Showing posts from category population.
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John Bongaarts on the Impacts of Demographic Change in the Developing World
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“The UN projects about 9.1 billion people by 2050, and then population growth will likely level off around 9.5 billion later in the century. Can the planet handle 9 billion? The answer is probably yes. Is it a desirable trajectory? The answer is no,” said John Bongaarts, vice president of the Policy Research Division at the Population Council, in this interview with ECSP.
Although family planning was largely brushed aside by international policymakers following the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Bongaarts said he is hopeful because it is now enjoying a higher profile globally – and receiving greater funding.
“I am optimistic about the understanding now, both in developing and developed world, and in the donor community, that [family planning] is an important issue that should be getting more attention,” Bongaarts said. “And therefore I think the chances of ending up with a positive demographic outlook are now larger than they were a few years ago.”
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Where Have All the Malthusians Gone?
›Forget youth bulges and population bombs; lately, the population story has been all about the baby bust. The cover of this month’s Foreign Policy features “Old World: The graying of the planet – and how it will change everything,” by Phillip Longman, and author Ted Fishman recently appeared in The New York Times and on NPR to talk about his book, Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How It Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival and Nation Against Nation. Nicholas Eberstadt covered similar issues in Foreign Affairs with his article, “The Demographic Future: What Population Growth – and Decline – Means for the Global Economy.”
To the extent that policymakers take away a sense of urgency to reform retirement institutions and potentially reevaluate military strategy, the recent spate of publications about aging is useful. But policymakers should not be misled into thinking that the population tide has turned and resources for education, development, and family planning are no longer necessary. While global population growth is slowing, it has not stopped, and the political and economic consequences of continued growth and youthful age structures across most of the Global South will be dire.
A Population Bomb…of Old People
Eberstadt, Fishman, and Longman argue for the need to prepare for a future where there are large proportions of elderly dependents and relatively few workers to support them, and they chronicle the many challenges that may result, including political resistance. The October protests in France against raising the pensionable age from 60 to 62 — which, despite the hullabaloo, fall far short of the levels needed to improve France’s long-term economic position — are but one example of the reform resistance they warn about.
The concern is that while the Global North – Europe and Japan in particular – scramble to meet the needs of their older citizens and preserve the health of their economies, their powerful positions in the international system are at risk. As Fishman states, “It now looks as if global power rests on how willing a country is to neglect its older citizens.” China, a country on the cusp of aging, has thus far chosen neglect over meaningful investment, stoking more fear that the Global North may fall behind.
Though a focus on economic health is useful, other aspects of their arguments do a disservice, particularly those that start from the premise that the days of Malthusian angst over the planet’s ability to support a rapidly growing population are long gone.
Echoing Fred Pearce in his The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, Longman argues without reservation that dangerous population growth is a thing of the past, and instead, the world faces a “population bomb…of old people.” He even goes so far as to claim that “having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers’ chief worry; now, having too few is.”
I have to ask: what demographers did he talk to? Articles published over the last year in the field’s top journals — Demography, Population and Development Review, and Population Studies — certainly explore low fertility, but they also cover a range of youth- and growth-related issues and topics such as mortality, teen parenthood, and immigration. And within the field of political demography in particular there is still quite a lot of attention being paid to the implications of population growth and youth bulges on civil conflict and human security. Even Foreign Policy, in which Longman’s article appears, publishes an annual Failed States Index that argues there is an important relationship between demographic pressure and state collapse.
As studies like the Failed States Index and the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends project show, contrary to Pearce et al., carrying capacity arguments are not completely outmoded. Regardless of how extreme the impact of an aging population will be on developed nations in the near future (although the United States will almost certainly be less affected than others), in many parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, population growth is straining local water and land resources and creating instability — issues that will likely be exacerbated by climate change.
Geographic Bias
If there really is more attention being paid among demographers to low fertility it may well be due to institutional and geographic bias. After all, most of the funding for demography comes from Western nations concerned with their own decline. Likewise, all the top journals are American or European.
Though it is correct that most advanced industrial states are aging because of low fertility, for a large part of the world, population growth is still the number one issue. Declining fertility in most countries of the world means that populations are getting older, but this is not the same as saying they have a problem with aging. Between 1980 and 2010, the median age of the less developed countries, excluding China, rose from 19 to almost 25 and the world’s least developed countries saw a rise from 17 to 20 years. Median age in more developed countries, however, went from 32 to 40 — a level twice that of the least developed countries.
Many of the low-fertility countries Longman cites — Iran and Cuba, in particular — are exceptions among developing countries, rather than the rule. The UN Population Division estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will gain 966 million people by 2050 – more than the current population of all of Europe – and, as Richard Cincotta and I have both argued on this blog previously, the total fertility rate (TFR) projections used in those estimations are likely low. Rapid population growth in sub-Saharan Africa has already exacerbated many countries’ abilities to meet the growing needs of their populations, causing civil conflict and instability, and will continue to do so in the future.
Why is it Important to Get it Right?
Alarmism is useful when it grabs the attention of policymakers and a public that is overloaded with information, but it is also risky. Both Pearce and Longman take jabs at Paul Ehrlich because his “population bomb” never exploded. What they fail to note is that Ehrlich’s predictions could have proven right, except that he was successful at scaring a generation of policymakers into action. Funding towards population programs increased greatly in the wake of such research. If those of us who write about the dangers of aging are successful, perhaps we will be so lucky to look as foolish as Ehrlich one day.
If these warnings fall on deaf ears and policymakers do not act to reduce the burden of entitlements, certainly budgets will be strained beyond capacity and the dire future predicted by Fishman, Pearce, and Longman may well become a reality. On the other hand, if policymakers similarly disregard carrying capacity issues in the developing world, conflict and misery are sure to continue in these places and may well worsen.
Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba is the Mellon Environmental Fellow in the Department of International Studies at Rhodes College. She is also the author of a forthcoming book, The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security. Follow her on Twitter at @profsciubba for more on population-related issues.
Sources: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, NPR, National Intelligence Council, The New York Times, Population Reference Bureau, Reuters, UN.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Protest/Manifestation,” courtesy of flickr user lilicomanche. -
Blue Ventures’ Integrated PHE Initiative in Madagascar
›In the small coastal village of Andavadoaka, Madagascar, the village elders offer a bottle of rum and two cigarettes to their ancestors before the men and their sons launch their wooden dugout canoes into the sea. Leaning over the side, their masked faces scour the water for their prey.
Meanwhile, the women – with babies on back and spears in hand – set out on foot into the shallow waters. One probes a small hole with her spear, and a tentacle reaches out to grapple with it. After careful coaxing, she pulls out an octopus, kills it, and adds it to her collection, which she tows on a string behind her.
In total, more than 1,850 pounds of octopus are collected on the opening day of the octopus harvest, a seasonal occurrence in Velondriake, the Indian Ocean’s first locally managed marine area.
Velondriake, which means “to live with the sea,” stretches along more than 40 km of southwestern Madagascar’s coast. The region encompasses 25 villages and is home to more than 8,000 people of the Vezo ethnic group, who are almost entirely dependent on marine resources, such as octopus, fish, and mangrove forests, for subsistence and income. But these resources are quickly disappearing due in large part to over-harvesting.
Blue Ventures Conservation – the London-based NGO I work for – has been working in the area since 2003 to protect the region’s coral reefs and mangroves, as well as their biological diversity, sustainability, and productivity, while also improving the quality of life of the local community.
To this end, Blue Ventures helped the community create a series of coastal marine reserves. Several permanent reserves protect the biodiversity of the coral reefs and mangroves, and help fish populations recover; while nearly 50 temporary reserves have increased the productivity of the octopus and crab fisheries. Octopuses reproduce quickly and juveniles grow at a nearly exponential rate, so a brief harvesting hiatus can lead to significant increases in yield. Increased yields translate to increased profits – something greatly welcomed by the people of this impoverished region.
The people of the region are also reproducing quickly: the average total fertility rate in Velondriake is 6.7 children per woman, according to our data. On average women are only 15 years old when they first conceive. To compound this problem, a majority of the population is under the age of 15 – at or approaching reproductive age. At the current growth rate, the local population will double in only 10 to 15 years. The local food sources, already heavily depleted, barely feed the current population, let alone twice that amount. Without enabling these coastal communities to stabilize their population growth, efforts to improve the state of marine resources and the community’s food security are considerably hindered.
In August 2007, Blue Ventures launched its Population, Health, & Environment (PHE) program as a weekly family planning clinic in Andavadoaka, which provided access to ingestible and injectable birth control options, as well as condoms. The clinic increased the village’s contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) from 9.4 percent to 36.3 percent, and the Velondriake region’s CPR from 11.0 percent to 15.1 percent, in its first two years. (CPR data for the third year is not yet available, but should be notably higher, especially at the regional level.)
In 2009, Blue Ventures opened two more clinics and began holding quarterly outreach clinics in all Velondriake villages. We started offering long-acting, reversible contraceptive options, including Implanon and IUDs. Most recently, we have implemented a community-based distributor (CBD) program to provide wider access to contraceptives around the region, particularly for villagers that could not easily reach one of the clinic sites. These expansions paid dividends: the number of patients increased almost four-fold between the second and third years, with a cumulative total for all three years of just under 1,700 patients.
Recently, the PHE program began a partnership with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), becoming the first PHE project to receive support from the UNFPA within Madagascar. The UNFPA funds will allow us to add new regional clinics; launch a behavior change campaign, including a regional theater tour and educational events; and further develop the CBD program.
UNFPA’s support of this initiative represents an important endorsement of Blue Ventures’ integrated approach to the challenges of marine sustainability, food security, reproductive health, and population growth. Funding applications to focus on improving maternal and infant health and to conduct a full health-needs assessment of the Velondriake region are pending.
In taking a population, health, and environment approach, Blue Ventures creates synergies that allow for the more effective achievement of health and conservation outcomes. Through providing family planning and health options – services the community really wants – Blue Ventures generates more support for all of its other initiatives, such as conservation and aquaculture programs.
This integrated multi-pronged approach also helps speed up the move towards a more sustainable future. By empowering and enabling couples to take control of their fertility, couples are able to have the size family they want. The use of family planning helps lower the population growth rate, and lower growth rates decrease pressures on natural resources. Decreased pressures on natural resources lead to healthier ecosystems; healthier ecosystems mean more natural resources available; and more resources lead to healthier families.
Through recognizing this inextricable link between communities, their health, and the environment they live in, Blue Ventures hopes to preserve not just the local coral reefs and mangroves, but the Vezo seafaring lifestyle. This way, the sons on the boats and the babies on the women’s backs may still have enough octopus and fish to harvest when they take their own children out to sea.
Matthew Erdman is the PHE coordinator for Blue Ventures. For more information about Blue Ventures’ PHE activities, please contact phe@blueventures.org, or visit their website at www.blueventures.org.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “07,” courtesy of Blue Ventures. -
Demography and Women’s Empowerment: Urgency for Action?
›Why do Middle Eastern women participate in economic life at a rate lower than that of female citizens of other regions? According to Nadereh Chamlou, a senior advisor at the World Bank, restrictive social norms are to blame. At the Middle East and Environmental Change and Security Programs’ “Demography and Women’s Empowerment: Urgency for Action?” event, Chamlou argued that the region’s women must be empowered to participate in a more significant way if their countries are to effectively exploit, instead of squander, the current economic “window of opportunity.”According to Chamlou, the region is facing a “demographic window of opportunity” where its relatively high numbers of working-age people create the potential for rapid economic growth. However, Middle Eastern countries also have the highest dependency rates in the world. Without opening more economic opportunities for women, the region’s demographic window of opportunity will not be exploited to its full advantage.
Chamlou disputed the commonly held assumptions regarding the historic lack of female participation in the Middle East’s economic sphere, such as the belief that women abstain from joining the workforce because they do not possess the necessary education and skills. She cited statistics showing that the region’s women are represented at a near-equal level as men in secondary school, and to an even greater degree at the university level. They are also studying in marketable fields, disproving the theory that they are not acquiring employable skills.
A survey conducted by the World Bank in three Middle Eastern capital cities — Amman, Jordan; Cairo, Egypt; and Sana’a, Yemen — showed that negative male attitudes regarding women working outside the home were the most significant reason for poor female representation in the workforce. Notably, negative male attitudes restricted women’s participation far more than child-rearing duties. Despite the successful efforts of most Middle Eastern states to improve female education, conservative social norms that pose a barrier to female empowerment remain in place.
Chamlou concluded her remarks with three policy recommendations: 1) Focus on medium-educated, middle-class women; 2) Undertake more efforts to bring married women into the workforce; and 3) Place a greater emphasis on changing attitudes, particularly among conservative younger men, towards women working outside the home. Such changes could more effectively utilize the Middle East’s demographic window of opportunity.
Luke Hagberg is an intern and Haleh Esfandiari is director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Obey Stikman,” courtesy of flickr user sabeth718. -
Mapping World Bank-Funded Projects
›The World Bank recently released their interactive “Mapping for Results Platform” that allows users to see where and how World Bank funding is being spent. Users can view project costs and expenditures by sector at sub-national levels and overlay this with human development data such as poverty, population, and health indicators. In the current beta version, interactive maps and downloadable data are available for Kenya, Bolivia, and the Philippines.
The example map shown above shows all of the World Bank’s 38 active water and sanitation, health, and agricultural projects in Kenya, as well as malnutrition rates by district. Clicking on any of the projects on the map displays the project name, financing amount, and exact location of the program.
Presumably, in the final version, all 2,669 active World Bank projects and 15,246 project locations – accounting for $136.91 billion – will be included.
Image Credit: World Bank Mapping for Results Platform. -
Tamara Kreinin on Women’s Empowerment, Population Growth, and Sustainability
›“We know that when that when we empower women – whether it’s giving them control over their bodies and access to family planning or whether it’s by including them in planning around climate change – their agency can make huge leaps for us,” said Tamara Kreinin, executive director of women and population at the UN Foundation, in this interview with ECSP.
Seventy percent of the world’s poor are women and they’re also the members of the household most likely to be responsible for food, water, and firewood collection.
“At the same time, we know that women are often not at the table,” she said. “They’re not at the table in country when countries are creating aid to adaptation strategies around the environment and climate change, and they’re not at the table at places like Copenhagen and some of the big climate change meetings.”
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Meeting the Health Challenges of the Urban Poor
›November 2, 2010 // By Joshua NickellFifty percent of the world’s population now lives in cities, a figure that is predicted to rise to 60 percent by 2030, and 70 percent by mid-century, according to UN figures. The majority of this growth will occur in the Global South, where most of the world’s slums are found.
Why the rampant urban migration? Prospects for better health care, education, and employment are drawing the world’s poor out of rural areas into cities. But as the number of impoverished city-dwellers and slums grows, it is becoming increasingly important for society to consider how it will address the problems associated with this unprecedented degree of global urbanization.
At a recent event, “Meeting the Health Challenge of Urban Poverty and Slums,” co-hosted by the Wilson Center on the Hill program and the Comparative Urban Studies Project, Jacob Kumaresan, director of WHO Center for Health Development in Kobe, Japan, and Richard B. Lamporte, director of new program development, Jhpiego, discussed poverty and health challenges in rapidly growing urban slums.
The chances that the world’s rapidly growing number of city-dwellers will live a healthy and prosperous life depend on the services and opportunities cities can offer. As Kumaresan pointed out, there is currently no shortage of problems. Among other ills, he stated that 170 million urban residents currently do not have access to a latrine, while more than 1.2 million people will die from urban air pollution this year alone. As more individuals migrate to cities, these problems will be compounded.
Kumaresan also noted that cities have the “worst and the most unimaginable disparities when it comes to health.” While urban centers have more hospitals and attract many of the best doctors, the hospitals are often not managed or governed well. As a result, many poor urbanites suffer worse health care than their rural neighbors.
For instance, Kumaresan noted that tuberculosis rates in rural parts of India are half those of urban settings. Kumaresan also emphasized that these disparities are certainly not limited to the Global South: developed cities like New York and Los Angeles contend with similar inequities.
To address these issues, Kumaresan encouraged policymakers to examine the unique circumstances and conditions of their cities. “You’ve got to do analytical work to see what the problems are in each city, and to look not at the averages, but to unmask the differentials,” he said.
In Osaka, Japan, tuberculosis rates are 12 times higher than the rest of the country, said Kumaresan, primarily because of high affliction rates among its homeless population. As such, it is important for Osaka’s policymakers to address its tuberculosis problem by considering related socio-economic factors and following through with concrete policy actions.
Lamporte emphasized the importance of giving aid and development organizations flexible funding in order to allow them to better address unique local urban problems and inequities. He advised international donors to devote a certain percentage of their funding to integrated initiatives. “Certainly the goalposts could be set, but having some element of complementary funding … would be extremely useful,” he said.
As both Lamporte and Kumaresan pointed out, the future of the city is increasingly becoming the future of the world. As such, it is crucial to have “an urban optic going into the future,” according to Lamporte. If not, he argued, it will be at our own peril, as disease and unrest find increasingly sturdy footholds in urban slums. As the transformation from a rural to an urban planet continues, it will be essential for emerging and growing cities must use successful urban development techniques from both the Global North and the South.
Joshua Nickell is an intern with the Program on America and the Global Economy.
Sources: IRIN, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, UN, World Health Organization.
Photo Credit: “kibera_photoshow08,” courtesy of flickr user newbeatphoto. -
Rare Earths Intrigue: In Response to Chinese Ban, Japan and Vietnam Make a Deal
›November 2, 2010 // By Schuyler NullThe BBC is reporting that Japan has reached an agreement with Vietnam that will help provide a secure supply of rare earth minerals, after China reportedly stopped exports to Japan during an ongoing territorial dispute last month.
China produces nearly all (97 percent, according to the GAO) of the rare earth minerals used around the world, minerals that are used in many advanced electronics including mobile phones, missiles, and key components of cleaner energy tech. Japanese companies are expected to gain exclusive exploration and mining rights in northwest Vietnam in exchange for technical assistance on nuclear reactors.
China’s reported export freeze on rare earths raised warning flags in the region as well as in Washington, where fears over exclusive supply of the crucial minerals have been growing for some time – particularly in the defense community. (Although Bloomberg reports a new Pentagon study says it’s not such a big deal after all.) Control over and access to resources has become an important concern in East Asian diplomacy, as population and consumption in the region rises. For more, check out The New Security Beat’s coverage of the many diplomatic fault lines at play between the lower Mekong countries, China, and the United States, rare earth minerals and green energy, and the conflict potential of future resource scarcity.
Sources: BBC, Bloomberg, Government Accountability Office, The New York Times, TechNewsDaily.
Image Credit: Adapted from “The Huc Bridge, Hanoi,” courtesy of flickr user -aw-.
