Global population growing faster than expected
13 Sep The Courant
Humanity is growing faster than we thought.In advance of World
Population Day, United Nations demographers have once again revised
official projections upward. This meticulous band of number crunchers
doesn’t mean to be alarmist, but its statistics can be startling
.Nigeria, the West African nation slightly larger than Texas, is on
track to surpass the United States as the world’s third-most populous
country by 2050. The size of its population may rival that of China by
the end of the century, unless something dramatic happens.
The number of people living on the African continent is set to nearly
quadruple by the end of the century, rather than merely tripling, as
previously projected.The world’s population is on track to reach 9.6
billion by midcentury and nearly 11 billion by 2100, which is 700
million more than was projected two years ago.The reason for the higher
figures? A slew of recent household surveys in African countries
revealed the average number of children per woman was higher than
previously estimated, said Francois Pelletier, chief of the U.N.’s
population estimates and projections section.
In some countries, “a high level of fertility appears to have risen
even higher,” Pelletier said. In others, “we realized the earlier
estimates were too low.”A seemingly modest change from an average of
four children per woman to five, he said, can produce a dramatic upswing
in coming decades due to the power of compound growth.
The prospect of Africa’s population of 1.1 billion exceeding 4
billion has surprised some demographers, because Africa is not following
the pattern of falling fertility around the world. Women on average
around the globe have half as many children as they did in the 1960s.The
counter-trend reflects what the Population Council’s John Bongaarts
calls “a lost decade of family planning in Africa.”Some of the programs
and money once devoted to providing contraceptives to poor women have
been scaled back or diverted to fight the AIDS epidemic, he said. As
these programs have fallen in prominence at the World Bank and other
international developing organizations it has left the matter adrift,
which is now showing up in the statistics.
In Nigeria, 10% of married women of childbearing years are taking
birth control pills, using intrauterine devices or other forms of modern
contraception. That compares with 72% of married women of reproductive
age in the United States.
More than 220 million women in the developing world say they would
like to avoid pregnancy but are not using modern contraception,
according to analysis of household surveys.
Many of them are in Africa.The British government, the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, and other governmental and nonprofit organizations met
in London last year to reinvigorate the effort to provide contraceptives
to women who want them. They are developing plans to reach 120 million
women who don’t have access to contraceptives by the year 2020.The
recent flurry of activity encourages Bongaarts, who remains concerned
about rapid population growth increasing hunger and poverty in Africa as
poor nations struggle with limitations on food, water and farmland.The
latest U.N. projections, he said, offer “a warning sign that people in
Africa are in more trouble than we thought. We should take population
and family planning more seriously.”
|
