Declining birth rates are slowing down the world population growth. India's population, 1 billion as of today, is set to increase by 540 million over the next 50 years overtaking China convincingly. Identifying India's population growth at "stage two", where death rate is low while birth rate is high, this another lucid rendition from Worldwatch, warns of falling living standards. Governments of countries which have been in this second stage for several decades are typically worn down and drained of financial resources, suffering from, what the authors call, "demographic fatigue". This fatigue results from governments' unending efforts to educate ever-growing numbers of children reaching school age, create jobs for the swelling numbers of young unemployed and deal with the environmental problems like deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of water resources.
In both India and China, grain production per capita was close to 200 kg as recently as 1978. Since then, India has inched up slightly but still falls short of 200 kg, while Chinas production has surged with the figure now standing at 300 kg. Although India has also achieved impressive gains in its harvest, they have been largely cancelled by population growth, leaving most of its people living close to the margin.
As the per capita cultivated area shrinks, more and more nations risk losing the capacity to feed themselves. The trend is illustrated starkly in the world's three fastest-growing countries - Pakistan, Nigeria and Ethiopia. As India's population is set to add another 500 million + by 2050, a study conducted by David Seckler of the International Water Management Institute says freshwater aquifers are being pulled down by 1-3 metres every year over much of the country. Seckler contends that as waterbodies get depleted, the resulting shortfall in irrigation could reduce India's harvest by 25 per cent. In a country where 53 per cent of the children are already malnourished and underweight, a shrinking harvest could increase hunger-related deaths, adding to the six million worldwide who die each year from hunger and malnutrition.
Besides, the social stresses resulting from rapid population growth are likely to exacerbate conflicts among different religious, ethnic, tribal and geographic groups within societies. Population-induced conflicts can quickly spill beyond a nation's borders in many well-known though unpredictable ways. Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Toronto calls attention to several pivotal nations whose stability profoundly affects regional and global security, and who are at risk of demographic-related conflict, including Mexico, Pakistan, China and India.
The world is now starting to reap the consequences of its past neglect of the population issue. The two regions where death rates are likely to rise are sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, which together contain 1.9 billion people, or one-third of humanity. "Without clearly-defined strategies by governments in countries with rapid population growth to quickly lower birth rates and a commitment by the international community to support them, one-third of humanity could slide into a demographic dark hole," warns Brown, Worldwatch Institute president.
The other threat already pushing the death rate up or having the potential to do so is the HIV virus. Of these three threats, the HIV virus is the first to spiral out of control in developing countries. The HIV epidemic should be seen for what it is: an international emergency of epic proportions, one that could claim more lives in the early part of the next century than World War II did in this one. In Sun-Saharan Africa death rates are soaring. The virus has also established a foothold in the Indian subcontinent. With more than four million of its adults now HIV-positive, India is home to more infected individuals than any other nation. And with the infection rate among India's adults at roughly one per cent - a critical threshold for potential rapid spread- an HIV epidemic is imminent if the government does not move fast.
One of the keys to helping nations quickly slow population growth is enhanced international assistance for reproductive health and family planning. At the 1994 UN conference on population and development in Cairo, the annual cost of quality reproductive health services to the needy in developing countries was estimated at $17 billion in the year 2000. By 2015, this figure would climb up to $22 billion. Industrialised countries agreed to provide one-third of the funds with the developing countries generating the rest. While developing countries have largely honoured their commitments, the industrial countries have reneged on their's. And almost unbelievably, in late 1998, the US Congress withdrew all funding for the UN Population Fund.
The same family planning services that help slow population growth also help to check the spread of the HIV virus. But unfortunately, the Congress, mired in the quicksand of anti-abortion policies, is depriving developing countries of the assistance they need. Beyond family planning, the waiver of international debts by governments in the industrialised world would enable poor countries to make heavy investments in education, specially of young females, that accelerates the shift to smaller families. As UN delegates evaluate the progress made since Cairo, there is a desperate need for leadership in stabilising world population at the earliest.
