Babies Everywhere in Africa, Meanwhile Global Population Leveling in Developed World

Get knocked up and win a Hummer! Talk about a national holiday. So went the “family contact day” earlier this month in the central Russian province of Ulyanovsk, where governor Sergei Morozov urged families to take the day off from work and do their best to, ahem, get lucky. In an effort to grow the Russian population, incentives go beyond the day off and pure pleasure of procreation: families who find themselves visited by a stork exactly nine months later on June 12, Russia’s national day, will be awarded home appliances, a sport-utility vehicle or even a new house.

This third annual Russian “sex day” seems to buck the common conception that, if anything, the earth suffers from too many human inhabitants. If you look at a graph of population growth, it would seem as much. From about the birth of Christ to the year 1800, there were less than a billion people. Then the graph shoots straight up, as the world population increased sixfold in two hundred years.

For a long time, common understanding dictated that overpopulation was a serious threat to the survival of the species. Such is still a perilous reality in countries like China and India who, each with more than a billion people, face poverty crises and drastic shortages of essential resources, namely water. Only, recent reports are hinting that the global baby boom may be coming to an end. Russia, in particular, is losing population at a rapid rate, hence the holiday.

Already, in an increasing number of countries, women are having babies at a rate that won’t keep populations even at its current levels. The United Nations, who has been tracking this story since 1951, estimates that by mid-century there will be 9.2 billion people. That’s an increase of almost 3 billion. For some perspective, that’s more people than even existed 50 years ago.

The mass of those billions of babies soon to be born, on the whole, will be from developing countries. Currently, the world’s highest fertility rates are in some of the world’s poorest areas. On the whole, women in Uganda, Angola, Chad, East Timor, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan are giving birth to seven children over the course of their child-bearing years. (See here for a complete list.)

Growth in countries like the United States, Europe, and Japan, has already leveled off. In other words, the developed world is getting old. Unfortunately there’s no Viagra prescription that is going to solve this one. Hummers, as incentives, may help, but you have to wonder about the wealthy world—all work and no babies?

(Map of world fertility rates from Wikipedia; click to enlarge.)

Comments

[Buzzb]

With regard to what one calls the result of the twin tragedies of global poverty - there is lots to say. The first, of course, is that so many babies are seemingly fated to live horribly stunted, miserable lives and die such early deaths. The second is that after fifty years and more than $2.3 trillion in aid from the West to address the first tragedy, it has shockingly little to show for it. We'll never solve the first tragedy, unless we figure out the second.

The corruption of African governments is to blame. No leaders. Corruption fills the centuries. Responsibility has to come -for all the people who pretend to care, not one will be counted.

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