The United Nations will to-day declare that the world population has reached seven billion. One of the 382,000 babies born Monday will have that honour.
Some say the occasion is to be celebrated as a success of the human species. Population grows when births exceed deaths. The 7-billion mark was reached because people are living longer and the number of infant deaths has dropped, because of a larger food supply and because of advances in sanitation and medicine. Others voice a foreboding for the future, questioning the growth's sustainability upon the natural resources of the world. As many debate the earth’s population reaching seven billion on October 31, some countries in Europe, East Asia and the US are facing declining birth rates.
For a population to stay at a steady state, the fertility rate needs to be about 2.1 children per woman. More than 30 countries have what is considered a very low fertility of less than 1.3 births per woman. Japan’s rate, one of the lowest in the world, is 1.21, according to the CIA, far below basic replacement levels. The UK is at 1.91, Belgium’s is 1.65, Canada is at 1.58, South Korea has a rate of 1.23 and Italy has a rate of 1.39. Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, and Lebanon are also now sub-replacement countries.
“With a lower fertility rate, the ageing of the population is inevitable” said Roderic Beaujot, a demographer at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
In the UK, for example, the number of people over 70 will increase by more than 50 per cent - from 6.2 million today to 9.6 million in 2030. With senior citizens making up a larger proportion of the population, countries are worried that there will be too many retirees receiving healthcare and social security payments and too few workers to support them. There are two main solutions: increasing fertility rates or encouraging immigration. Russia initiated a policy known as “mother capital” where women are paid about $10,000 to have more than one child. While in proportion to its population, Canada naturalises the most people in the world by far. By 2031, one in three workers in Canada is projected to be foreign-born.
“Countries that do not wish to open their doors to immigration will be forced to rely more on other policies to shoulder the burden of population ageing” Sumption, from the Migration Policy Institute, said - Raising the retirement age and cutting back on welfare benefits
"The world's population growth reached its peak at 1.9 per cent in the 1960s and has dropped to about 1.2 per cent," said Richard Bilsborrow, faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Centre. "The fall is really extraordinary."
The Economist reported in January 2011 that "The richest one per cent of adults control 43 per cent of the world's assets; the wealthiest ten per cent have 83 per cent. The bottom 50 per cent have only two per cent."
If the gap between the haves, have-nots and have-yachts is reduced drastically, critics say, the world has enough wealth and natural resources to provide a decent standard of living to a large population. A rise in living standards, access to family planning and more rights for women have all played a role in slowing the rise, analysts said.
There is, however, one significant exception - sub-Saharan Africa. Its population is expected to at least double in less than 40 years with the average woman in Ethiopia and Mozambique giving birth to five children. In Somalia, which has one of the highest birth rates in the world, only 1 percent of married women have access to modern contraception.
"The most productive aid we in the West can give is education," John Weeks, director of the International Population Centre at San Diego State University said. "But selling weapons is what the rich countries do most easily."
In all likelihood the 7 billionth child will join the ranks of the already hungry, or those perpetually wondering where their next meal will come from. Around 3 billion people are currently estimated to be living on $2 a day and almost 1 billion are hungry. The 7 billioner will probably struggle to get an education or a permanent job, and their illiteracy and work-insecurity will make getting out of poverty that much more difficult.
He/she may struggle to get potable water: water usage in the developing world is due to rise by 50% by 2025. Of the 2.5% of the world’s fresh water, two-thirds is frozen. Irrigation is used on around a quarter of the world’s croplands and underpins more than one third of agricultural production. If there were no irrigation then global cereal production would drop by 20%.
More than likely will live in a city for urbanisation – or rather the flight from rural areas – is not only going to use all manner of resources, it’s going to mean fewer farmers willing to stick to their fields. By 2050 around 6.3 billion of the world’s 9 billion people by that time will live in cities.
Hopefully the 7 billionth person will be a socialist and understand the solutions. The present food crisis -- in which nearly a billion people are going hungry -- is used as proof of the food scarcity plaguing the planet. There is scarcity -- but not of food.
The world produces 1-½ times enough food to feed every man, woman and child currently living. Studies show that sustainable agricultural practices can produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. The University of Michigan have constructed two models, a "conservative case" and a "realistic case." The "conservative case" applied the yield ratios of organic production to conventional production from the developed countries to worldwide agricultural production (production in both the developed and developing countries). As the yield ratios in the ten food categories were generally lower in the developed countries, applying them worldwide means that slightly fewer calories would be produced under a fully organic global system: 2,641 kcal/person/day instead of 2,786 kcal. However, this number is still above the suggested intake for healthy adults of 2200 to 2500 kcal/person/day, so even under this conservative estimate there would be sufficient food production for the current population. However, under more realistic assumptions—that a switch to organic agriculture would mean the relatively lower developed world yield ratios would apply to production in the developed world and the relatively higher developing world yield ratios would apply to production in the developing world—the result was an astounding 4,381 kcal/person/day, a caloric availability more than sufficient for today's population. Indeed, it would be more than enough to support an estimated population peak of around 10-11 billion people by the year 2100. The study isn't a precise prediction for any specific crop or region, but rather an indicator of potential performance of organic relative to conventional and the current low-intensity agriculture practiced in much of the developing world.
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/1778
People are going hungry not because there is not enough food, but because they are poor and can't afford food
3 comments:
Quite amazing really to think that the present world population outnumbers, the whole total of humanity from day one.
For more on the declining population problem see
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011103174318924559.html
"Chinese, Russians, and Brazilians are no longer replacing themselves, while Indians are having far fewer children. Indeed, global fertility will fall to the replacement rate in a little more than a decade. Population may keep growing until mid-century, owing to rising longevity, but, reproductively speaking, our species should no longer be expanding.
What demographers call the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is the average number of live births per woman over her lifetime. In the long run, a population is said to be stable if the TFR is at the replacement rate, which is a little above 2.3 for the world as a whole, and somewhat lower, at 2.1, for developed countries, reflecting their lower infant-mortality rates.
The TFR for most developed countries now stands well below replacement levels. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average is at around 1.74, but some countries, including Germany and Japan, produce less than 1.4 children per woman. However, the biggest TFR declines in recent years have been in developing countries. The TFR in China and India was 6.1 and 5.9, respectively, in 1950. It now stands at 1.8 in China, owing to the authorities' aggressive one-child policy, while rapid urbanisation and changing social attitudes have brought down India's TFR to 2.6...
...China's Effective Fertility Rate (EFR) is around 1.5, and India's is 2.45. In other words, the Chinese are very far from replacing themselves, and the Indians are only slightly above the replacement rate. The EFR stands at around 2.4 for the world as a whole, barely above the replacement rate. Current trends suggest that the human race will no longer be replacing itself by the early 2020s. Population growth after this will be mostly caused by people living longer, a factor that will diminish in significance from mid-century.
China is ageing very rapidly, and its working-age population will begin to shrink within a few years. Relaxing the one-child policy might have some positive impact in the very long run, but China is already past the tipping point, pushed there by the combined effect of gender imbalance and a very skewed age structure.
The number of women of child-bearing age (15-49 years) in China will drop 8 per cent between 2010 and 2020, another 10 per cent in the 2020s and, if not corrected, at an even faster pace thereafter. Thus, China will have to withdraw an increasing proportion of its female workforce and deploy it for reproduction and childcare. Even if China can engineer this, it implies an immediate outflow from the workforce, with the benefits lagging by 25 years...."
Life expectancy tripled in the last few thousand years, to a global average of nearly 70 years. The average number of children per woman fell worldwide to about 2.5 now from 5 in 1950. The world’s population is growing at 1.1 percent per year, half the peak rate in the 1960s. Nearly two-thirds of women under 50 who are married or in a union use some form of contraception, which saves the lives of mothers who would otherwise die in childbirth and avoids millions of abortions each year. However,86 million pregnancies were unintended, and they resulted in 33 million unplanned births.
The world produced 2.3 billion metric tons of cereal grains in 2009-10 — enough calories to sustain 9 to 11 billion people — only 46 percent of the grain went into human mouths. Domestic animals got 34 percent of the crop, and 19 percent went to industrial uses like biofuels, starches and plastics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/opinion/seven-billion.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
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