Global Demography

Learning Outcomes: At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. discuss the discuss the relationship between population and economic welfare;

2. identify the effects of aging and overpopulation; and

3. differentiate between contrasting positions over reproductive health.

When couples are asked why they have children, their answers are almost always about their
feelings. For most, having a child is the symbol of a successful union. It also ensures that the
family will have a successor generation that will continue its name. The kinship is preserved, and
the family's story continues. A few, however, worry how much strain a child can bring to the
household as he/she "competes" for the parents' attention, and, in reverse, how much energy the
family needs to shower its love to an additional member. Viewed from above, however, having
or not having children is mainly driven by economics. Behind the laughter or the tears lies the
question: Will the child be an economic asset or a burden to the family?

Rural communities often welcome an extra hand to help in crop cultivation, particularly during
the planting and harvesting seasons. The poorer districts of urban centers also tend to have
families with more children because the success of their "small family business" depends on how
many of their members can be hawking their wares on the streets. Hence, the more children, the
better it will be for the for the farm or the small by-the-street corner enterprises.

Urbanized, educated, and professional families with two incomes, however, desire just
one or two progenies. With each partner tied down, or committed to his/her respective
professions, neither has the time to devote to having a kid, much more to parenting. These
families also have their sights on long-term savings plans. They set aside significant parts of their
incomes for their retirement, health care, and the future education of their child/children.

Rural families view multiple children and large kinship networks as critical investments.
Children, for example, can take over the agricultural work. Their houses can also become the
"retirement homes" of their parents, who will then proceed to take care of their grandchildren.
Urban families, however, may not have the same kinship network anymore because couples live
on their own, or because they move out of the farmlands. Thus, it is usually the basic family unit
that is left to deal with life's challenges on its own.

These differing versions of family life determine the economic and social policies that
countries craft regarding their respective populations. Countries in the "less developed regions of
the world" that rely on agriculture tend to maintain high levels of population growth. The 1980
United Nations report on urban and rural population growth states that these areas contained 85
percent of the world rural population in 1975 and are projected to contain 90 percent by the end
of the (20th) century.
 Since then, global agricultural population has declined. In 2011, it accounted for over 37
percent of the total world population, compared to the statistics in 1980 in which rural and urban
population percentages were the same. The blog site "Nourishing the Planet," however, noted
that even as "the agricultural population shrunk as a share of total population between l980 and
2011, it grew numerically from 2.2 billion to 2.6 billion people during this period."

Urban populations have grown, but not necessarily because families are having more
children. It is rather the combination of the natural outcome of significant migration to the cities
by people seeking work in the "more modern" sectors of society. This movement of people is
especially manifest in the developing countries where industries and businesses in the cities are
attracting people from the rural areas. This trend has been noticeable since the 1950s, with the
pace accelerating in the next half-a-century. By the start of the 21st century, the world had
become "44 percent urban, while the corresponding figures for developed countries are 52
percent to 75 percent.

International migration also plays a part. Today, 191 million people live in countries
other than their own, and the United Nations projects that over 2.2 million will move from the
developing world to the First World countries (more on this in Lesson 11). °Countries welcome
immigrants as they offset the debilitating effects of an aging population, but they are also
perceived as threats to the job market because they compete against citizens for jobs and often
have the edge because they are open to receiving lower wages. Voters' pressure has often
constrained their governments to institute stricter immigration policies.

The "Perils" of Overpopulation

Development planners see urbanization and industrialization as indicators of a developing

society but disagree on the role of population growth or decline in modernization. This lengthy
discussion brings back ideas of British scholar Thomas Malthus who warned in his 1798 "An
Essay on the Principle of Population" that population growth will inevitably exhaust world
food supply by the middle of the 19th century,"2 Malthus' prediction was off base, but it was
revived in the late 1960s when American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, wrote
The Population Bomb, which argued that overpopulation in the 1970s and the 1980s will bring
about global environmental disasters that would, in turn, lead to food shortage and mass
starvation. They proposed that countries like the United States take the lead in the promotion of
global population control to reduce the growth rate to zero. Their recommendations ranged from
the bizarre (chemical castration) to the policy-oriented (taxing an additional child and luxury
taxes on child related products) to monetary incentives (paying off men who would agree to be
sterilized after two children) to institution-building (a powerful Department of Population and
Environment).
 There was some reason for this fear to persist. The rate of global population increase was
at its highest between 1955 and 1975 when nations were finally able to return to normalcy after
the devastations wrought by World War II. The growth rate rose from 1.8 percent per year from
1955 to 1975, peaking at 2.06 percent annual growth rate between 1965 and 1970.

By limiting the population, vital resources could be used for economic progress and not
be "diverted" and "wasted" to feeding more mouths. This argument became the basis for
government "population control" programs worldwide. In the mid-20th the Philippines, China,
and India sought to lower birth rates on the belief that unless controlled, the free expansion of
family members would lead to a crisis in resources, which in turn may result in widespread
poverty, mass hunger, and political instability." As early as 1958, the American policy journal,
Foreign Affairs, had already advocated "contraception and sterilization" as the practical solutions
to global economic, social, and political problems. While there have been criticisms that
challenged this argument (see the next section), it persists even to this very day. In May 2009, a
group of American billionaires warned of how a "nightmarish" explosion of people was "a
potentially disastrous environmental, social, and industrial threat to the world.

This worry is likewise at the core of the economist argument for the promotion of
reproductive health. Advocates of population control contend for universal access to
reproductive technologies (such as condoms, the pill, abortion, and vasectomy) and, more
importantly, giving women the right to choose whether to have children or not. They see these
tools as crucial to their nation's development. Thus, in Puerto Rico, reproductive health
supporters regard their work as the task of transforming their "poor country" into a "modern
nation."

Finally, politics determine these "birth control" programs. Developed countries justify
their support for population control in developing countries by depicting the latter as
conservative societies. For instance, population experts blamed the "irresponsible fecundity" of
Egyptians for that nation's run-on population growth, and the Iranian peasant's "natural" libidinal
tendencies for the same rise in population. 2 From 1920 onwards, the Indian government
"marked lower castes, working poor, and Muslims as hypersexual and hyper-fecund and hence a
drain on national resources."4 These policy formulations lead to extreme policies like the forced
sterilization of twenty million "violators" of the Chinese government's one-child policy. Vietnam
and Mexico also conducted coercive mass sterilization.23

It's the Economy, Not the Babies!

The use of population control to prevent economic crisis has its critics. For example,
Betsy Hartmann disagrees with the advocates of neo-Malthusian theory and accused
governments of using population control as a "substitute for social justice and much-needed
reforms-such land distribution, employment creation, provision of mass education and health
care, and emancipation. Others pointed out that the population did grow fast in many countries in
the 1960s, and this growth "aided economic development by spurring technological and
institutional innovation and increasing the supply of human ingenuity. They acknowledged the
shift in population from the rural to the urban areas (52 percent to 75 percent in the developing
world since the 1950s). They likewise noted that while these "megacities" are now clusters in
which income disparities along with "transportation, housing, air pollution and, waste
management" are major problems, they also have become, and continue to be, "centers of
economic growth and activity.

The median of 29.4 years for females and 30.9 for males in the cities means a young
working population.!" With this median age, states are assured that they have a robust military
force. According to two population experts:

"As a country's baby-boom generation gets older, for a time it constitutes a large
cohort group of working-age individuals and, later a large cohort of elderly people…In
all circumstances, there are reasons to think that this very dynamic age structure will
have economic consequences. A historically high proportion of working-age individuals
in a population means that, potentially, there are more workers per dependent than
previously. Production can therefore increase relative to consumption, and GDP capita
can receive a boost.”

The productive capacities of this generation are especially high in regions like East Asia
as "Asia's remarkable growth in the past half century coincided closely with demographic change
in the region. As infant mortality fell from 181 to 34 per 1,000 births between 1950 and 2000,
fertility fell from six to two children per woman. The lag between falls in mortality and fertility
created a baby-boom generation: between 1965 and 1990, the region's working-age population
grew nearly four times faster than the dependent population. Several studies have estimated that
this demographic shift was responsible for one-third of East Asia's economic growth during the
period (a welcome demographic dividend).

Population growth has, in fact, spurred "technological and institutional innovation" and
increased "the supply of human ingenuity. Advances in agricultural production have shown that
the Malthusian nightmare can be prevented. The "Green Revolution" created high-yielding
varieties of rice and other cereals and, along with the development of new methods of
cultivation, increased yields globally, but more particularly in the developing world. The global
famine that neo-Malthusians predicted did not happen. Instead, between 1950 and 1984, global
grain production increased by over 250 percent, allowing agriculture to keep pace with
population growth, thereby keeping global famine under control.

Lately, a middle ground emerged between these two extremes. Scholars and
policymakers agree with the neo-Malthusians but suggest that if governments pursue population
control programs, they must include "more inclusive growth" and "greener economic growth.”
Women and Reproductive Rights

The character in the middle of these debates-women-is often the subject of these
population measures. Reproductive rights supporters argue that if population control and
economic development were to reach their goals, women must have control over whether they
will have children or not and when they will have their progenies, if any. By giving women this
power, they will be able to pursue their vocations--be they economic, social, or political-and
contribute to economic growth.

This serial correlation between fertility, family, and fortune has motivated countries with
growing economies to introduce or strengthen their reproductive health laws, including abortion.
High-income First World nations and fast-developing countries were able to sustain growth in
part because women were given the power of choice and easy access to reproductive
technologies. In North America and Europe, 73 percent of governments allow abortion upon a
mother's request. Moreover, the more educated a woman is, the better are her prospects of
improving her economic position. Women can spend most of the time pursuing either their
higher education or their careers, instead of forcibly reducing this time to take care of their
children.

Most countries implement reproductive health laws because they worry about the health
of the mother. In 1960, Bolivia's average total fertility rate (TFR) was 6.7 children. In 1978, the
Bolivian government put into effect a family planning program that included the legalization of
abortion (after noticing a spike in unsafe abortion and maternal deaths). By 1985, the TFR rate
went down to 5.13 and further declined to 3.46 in 2008. A similar pattern occurred in Ghana
after the government expanded reproductive health laws out of the same concern as that of the
Bolivian government. As a result, fertility declined steeply and continued to decline [after] 1994.
Such examples seemed to draw the attention of other countries. Thus, in 2014, the United
Nations report noted that the proportion of countries allowing abortion to preserve the physical
health of a woman increased from 63 percent to 67 percent, and those to preserve the mental
health of a woman increased from 52 percent to 64 percent.

Opponents regard reproductive rights as nothing but a false front for abortion. They
contend that this method of preventing conception endangers the life of the mother and must be
banned. The religious wing of the anti-reproductive rights flank goes further and describes
abortion as a debauchery that sullies the name of God; it will send the mother to hell and
prevents a new soul, the baby, to become human,42 This position was a politically powerful one
partly because various parts of the developing world remain very conservative. Unfailing
pressure by Christian groups compelled the governments of Poland, Croatia, Hungary,
Yugoslavia, and even Russia to impose restrictive reproductive health programs, including
making access to condoms and other technologies difficult. Muslim countries do not condone
abortion and limit wives to domestic chores and delivering babies. Senegal only allows abortion
when the mother's life is threatened,4 The Philippines, with a Catholic majority, now has
reproductive health law in place, but conservative politicians have enfeebled it through budget
cuts and stalled its implementation by filing a case against the law in the Supreme Court.

A country being industrialized and developed, however, does not automatically assure
pro-women reproductive regulations. In the United States, the women's movement of the 1960s
was responsible for the passage and judicial endorsement of a pro- choice law, but conservatives
controlling state legislatures have also slowly undermined this law by imposing a restriction on
women's access to abortion. While pro-choice advocates argue that abortion is necessary to
protect the health of the mother, their conservative rivals shift the focus on the death of the fetus
in the mother's womb as the reason for reversing the law. This battle continues to be played out
in all the political arenas in the United States.

The Feminist Perspective

Feminists approach the issue of reproductive rights from another angle. They are,
foremost, against any form of population control because they are compulsory by nature,
resorting toa carrot-and-stick approach (punitive mechanisms co-exist alongside benefits) that
actually does not empower women. They believe that government assumptions that poverty
environmental degradation are caused by overpopulation are wrong. These factors ignore other
equally important causes like the unequal distribution of wealth, the lack of public safety nets
like universal health care, education, and gender equality programs. Feminists also point out that
there is very little evidence that point to overpopulation as the culprit behind poverty and
ecological devastation.

Governments have not directly responded to these criticisms, but one of the goals of 1994
United Nations International Conference on Population and Development suggests recognition of
this issue. Country representatives to that conference agreed that women should receive family
planning counseling on abortion, the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, the nature of
human sexuality, and the main elements of responsible parenthood." However, the conference
also left it to the individual countries to determine how these recommendations can be turned
into programs. Hence, globally, women's and feminist arguments on reproductive rights and
overpopulation are acknowledged, but the struggle to turn them into policy is still fought at the
national level. It is the dilemma that women and feminist movements face today.

Population Growth and Food Security

Today's global population has reached 74 billion, and it is estimated to increase to 9.5
billion in 2050, then 11.2 billion by 2100. The median age of this population is 30.1, with the
male median age at 29.4 years and female, 30.9 years. Ninety-five percent of this population
growth will happen in the developing countries, with demographers predicting that by the middle
of this century, several countries will have tripled their population. The opposite is happening in
the developed world where populations remain steady in general but declining in some of the
most advanced countries (Japan and Singapore). However, this scenario is not a run-off that
could get out of control. Demographers predict that the world population will stabilize by 2050
to 9 billion, although they warn that feeding this population will be an immense challenge.

The decline in fertility and the existence of a young productive population, however, may
not be enough to offset this concern over food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) warns that in order for countries to mitigate the impact of population growth, food
production must increase by 70 percent; annual cereal production must rise to 3 billion tons from
the current 2.1 billion; and yearly meat production must go up to 200 million tons to reach 470
million. The problem here is that the global rate of growth of cereals had declined considerably-
from 3.2 percent in 1960 to just 1.5 percent in 2000.

The FAO recommends that countries increase their investments in agriculture, craft long-
term policies aimed at fighting poverty, and invest in research and development. The UN body
also suggests that countries develop a comprehensive social service program that includes food
assistance, consistent delivery of health services, and education especially for the poor. If
domestic production is not enough, it becomes essential for nations to import. The FAO,
therefore, enjoins governments to keep their markets open, and to eventually "move towards a
global trading system that is fair and competitive, and that contributes to a dependable market for
food.

The aforementioned are worthy recommendations but nation-states shall need the
political will to push through these sweeping changes in population growth and food security.
This will take some time to happen given that good governance is also a goal that many nations,
especially in the developing world, have yet to attain.

Conclusion

Demography is a complex discipline that requires the integration of various social

scientific data. As you have seen, demographic changes and policies have impacts on the
environment, politics, resources, and others. Yet, at its core, demography accounts for the growth
and decline of the human species. It may be about large numbers and massive effects, but it is
ultimately about people. Thus, no interdisciplinary account of globalization is complete without
an accounting of people.