The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated
economist.com
economist.com
"The tendency for societies to have fewer children as they become richer appears to be universal. It holds good across races, religions and ethnicities. Thus the fertility rate is the same (2.3) in Azerbaijan (which is largely Muslim), Mexico (largely Christian), Myanmar (largely Buddhist) and Nepal (largely Hindu). By the same token, many countries that remain relatively rural—Bangladesh, India and Vietnam, for example—have nonetheless seen sharp falls in fertility, albeit not quite to the levels of heavily urbanised ones, such as Brazil."
The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated in earlier projections, although the article points out that Addis Ababa has a fertility rate below two children per woman, just like the rates in rich countries. The article includes other nuanced information about what might help African people adjust to planning family sizes appropriate for the new economic realities in their countries as those countries prosper. Further economic development throughout the continent, which depends on improvements in governance, is still crucial.
What a remarkable statistic. While 40% is still far from ideal, it does show that the push for sexual education has been at least somewhat successful.
It is not quite the UN's fault - I'm sure their raw data comes with caveats. It is hard for anybody to get accurate data for a country with Ethiopian-style government, administration, and infrastructure.
My point is Africa is huge.
I prefer waterman butterfly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection#...
>The declining birth rate elsewhere has brought the world to the verge of what Hans Rosling, a Swedish demographer, calls “peak child”
But then:
>The revision of population predictions for Africa partly reflects the fact that HIV/AIDS has not proved quite as catastrophic for the continent as seemed likely ten years ago.
This comes from the 1950's 'red-scare' idea that foreign communists would have lots of babies who would grow and then invade America.
He goes on to show that such a description of the statistics is inaccurate and scare-mongering.
From: NdiliMfumu Dec 14th, 03:10
Today's problems with overpopulation are directly related to Mankind's evolution, as are many other modern discontents:
Prior to the modern era (especially, prior to the beginning of organized agriculture in the Middle East, 12,000 years ago), Mankind was a predominantly nomadic beast who wandered about, following natural herds and eating whatever fruits, nuts and other small vegetables he could find, whenever he couldn't fell another water buffalo or gazelle.
In this condition, food was generally scarce, disease common and rampant, children frequently taken by the passing lion or wave of dysentery, and the population constantly under threat. It made sense for us to evolve to be continuously fecund, always seeking meat, salt and sweets (fruits), and to avoid anything foul, bitter or unduly acidic. People tended to be lean and stringy, eager to sock away a bit of fat or sodium for the next dry and desperate week ahead.
We were not used to regular access to food, drink, salt or sugar, nor were we quite used to seeing our numbers grow.
Ah, then, we learned settled agriculture and everything began to change. Suddenly, there was a much more certain supply of food and drink. Sweets became more commonplace. Salt was easier to come by. And there was ever so much more opportunity for sex, now that the new girl just moved in next door.
Over the centuries after the onset of settled agriculture, human populations grew rather steadily. From merely about 25,000 souls in 50,000 BCE, we grew to around 100,000,000 souls around the year 1 CE. This is an intrinsic rate of population growth of only 0.016 % per year. Hardly much, but enough to be very successful as a species over a long period. Yet, it pales in comparison to the modern rate of intrinsic population growth, which has often been above 2.5% per year.
What has happened in the meantime? The Industrial Revolution enabled human populations to intensively urbanize, elevating millions from abject poverty, bringing in its train electricity, among other things, and the development of artificial ammonia production. This was critical.
Together with artificial fertilizer and increasing agricultural mechanization, farm productivity bounded and food became increasingly cheap in most parts of the world during the last 200 years. At the same time, SANITARY practices (especially, sewage system development and water purification projects) deprived the River Styx of legions of children who would otherwise have died of dysentery and early childhood respiratory illness. All this came about long before modern medicine could penetrate into most parts of the world, and well before antibiotics were developed and could play their role.
Between 1800 and 1950 (when penicillin began to become much more prevalent), death rates plummeted and the intrinsic rate of population growth exploded. At the same time, Mankind began to fall ill from diseases of excess: Excess salt leading to hypertension, excess sugar and fat tending towards morbid obesity and adult-onset diabetes, excess nicotine tending to heart attack, stroke and cancer.
What we see, here, are very swift cultural, economic and political changes sweeping over the Human Condition, much faster than can be accommodated by the usual evolutionary processes, alone. The Human Genome simply cannot respond quickly enough to doff the tendency to want more: More food, more sex, more sugar, more fat, more stimulation. All those things which for millennia we longed for, now, we have in great surfeit.
The tendency for wealthier, urbanized families to have fewer children and to start later is a direct reflection of the population pressure experienced by large numbers of people living in close quarters. We can help this along by encouraging people to continue leaving the countryside: Raise taxes on idle farmland and pastureland, on rural homes, and on train/bus rides terminating in the hinterland !
Similarly, give families income support and training to relocate into cities. Offer them apartments, jobs, healthcare and continuous education. Pay them to forego having more children, and to educate the ones they have better. Offer particularly young women money and apartments to stay single and childless until they're at least 25 years old thereby cutting their fecundity in half. And of course, make reproductive health services, including contraception and abortion services, broadly available, safe and cheap for young women.
The current and continuing crisis of world-wide deleterious climate change is, like overpopulation, a direct reflection of our evolutionary challenge and current inadequacy. Were it not for the 7.32 BN of us already alive in such vast numbers, there would be many more fish in the seas, much more oil in the ground and much less carbon in the atmosphere. Time for a thorough-going and purposeful change: Let’s not leave it to evolution, lest we go the way of the dinosaurs !
Continuing fecundity in Africa is the direct result of the general lack of urbanization, there, as compared with other continents, as well as cultural values emphasizing fecundity and large families, and the general level of poverty and illiteracy.
But this is rapidly changing, as the article points out.
As African nations lift themselves from poverty and progressively urbanize, e.g., Nigeria, today, fecundity drops and the intrinsic rate of population growth along with it. Nigerian women, especially those who live in Lagos and other large cities (e.g., Abuja, Port Harcourt, Benin City, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna) are increasingly interested in getting an education, making money and deferring marriage. Deferring the start of childrearing has a dramatic effect on overall fecundity. Deferring a first pregnancy to the age of 25 cuts an average woman's lifetime fecundity in half.
The major impediments to successful population control are largely culturally determined resistance -- especially male chauvinism, heterosexism, paternalism and religiously-driven moral imperatives to "be fruitful and multiply" (this, largely an attempt on the part of these religions to secure and increase their numbers by indoctrinating newborns in the faith).
But all these impediments tend to fall by the wayside, when young women and families enter into urban areas: The anomie of the cities assists young people in escaping the control of their parents and their clergy. "Traditional values" tend to fall victim to "modernism". "Contraception" is no longer a dirty word. Liberality and social mobility go hand in hand. Staid and stoic traditionalist parents tend to shut up, when their well-educated daughters are sending home then rent cheque from Lagos !
Africa's population will bound towards 2 billion or more by the end of the 21st century, but then it will stabilize. By that time, if we're lucky, the Earth will host more than 12 BN souls, and we shall be straining the world's resources to the limit.
If we have some real luck, hydrogen fusion power will replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission, entirely. We will devote the new, cheap and nearly limitless power to cleaning up the environment, sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere and burying it in the deep seas, planting billions of trees, and building tall and narrow cities, leaving vast tracts of open land to the animals, the insects and the other flora and fauna. We shall swing from mile-high elevators much like our distant ancestors swung through tropical forests.
And we shall begin to colonize the Moon, Mars and other regions of space, as well.
Time for a thorough-going change!
Probably one reason why their fertility is with 4,7 children/women (2015) higher than 1,6 in EU. http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1724/umfrage/w...
What I'm not sure is why. My guess is its financial propaganda such that if you assume food, jobs, energy, and economic activity will magically fall from heaven, then a company selling housewares would logically expect tripling the population would result in triple revenue leading to more than triple profits. That sounds like nice clickbait, and the bar rises every time clickbait is published, so I'm not surprised the bar right now is 4 billion africans. I'm sure to keep the financial press happy it'll be up to 8, maybe 10 billion by the end of next year.
Reality of course, with declining energy supplies and declining raw material and declining farmland, and increased lethality of weapons, is the 3rd world is going to take a bigger hit than the rest of the planet, so there's likely to be a modest population decline via the traditional unpleasant to think about methods.
There's a tragedy of the commons effect where on a societal level if at the gut level you know declines are coming, you're better off if everyone has fewer kids, but on an individual level both you AND all your other kids are better off if you have a larger family unit.
"Lethality" of weapon could be defined in many ways. You could claim that lethality has not increased significantly since Hellenic period. Depends entirely form definition.
Babies per woman in Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7P1UiAo09E