Population Where We Stand Now

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By then, young people would make up a much less sizable proportion of the population than they did before, because families would have averaged a little over two children for four decades. Consequently, a relatively low number of couples would then be having the small families aimed for. And since birth rates would fall as death rates rose, they'd meet, some 60 years or so after replacement reproduction began, and population growth would finally come to a halt.

To give you some idea of the sheer magnitude of the momentum of populati on growth, consider the following: Suppose that a rapidly growing poor nation with in average family size of five or six children in. stitutes a population control campaign and that—in about 30 years—the country manages to bring its family size down to replacement level. Under those circuma stances, the population will continue to grow—as a result of the momentum provid, ed by an initially youth-heavy population—for almost a century after the start of the campaign, and the final stabilized pop tion will be on the order of 2.5 times that which existed when the control campaign began!

For example, suppose India, with a population in 1970 of some 540 million, man aged to reach replacement reproduction around the year 2000. It would not stop growing until after 2050, and its final population would be almost 1.4 billion ... or about the size of Planet Earth's entire hu man population in 1900.

TEN BILLION EARTHLINGS!

It's this momentum that led the World Bank in 1980 to project an end to wood population growth in about the year 2100 with roughly 10 billion souls. In this vision Kenya would hav e 109 million people in stead of the current 16 million ... Nigeria would increase from 85 to 425 million ... Indonesia from 150 to 350 million ... and Bangladesh from 93 to 314 million. Mexico would almost triple in size from 70 to 205 million.

We believe, however, that these projections are extremely optimistic in one way, and far too pessimistic in another. The optimism is a reflection of the complete ignorance of environmental constraints that pervades the World Bank's World Development Report, 1980. Should the planet proceed along the lines those predictions indicate, death rates would rise long before the population of Bangladesh reached 200 million, let alone 314 million. The implication that Earth can somehow sustain continued high rates of population growth until the middle of the next century indicates only the ecological naivete of the World Bank.

On the other hand, the projections may be pessimistic about how soon replacement reproduction could be obtained. In most cases, this isn't presumed to occur in poor nations until nearly the middle of the next century. But China's experience, which we'll discuss in our next column, indicates that it could be achieved much more quickly than that.

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