We Didn’t Plan for the Right Population Problem

by Jim Peron

By now you no doubt have heard that world population has increased to an estimated 6 billion. This fact has created a flurry of hand-wringing and activity by those who are concerned about overpopulation. But what has not been mentioned, in fact what has been ignored, is all the good news about population which the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA) has recently released.

First off the UNPFA admits that in spite of increased population the world is better fed today than ever before. “While world population climbed from 3.1 billion in the 1960s to 5.7 billion in 1995, per capita food production grew from the equivalent of 2,300 to 2,700 calories a day.” In fact the UN says that in high income countries “there is an endemic problem of surplus.” The dark spot in this is that the UN says that low income countries can’t afford to import food and they don’t grow enough of their own.

One such country is Zimbabwe run by the Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe. It is clear to even the casual tourist that Zimbabwe is in trouble. When I was there late last year even tourist locations like Victoria Falls were filled with beggars seeking a handout. The country suffers from perpetual food supply problems But these problems are the creation of Mr. Mugabe. Price controls make food production unprofitable forcing many farmers into producing tobacco instead. Tobacco, unlike food crops, could be sold at the world market price. Mugabe has also waged a war against the most productive farms in the country by threatening confiscation so they can be redistributed to his cronies.

The UN which is filled with similar third world basket cases is not very likely to admit the politically unacceptable fact that many such nations are poor because they are badly run. But even in spite of such bad management the UN has to admit: “More people are being fed adequately today than ever before.” The doomsayers in the green movement tend to leave this fact out of all discussions.

Now these prophets of disaster would have us think that every level of human existence is getting worse. But the UN, contradicting this scenario, has more good news. We humans are living lives that are longer and healthier than ever before. The UNPFA reported: “Since 1950 the death rate has been cut in half, from about 20 to fewer than 10 deaths per year per thousand people. At the same time global life expectancy has risen from 46 to 66 years.” It gets even better: “The world’s population is healthier from infancy through old age than it ever has been. Global infant mortality has fallen by two thirds since 1950, from 155 per thousand live births to 57 per thousand; this rate is projected to be reduced by a further two thirds by 2050.”

Amongst all this good news are a few UN projections which you would think would make the environmentalists jump with glee. The average number of children per woman has been steadily declining. From a high yearly population growth rate of 2.03% in 1970 the population increase has dropped to a current level of 1.33%. And the UN projects that world population will level out over the next fifty years and then go into rapid decline. In fact they concede that “61 countries (with about 44 per cent of the world’s population) already have below-replacement fertility rates (less than 2.1 births per woman). The number of such countries is projected to grow to 87 by 2015, encompassing about two thirds of the world’s population.”

Now before you get too excited about this news consider what it means. The population of the developed countries of the world will be going into massive decline. In the next few decades Europe is expected to lose 24% of its population. Japan is expected to lose 16 million people by 2050. Italy is set to lose over 15 million. And in country after country the same scenario is playing itself out.

When a nation loses such a high percentage of its economically active population this will mean dire consequences for its economy. And we can’t forget that many of the welfare state programmes have been built on the premise that more and more people will be paying contributions each year. But instead we will see an elderly population which is growing being supported by a shrinking number of economically active workers. With fewer people paying in and more people collecting, the welfare state is in for a very bumpy ride.

Goldman Sachs reported in 1997 that decreasing population meant that: “The developed world is facing a demographic disaster with respect to pension obligations and funding. The dramatic aging of the developed world’s population is expected to cause a financial crisis at both the governmental and personal levels.”

So we just might have a population problem after all. Unfortunately it won’t be the one for which everyone was planning.

Jim Peron is an American writer living in South Africa. He is the author of Exploding Population Myths.