth of GDP. It was precisely this presumption that led Kenneth Boulding, one of the very first ecological economists, to proclaim that, “anyone who believes that we can have infinite growth in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” I am afraid the same complaint applies to the UN demographers who project that the population of the Earth will reach 9.3 billion in 2050. Indeed, since they are not economists, I must assume that they are mad.
The current population of 7 billion, by just about every measure available to us and by our own observation, is simply not sustainable. The Ecological Footprint, which measures the balance between the carrying capacity of the Earth compared to the demands being placed on it, reveals that, at present, we need 1.5 Earths to sustainably produce what we are now producing. This means that we are using up Earth’s bio-capacity at a rate 50% greater than it can be replenished by Earth’s regenerative systems. This is manifest in declining fish stocks, deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity, loss of top soil, depleted stocks of fresh water and the accumulation of air and water pollutants including carbon dioxide, and of course, there is the matter of per capita peak oil. How in the world can anyone project that the Earth can sustain another two Indias when it cannot sustain the one it already has?
In defense of the UN’s demographers, I think they are saying we have a choice: do we want a world with 9.3 billion people or do we want to get serious about family planning to lower total fertility? But his is not a legitimate question; it is simply not possible to have an Earth that supports 9.3 billion people even allowing for the most horrific living conditions. The “positive checks” that Malthus warned about will surely prevent population from getting anywhere near 9.3 or even, I doubt, near the 8 billion predicted for 2025.
For those of you who slept through ECON 101, the positive checks, forces like war, famine, and disease that tend to increase the death rate. It is difficult for people living in a paradise like Vermont where food and resources are abundant to imagine that the population could not increase by 50%. Yet, the threat of population growth is not in Vermont, it is in the developing world in places like Africa, India, Indonesia, Latin America, the Philippines, and even China. For the Earth as a whole, the difference between the birth rate and the death rate is a plus 158. Of that 158 surplus, 154 are accounted for by from the developing world. Where is the developing world going to find the resources to sustain 2 billion more people? Or, how could it possible lower fertility to the levels needs to stabilize or even decrease the population. The answer is simple, it cannot do either.
How is the developing world, which over the centuries, has seen its resources stolen by first colonialism and now imperialism with its network of Kleptocracies that funnel the oil, gas, minerals, and timber from the developing to developed countries with little to no gain to the people. How in this developing world where farmland is appropriated by rapacious landlords to grow plantation crops of coffee, cocoa, palm oil, and cattle going to get enough resources to support another 2 billion people?
The positive check, lowering fertility, that is lowering the birth rate would appear to be the only possible way out of this demographic trap, but this too while not impossible is extremely unlikely for two sets of very big reasons.
The so-called theory of demographic transition claims that economic development invariably brings about a lowering of fertility rates to match the lower death rates produced by modern medicine and sanitation. While it is true that in the developed world high per capita income did cause a dramatic decline in the birth rate and in total fertility, the income levels necessary are to do this are far beyond the reach of the developing world. First, as Barry Commoner pointed out four decades ago, the nations of the developed world were “demographic parasites.” They developed countries were able to reach the level of affluence necessary to realize demographic transition only by means of wealth transfers from the undeveloped world – an option not now available to the developing world.
Back in the 1990s, Al Gore, in Earth in the Balance, saw the necessity of massive transfers of wealth to the developing world if there was to be any hope of saving the planet and advocated a Global Marshall Plan to transfer resources to the developing world. In the racist United States we find it hard to take care of our own poor, dark-skinned citizens. What is the chance that we will care for those in Somalia, or Kenya? Rudyard Kipling ennobled US imperialism in the Philippines in terms of the “White Man’s Burden;” it was the obligation of the white man to bring civilization to Manila. We gave the quintessential Kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, and his lovely shoe-ridden wife Imelda instead. It is an easy exercise to substitute “rich” for “white” to see the situation has not changed much – imperial goals do not square up with the needs of its victims.
Second, given the severe resource scarcity in the world today, and the incredible inequity in distribution of access, it is virtually impossible to imagine these less developed nations ever reaching the level of affluence that drove demographic transition in the developed countries. According to Ecological foot prints calculated for 2005, the developed world consumed 3.0 hectares more per person of earth’s biocapacity than they had. For the low income nations the ecological deficit was a mere .1 hectares per person. The United States had an ecological footprint of 10.3 and a deficit of 3.6. India, on the other hand had an Ecological Footprint of .8 and a deficit of .3. Clearly the bulk of the world’s resources are being consumed by the developed world and it is the latter which is causing the bulk of the ecological destruction going on in the world. While the latter issue is surely one that needs explication it is off the point here. The point in our context is simply that the resources needed by the developing world to achieve per capita incomes that will promote demographic transition are simply not available to them for both ecological and political reasons.
The UN strategy to lower fertility is focused on improving the status of women. When women have options other than marriage and motherhood, and they have reproductive rights, they tend to desire and to have fewer children. Again a Vermonter might say, pas problem! But, even a casual look at developing world reveals a deep-seated cultural misogyny that is exacerbated by misogynistic religions such as Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Fundamentalist Christianity. The atavistic misogyny of these cultures coupled with the pronatalism of these religions makes for a steadfast opposition to any improvement in women’s rights, especially reproductive rights. The low status of women in this world is manifest in honor killings, genital mutilation, rape, forced marriages, family violence and incredible poverty. Even when they are within families women are abused and exploited as exemplified in dowry murders and kitchen fires in India.
Gendercide is a relatively new word. It is used to describe the relatively new practice of sex-selective abortion. While it exits everywhere, Gendercide is most common in the developing world. Put simply, women get an ultrasound picture of a fetus; if it is a girl they get an abortion. Between 2000 an 2010 it has been estimated that 8 million female fetuses were aborted in India. But, Gendercide has a longer and even more appalling history.
The long legacy of Gendercide is evident in a chapter title in a book written by the great cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris, “Murders in Eden.” When the gender of child could not be determined before birth, when born, girls were killed immediately after birth – infanticide. This according to Harris was the origin of misogyny. When girls were treated with such extreme prejudice people had to invent a justification for their murder; some sort of inferiority complex as it were. Harris argued that it was female inferiority as warriors that doomed many of them to a very early death. Of course not all were killed, perhaps only if they were the first born, or if times were goods all of the young might be spared. Ironically, Harris noted, the shortage of women was often a cause of war as desperate men went raiding to steal women from other groups. Being so scarce also ironically made women a valuable property that often found their way into the hands of elites in polygamous societies as the despised objects of desire, as property.
Gendercide by abortion then is only the more modern means of eliminating unwanted girls. The scale of Gendercide is as stunning and it is appalling. Given normal birth ratios, and survival rates, one can predict the number of girls one expects to find in a population. A study done in 2005 reported that over 90 million expected females were “missing” in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan. An earlier study in 1990 by Amyarta Sen of 38 countries found 100 million expected girls were missing.
And so it goes on, the Gendercide, admittedly, slows population growth. But the misogyny which denies education, birth control information and devices to women still results in millions of unwanted pregnancies and births every year in the developing world. Elimination of unwanted pregnancies could dramatically reduce fertility in the developing world, but the power of patriarchal culture and religious and political institutions make that unlikely. At least the United States is no longer meddling here. For years, Under Reagan and Bush, under what has been called the “gag order,” the US has refused to support any foreign medical facility that did abortions and offered family planning information and devices. It was after all just another part of what Tanya Melich has called the “Republican War on Women” so prominent in the US. This program was suspended by the Clinton and Obama Administrations, but you can be sure it will return with the next Republican President.
The Indian train provides an apt metaphor for the situation of the developing world. We have all seen images of trains in India. The trains are overloaded far past their designed carrying capacity; people fill the seats the aisles, hang from the sides and cover the roof. Everyday some people fall to their death. The overloaded trains must also negotiate bridges that were not designed to handle such weight and sooner or later they will start collapsing. Unfortunately the train has developed considerable momentum so even turning off the engine and applying the brakes cannot stop it from reaching that weakened bridge and crashing into the abyss. Just like everywhere else in the developing world India now faces serious ecological challenges. It also faces the problem of a growing population. The huge number of fecund wombs already available in India assures that the population train will keep rolling even should the engine be turned off by substantial declines in fertility however unlikely that may be. This continued population growth will reach a tipping point where the “overshoot” of carrying capacity becomes critical. The ultimate clash with ecological limits will destroy the very basis of life and spur on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, war, pestilence, famine and death.
Paul Erhlich, who published the Population Bomb in 1968, has endured a great deal of criticism because the population catastrophe he predicted did not happen due primarily to the Green Revolution of the 1970s. When Erhlich wrote the Ecological Footprint of humanity was a mere .63 leaving a great deal of space for a technically ingenious species to make room for a more people. But just like the recent economic expansion in the US was based on an unsustainable growth in financial debt, the growth in population numbers is now coming at the expense of great ecological debt. The debt crisis has emerged in our Global Economy will reshape the world of paper money and wealth, but humanity will survive. The ecological debt on the other hand will be manifest in more deadly ways, ways that will leave humanity asking “what were we thinking?”