An End to Population Growth: Why Family Planning Is Key to a Sustainable Future
From Solutions Magazine. See: http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/919
An End to Population Growth: Why Family Planning Is Key to a Sustainable Future
By Robert Engelman, Executive Director at the Worldwatch Institute
In Brief: The widespread assumption that world population, now at 6.9 billion, will inevitably grow to 9 billion by midcentury is wrong. Population could peak before then and at a lower level, ameliorating environmental risks associated with climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and food and energy insecurity.
The equally widespread belief that an earlier, lower population peak would require coercive “population control” is also incorrect. Population growth rates and average family size worldwide have fallen by roughly half over the past four decades, as modern contraception has become more accessible and popular. The average number of children born to each woman worldwide is not much higher than replacement fertility, an average that would eventually end population growth. Yet more than 40 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, with higher proportions in developed than in developing countries.
As these figures suggest, it might be possible to end and then reverse human population growth through a strategy aimed at elevating women’s status and increasing access to contraceptive services, so that essentially all births result from intended pregnancies. Preliminary calculations based on conservative assumptions suggest that global fertility would immediately move slightly below replacement levels, putting world population on a path toward an early peak followed by gradual decline. The success of such a strategy would have many other benefits, such as reducing disability and deaths among mothers and their children and freeing more women to earn money and participate actively in social affairs.
To read the full article, please click here: http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/919
June 27th, 2011 at 9:39 am
I am a little puzzled about the mathematical assumptions made, ergo the opening statement “The widespread assumption that world population, now at 6.9 billion, will inevitably grow to 9 billion by mid-century is wrong”. For a start accurate population statistics can be difficult to come by and long-range predictive mathematics can run into all sorts of “unpredictable” results due to things like “positive feed-back” – ask your favourite weather scientist! I certainly agree that a key to reducing unwanted pregnancies is to elevate the status of women in societies were that is required so that they can make their own reproductive choices but how easy that is remains to be seen. My problem with many Western commentators on this subject is that many even if they may have travelled a little; remain sublimely ignorant of the real day-today situation that exists at grass roots level in for example a rural village or slum in sub-Saharan Africa. This is because they have to rely on the opinions of government officials, interpreters and AID care workers with a vested interest in their own careers and mandates and accurate statistics rarely exist. In Kenya when I was a child, Kikuyu women over 35 years of age in a rural setting were marked by an indentation on their foreheads that is from a leather strap attached to heavy loads they are required to carry from a young age. A recent documentary still showed evidence of this indentation existing in rural Kikuyu women today; 40 years later – what progress percentage are we looking at? I have encountered wealthy well-educated African gentlemen with a little secret that they would not share with their learned Western visitors. That secret is the half dozen or so tribal wives bought with their new found wealth that they keep bare-foot along with their scores of children tucked away in mud-huts in the hinterland. Every day the resources particularly in the Third World shrink reducing the chances of a revolution in women’s rights and freely available contraception, let alone the social changes required in these communities. How much time and resources are left? In the West most people apart from those still hog-tied to ideology, elect to have small affordable families and have done so for at least 2-3 generations. These are personal choices but unfortunately their governments are still held in the strangle-hold of Friedman and company with his policy of endless growth imprinted in their very genes. This policy demands ever growing markets and this is hard-wired into population increase with cheap labour that is engineered by immigration from the 3rd World with its high birth rate. They may not declare openly their commitment to population increase but their policies at home and abroad say the opposite. Soviet Russia took 80 years to break free from the ideological grip of Marx; do we have 80 years to break Friedman’s hold? I applaud Mr Engelman’s optimism and had I not been born and raised in the 3rd World with African blood in my veins, I might happily share in that optimism and be less of a hard-core cynic.