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.)
Earlier this year I attended a luncheon about world hunger. Despite the fact that the world-renowned panelists proved very informative, the seeming contradiction of a lunch for hunger rivaled, say, a pub crawl for alcoholism.


