"Fertility" (fecundity) may be the long term driver of population size but we cannot talk about it as though it was the only thing determining it. The main factor underpinning fecundity is the food supply. Since we are now post-peak in terms of our oil supply (http://www.postpeakliving.com/peak-oil-primer) and since future phosphate supplies are uncertain (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/33164) we face a crash in food production within ten years. Traditional food exporters such as Australia will probably have difficulty feeding themselves let alone exporting anything. (Australia actually exports far less food than previously believed! - http://www.energybulletin.net/node/33164). For these reasons I think we will see world population falling before 2030.

Sorry, the link for Australia's food exports being less than commonly believed should have been http://www.abc.net.au/rural/telegraph/content/2009/s2526814.htm

Poverty & environmental destruction is caused by population growth!
-
Reading the fertility rates by nation, it is clear that all the poorest countries, countries with desertification and growing exploitation of the fragile environment have the highest fertility... And this fertility is the CAUSE of poverty, not a RESULT of poverty.

For a list of "fertility" rates by nation, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_fertility_rate

The highest fertility rates have the highest poverty (and also some Muslim nations with culturally driven high fertility)

Imagine, that our government had top build 5 time more schools, 5 times more hospitals, roads and somehow make 5 times more farm land each generation? Our wealthy economies would simply collapse! Our cities would choke, our schools provide lessons in the playground, taught by volunteer retirees, our national parks would be opened up for food farming to fend off starvation...

But that is the burden we allow the poor countries to suffer from... Rwanda's growth means that every 25 years, there are 5 times more people! Aid that saves lives, reducing infant mortality, deepens a nations problems.

Why is it 'not acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty? Thailand has implemented such policies, ad the effects are impressive. The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. (now I'm getting dramatic!)

Feminism
The other thing to note is the bottom of the list - nations who are committing genocide against themselves by failing to produce children are the richest nations (and some with social issues, repression etc). These are the most "feminist" nations... If education of women reduces fertility (one of feminism's basic claims), then stronger militant feminism seems to cause such low fertility to be suicidal.

The 'man drought'

..continued...

Perhaps it is time we started reading Thomas Malthus again.
http://desip.igc.org/malthus/guests.html
might be a good place to start.

David

...continued...

The 'man drought'
There are several reasons for low fertility... "the Marriage Strike" (http://www.glennsacks.com/have_antifather_family.htm) is rampant across the west. Middle class men are described as "commitment phobic". But far from some irrational 'phobia', rational response to 50% divorce rates and the fact that many children have their dads stolen from them by divorce courts. Divorce courts routinely take the lion-share of a family's assets, around 50% of the after-tax income, and (worst of all!) the children away from dads. Faced with these risks, many middle-class men are simply refusing to become fathers.

Add to that the shocking collapse in boys school results over the last 20 years, means there are too few professional men to become middle-class fathers. In Australia, 6-out-of-10 new uni graduates are girls.

For each 6 professional women, there are only 4 professional men. Of these, some will marry their secretaries, some are on the marriage strike and some may even be gay. Leaving maybe two professional men for the 6 professional women. Since women continue not to marry 'down', there are simply too few 'good' men.

Supporting Families
Western nations need to stop treating fathers as the goose that laid the golden egg. We need to protect children's right to both natural parents. We need to remove the strong incentives given to women which encourage divorce and encourage single-motherhood.

We need to encourage the professional classes to form stable families. Fertility is dramatically lower as socio-economic status increases, with welfare recipients having the highest fertility, and female graduates the lowest.

We need to wind-up the complex array of means-tested family payments, baby-bonuses, maternity leave, child-care benefits.

A simple tax-deduction for each child, or allow income income splitting between parents AND their children. This will protect children by discouraging divorce and allow middle-class parents to have the children they want but currently can't afford.

We must remove the perverse incentives that encourage single-parent families, encourage high fertility from the mothers most likely to rely on welfare, and that discourage men from commitment. Australia needs children, and children need both their natural parents.

James ADAMS MBA
PartTimeParent@pobox.com

It is unfortunate that Professor Chamie - a well known and respected demographer on the global stage - did not also explain that the primary cause of present and future population growth is a phenomenon demographers call the 'momentum effect', not high fertility per se. This, coupled with declining infant mortality, means that another 2 billion people by mid century is essentially unavoidable. The mometum effect refers to the youthful age structure of many developing countries - the legacy of the high fertility rates of the recent past, not directly of the present. Even if the birth rate fell below 2.1 immediately, population growth would continue for at least another few decades as the large cohorts already in their teens and childhood years reach their own reproductive years. Declining infant mortality compounds this growth because it keeps more babies alive, and within a few decades they too become reproducers. It is indeed of critical importance for policy makers to be fully educated on these dynamics, because the picture is very different when viewed with all the pieces of the jigsaw on display. To try to bring down the remaining areas of high fertility much faster than it is already falling (in most cases it has halved in the space of 15 years) will result in extremely rapid structural ageing, which these countries will struggle to cope with (look at how we in the west are carrying on about it!!). Rather, we in the rich countries need to help the developing countries through their remaining unavoidable growth - which we ourselves 'enjoyed' in the twentieth century and which largely drove our economic booms. Yes that support must include funding for contraception - and equally importantly education and health, but if we keep whipping that old horse 'high fertility' (which at 2.6 births per woman globally is actually quite low) and believe that we can resolve the problems by simply getting the birth rate down to the magical replacement level overnight, we will fundamentally fail to prepare for the truly enormous UNAVOIDABLE challenge ahead.

You identify the problems, the challenges, but what are your solutions? And when you have listed the solutions, how prepared are you to go about - rolling up your sleeves - to implement them?

Because we need action now and fast to stop at 7b and come dowm from there.

Marie Stopes, the first step in slowing population momenum, is reducing unsustainable high fertility. period.

Marg, Look at what Thailand has achieved, quietly, in reducing it's poverty-inducing population growth of twenty years ago, down to sustainable, replacement levels.

It's simple... not the massive education of women, and pushing feminist prnciples upon unwilling people... but much simpler... simply offering women simple, free slow-release contraceptive implants, locally, for free. Each lasts from several months to several years... and are fully reversable.

By doing this, they now have a the means to supply their population with education, clean water, food and opportunities for advancement. A massive change from the collapsing social and physical infrastructure they were facing only a few years ago.

Over the next couple of decades, Thailand's quality of life and wealth per head of population is set to skyrocket, as they reap the demographic benefits, just as we in the west are suffering from the demographic tragedies.

*simply offering women simple, free slow-release contraceptive implants, locally, for free. Each lasts from several months to several years... and are fully reversable.*

At last a sensible suggestion on this topic. Give women in
the third world that choice and be amazed how they respond!

One factor that was not raised in the article is the effect climate change is likely to have on populations around the world i.e. more deaths as sea levels rise, increased storm events etc. These events kill off both young (reproductive) and old people. Add to this starvation as food and fresh water sources decline and desertification advances. And what about AIDS? This issue seems to have dropped off the radar screens lately. Previously we heard about many millions dying after becoming HIV positive. In Africa many villages are populated by the elderly who raise children orphaned as their AIDS infected parents die. They in turn can potentially be infected. How are demographers factoring this in?

Yabby is right. The Gutmacher Institute estimates that if people in developing countries had good access to contraception, 23 million births a year could be prevented, as well as millions of abortions and half a million children losing their mothers due to complications of unsafe abortion, pregnancy, and childbirth under conditions of poverty. Better spacing of births would also help child survival, reducing the pressure to have extra children for insurance.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/11/3/gpr110313.html

Marie Stopes is right about demographic momentum, but it is unrealistic to think that ordinary people in the developed countries would be willing to accept drastic cuts in living standards for themselves and their children (but not, of course, for politicians and other members of the elite) to deal with the consequences of bad reproductive and other decisions and policies in foreign countries. Any politician who tried to force such cuts on them would be thrown out at the next election, if not lynched. The real choice for the badly overpopulated poor countries is between following China's lead and adopting a one child policy for one or two generations, or collapse.

1. Many years ago, John Caldwell showed clearly that fertility rates in Western Europe had fallen dramatically in the late nineteenth century soon after compulsory education was introduced - instead of being economic assets around the home and farm, children suddenly became economic costs as well as non-contributors.

2. The education of women is correlated with fertility rates. Countries such as Singapore have demonstrated that a well-educated female work-force leads to slow or no population growth.

Clearly, these factors would indicate that far more resources should be put into the education of girls and women around the world. It is no coincidence that Australia's natural fertility rate is low while the female contribution to Australia's university student population has been around 56 - 60 % for a couple of decades.

3. Systems of aged pensions and public health services reduce the need for people to have many children in order to support and provide for them in their old age. But such systems depend on the ability of a state to collect revenue from income taxes, which in turn depend on liveable wages.

Divergence, what will be China's age-structure in thirty or forty years from now ? Won't it be massively top-heavy ? One-child families doesn't just mean that there are two parents for each child while it is growing up, but in the more distant future, perhaps two ageing parents and perhaps four elderly grand-parents for each young working person, i.e. each tax-payer. Not to mention a rapidly declining population after about 2030-2040.

Sorry, at # 2 in the previous post, I should have said 'The education of women is correlated NEGATIVELY with fertility rates.'

Loudmouth, the education of all women in the third world is indeed
a noble goal and we should aim towards it. Meantime if our
educated Western women could not pop down to their pharmacy to
pick up their supplies of family planning aids, they might be popping
out far more babies then they wished, education or no education.

If you spend time in the third world, reality eventually hits you.
Hundreds of millions of women have neither the money nor the
convenient pharmacy down on the corner, but they still have sex
with their husbands, willingly or unwillingly.

It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that when this
takes place, they will be popping out babies, wanted or not.

The more boatloads of food that we send, the more babies they will
produce, the more the problem feeds on itself.

Now whilst people like yourself follow noble goals of educating
them all, which is wonderful, a simple implant next week would
no doubt be a huge relief for them, so that they actually have
some time to go and study.

I don't believe we have to force people like in China, but at
least offer them the option of family planning, if they wish.
That is something that hundreds of millions don't have, at the
present time.

Loudmouth,

Of course a one-child policy plays hell with the age structure and creates a variety of problems. However, it is an attractive choice compared to the alternative of a collapse where millions of people starve, die in epidemics, or are killed in communal violence.

With respect to what we can do to help, I agree with Yabby that the first and most cost effective priority has to be to give everyone access to effective contraception. Beyond that, we could help by funding clean water and primary health care projects to improve child survival, free school meal programs to make it easier for parents to say no to child labour and send their children to school, economic opportunities for women, which introduce opportunity costs for childbearing, and pensions for people who don't have children.

Divergence: "Beyond that, we could help by funding clean water and primary health care projects to improve child survival, free school meal programs ... which introduce opportunity costs for childbearing..."

Hello? Increasing childhood survival rates, and free things for kids decreases the opportunity costs of children. Children need to be made more expensive, not cheaper, so they are valued more, not treated as free sources of labour.

I would suggest compulsary school is the key factor.

However, your other points are very true

Yabby,

Yes, I presumed that readers would understand the indirect connection between higher education levels for women and lower fertility rates, given that
(a) the more years of education that women engage in, the later they may start their families,
(b) the more education, the more likelihood of being employed outside the domestic economy and at higher levels,
(c) the more education women gain, the more discernment and power they may have in choosing a husband,
and (d) the more power women may have over their own bodies, and their own family-planning decision-making, the more information they may have about birth control and the more wherewithall (control over their own income) they may have to exercise their rights to birth control.

In fact, the more education, perhaps the more assertion of more rights. Nothing is written in stone, so my repeated use of the word 'may'. Nor do I envisage that women's education can be brought about everywhere easily, it will be a very long, hard, and very political process in most Third World countries, especially in those with anti-women cultural practices.

Divergence,

I guess we can't really rebut one argument with some horrific either-or scenario: there may be alternatives to (a) China's one-child policy and (b) 'a collapse where millions of people starve, die in epidemics, or are killed in communal violence'. The long, slow grind of extending education for women, of bringing in (and funding) universal and compulsory education systems, the development of modern economies which can employ (and build on) the skills of education women and men - one may not have to go down either of the roads that your dilemma suggests.

Growth reduction programs?

Does anybody know any other successful and morally acceptable population growth reduction programs?

China's One-Child policy is morally questionable.

Europe's strong feminism and poicies that provide strong financial incentives for welfare reciepients for having many children (while middle-class people are unable to afford large families), has created a sort-of self-genocide, particularly against the middle class.

But THAILAND has achieved replacement fertility levels by free contraception, education and pushing even poor rural children into school (making them dependant on their parents).

Does anybody know of other sucessful programs like Thailand's?

Loudmouth, yes we know about all those indirect connections and
those noble goals. Give it a hundred years to implement them.

We also know of the direct connection between popping out babies,
when you have sex with no birth control. That is a relatively
cheap programme, that could be implemented now, for all women in
the third world who are willing and it seems as if they are.

Its great that so many people are paying attention to this very important issue. However, to those who continue to push the 'lets implant them with contraception today' argument (which I wouldn't disagree with for anyone who wants it), think on the following - a very simple three-point plan proposed years ago by demographer Aynsley Coale .. First people have to believe that they can actually control their fertility (rather than seeing it as being 'up to God'); second they have to perceive there to be value in having fewer children (difficult when kids are net economic assets who gather fuel and water, look after animals, weed crops and generally contribute to the family's food supply); third - only when these two 'preconditions' are met that they really go for having fewer kids, and even then there has to be appropriate attitudes, information, acceptance etc in that society. In short providing people with the actual means by which to have fewer children, before getting all those other things sorted out, doesn't drive demand for contraception. What does is realsing that most of your kids are going to live; those kids not just attending school but being required to - the classic John Caldwell wealth flows argument; and having an alternative means of support in old age. Education IS the key, but its going to be far too slow by itself. We need to throw everything possible at the problem - including wiping the debts of those countries, wiping Structural Adjustment Programs that prevent poor people feeding themselves, moving away from the mad neo-liberal economic agenda.. its time to put all our eggs in the one basket.

Hi Yabby,

Marie Stopes has a point, just like her predecessor did eighty years ago. But with great respect, you both may be missing one important point, that in many countries, reactionary cultural practices (there's a phrase you don't see often these days) will force women to keep having children, for the benefit of her husband's family more than for her own, and to 'honour' her own family. Many societies WANT high fertility rates - Islamic, Catholic and many Indigenous groups as examples - regardless of the health or rights of the women.

I wish you wouldn't keep using the phrase 'popping them out' Yabby, it greatly demeans women, just as 'tie a knot in it' does to men. In many societies, women not only have little say in whether or not, or when, to have sex, but are required to by dominant cultural practices - in which invariably male power trumps women's rights, incidentally.

While women are trapped in male-dominated social situations, i.e. where they effectively have no power, and that power is sanctioned by vile cultural practices, then they will not be able to develop, let alone exercise, any equality of human rights. Lack of access to education is almost always a telling sign of this social and cultural powerlessness, and the sooner such societies are transformed, and their justification for inequitable cultural practices exposed, the better. Without equality of rights, women will keep 'popping them out', Yabby, whether they like it or not, because they will have little say in the matter and even their own families will force them to submit, just to keep the peace between families, in which women are not much more than micro-political pawns.

Enforcement of the equality of rights for women, equal access to education for girls and women, pension systems for the elderly, better health services - a huge agenda which, yes, may take a hundred years.

Well, that's me for another 24 hours.

Loudmouth

Thank you for your succinctly worded lesson in reality for the lives of far too many third world women.

Given that it has taken 100 years since western women achieved the right to vote and we are still to reach parity in government and business, I can only pray that time speeds up for women in third world countries. Too much suffering for too many and this includes the men (in those poor countries) if only they would realise that healthy happy people are a benefit to all.

"Enforcement of the equality of rights for women, equal access to education for girls and women, pension systems for the elderly, better health services - a huge agenda which, yes, may take a hundred years."

Which begs two questions:

1: People seem to forget that the rights of men are also squashed in these cultures. The best prism to understand these cultures is one of THREE genders 1: Powerful men (with power and hence freedom), 2: All women (safe and protected, but with limited rights), 3: powerless men (with neither power, nor safety).

In this light, polygamy is one of the forces of oppression of men! Because it creates an underclass of men who have no value other than as cannon and factory fodder.

2: When are the relative rights and opportunities of men and women 'fair'?
My take on this is that the pendulum is way to the women's favour in the west.

THis is why many middle class men are refusing to become fathers. commitment phobia is in fact a rational response to irrational society that devalues fatherhood and children's rights to have a relationship with their natural fathers.

Where men regularilly have their children they love and the assets of their life's work stolen by the divorce courts, and left, with a garnishee order on half their future income for the crime of becomming a father.

Where men are arrested and convicted on the "denouncement" (on the false accusation) of a woman in cases of violence and sexual assult - and convicted without even the basic human right to an open court and the opportunity fo face your accuser.

BTW Women who commit perjury, are almost never punished

Part Time,

People tend to want extra children as insurance if they expect several of their children to die or emigrate (see refs. to Chapter 3 of Virginia Abernethy's "Population Politics"). Keeping existing children alive may lead to fewer of them. Of course, governments should enforce compulsory education and child labour laws, but if they don't, those free school meals give parents an incentive to send the children to school instead of putting them to work. They tried it successfully in Kerala, India. Children also learn better if they are not malnourished.

Loudmouth,

The collapses have already started happening. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has calculated that providing an individual with a nutritionally adequate diet requires 0.053 hectares of arable land, even with the best modern farming techniques. Rwanda got down to 0.03 hectares per person before the genocide. James Gasana, their former agriculture minister, wrote an article on the genocide in 2002 in Worldwatch Magazine. He included a table showing that the most people were killed in massacres in districts where calories per person was lowest. The Darfur massacres have also been blamed on a combination of overpopulation and drought so that there is not enough to go around.

Loudmouth, I snipped this from the Gutmacher Institute URL which
was provided earlier in the debate:

*However, approximately 201 million women in developing countries desire to either delay or limit their births, but do not have access to modern contraceptives; 64 million of these women use traditional methods such as periodic abstinence and withdrawal, which have high failure rates. The report concludes that providing family planning services to all of these women would prevent an additional 52 million unintended pregnancies and a wide range of deleterious outcomes from those pregnancies (see box).*

So I don't think I am missing anything. If you look at family planning
clinics which now operate, they are very discrete, woman can visit
without their husbands knowledge and approval. So they empower women
to make decisions about their lives right now, like how many kids
to have. Clearly there is unmet demand out there right now, if
you read the Gutmacher article.

What we can show is that when family planning services are provided
in countries, even third world ones, women choose to use these
services. They don't want to wait 100 years.

Lots of progress can me made, without third world women becoming
paid up members of the Western sisterhood.

Hi Yabby,

I'm sure that both Marie Stopes and I would agree with you, but the problem is not just formal availability but actual availability of family planning and birth control services for women. Yes indeed, I'm sure that many, many women would dearly like to have more control over their own bodies. But I don't think much of your chances of setting up a family planning clinic in, say, Pakistan's frontier provinces, where the Pushtu proverb that 'the only place for a woman is either in the home or in the grave' still rules.

Or indeed in many other countries around the world where reactionary cultural practices still inhibit (what was that again about 'all cultures being equally valid in their own context' ?), even PROhibit, the introduction of the services that you and Marie Stopes and I would advocate. Culture, as the ever-ready justification for gender inequality, is yet again the enemy of women's political rights, and the handmaiden of male power, as it has been since our Stone Age ancestors raided each others' territory for 'partners'.

Joe

Loudmouth, it is a little naive of you to blame all cultural practises
in the third world on males. If you travel through the third world,
you would be amazed to see how much power that women actually
have. But I grant you, men make the most noise :)

To make my point, I remind you that most female genital mutilation
is performed by women on other women. Culture involves both men
and women.

Just because some parts of Pakistan think that women should stay
home with the kids, does not mean that they are against family
planning. Many interpretations of Islam are in fact far more
practical about these things, then our very own backward Western
Catholic Church. Nobody campaigns globally against modern family
planning, as the Catholic Church does!

I followed this debate closely when George Bush came to power and
as a result, money for family planning to the third world was
cut dramatically, as George decided that abstinence was their
solution. (The Catholics and Fundies hounded him all the way over
this one)

The result was frankly a disaster. Women in Ethiopia leaving their
babies for the hyenas, or throwing them down wells, or Nigerian
women trying to give their children away. The list is endless.

We have women in the Philippines, begging to have their tubes tied
after 8 kids, but denied by the Catholic controlled hospitals.

Frankly the world needs a change of thinking and its time that the
Catholic Church was put back in its box. Give those women who want
family planning that choice, you will be amazed how they respond,
as the Gutmacher Institute confirms.

Thanks Yabby, but even female mutilation may be more a function of power within and between families, whereby older women have to keep the peace between their own families and the ones they have married into, as they perceive it, by mutilating their own daughters, effectively neutering them by extinguishing their sexual pleasure, in order to allay male fears.

Yes, you are spot-on about the Catholic Church's opposition to birth control. Many years ago, the great Irish actor Milo O'Shea was in a very funny series on Irish life, one episode of which he played a harassed father of a dozen or so kids, desperately trying to avoid another arrival, yet craving to satisfy his and his wife's passions. He hears about this thing called The Pill and scours Dublin to find some. He eventually has to do a deal with some crime bosses and rushes home with a packet and, while his wife awaits upstairs in joyful anticipation, swallows one and leaps up the stairs, two at a time.

I have often wondered what he would have done with the rest of the packet, or with a diaphragm instead. Or where he would have put a loop.