Population News

Monday, 7 November 2011

Nature Studies by Michael McCarthy: Exhausted, deforested landscapes show the truth about over-population

Nature Studies by Michael McCarthy: Exhausted, deforested landscapes show the truth about over-population:

I imagine most people would be hard put to place Burkina Faso on a map; it neatly fits that cliché of a faraway country of which we know nothing.

Thursday, 3 November 2011

Discounts and time off work: how Japan is battling a birthrate in decline

Discounts and time off work: how Japan is battling a birthrate in decline:

The country's low birthrate and ageing society are taking the world's third-biggest economy to the brink of a demographic crisis

Companies have been urged to give their employees more time off to procreate; shops have offered discounts for larger families; and the government has introduced child allowances to lift the birthrate.

Yet try as it may, Japan appears unable to stop its inexorable slide into long-term population decline.

With the global population forecast to reach 9 billion by the middle of the decade, Japan is bucking the trend. Instead, its low birthrate and ageing society are taking the world's third-biggest economy to the brink of a demographic crisis to which it is struggling to find solutions.

The traditional pyramid population model is beginning to flip upside down against a backdrop of fewer, and later, marriages, while life expectancy continues to rise thanks to a traditional low-fat diet and advanced medical treatments paid for by universal health insurance.

Demographers warn that if current trends continue, Japan's population will look much smaller and greyer in just a few decades.

Although the population increased slightly last year to just over 128 million, according to government figures, the most recent census attributes the rise to more people returning to Japan than had left.

The long-term trend points to an accelerated decline. The current population will dip below 100 million in 2046, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo, before sinking to below 45 million in 2105.

For many Japanese, coupling appears to be low on the agenda: a 2008 survey conducted by Durex found that the average Japanese couple has sex 45 times a year, less than half the global average of 103 times.

The birthrate, at 1.34 - the average number of children a woman is expected to have during her child-bearing years - is below the 2.1 experts say is necessary to keep the population stable.

"Even that is a conservative estimate," says Futoshi Ishii, a researcher in population dynamics at the institute, who adds that it is too early to gauge the impact on the birth rate of the recent introduction of allowances for children up to the age of 15.

Local authorities and the private sector have attempted to encourage couples to have more children, from offering shopping vouchers to larger families to launching officially sanctioned matchmaking websites.

The country's biggest business lobby, Keidanren, has encouraged its 1,600 member firms to allow employees to spend more time with their spouses and, so the theory goes, have more children.

Yet appeals to promote a healthier work-life balance are unlikely to produce results until corporate gimmicks such as "family weeks" - when firms send workers home by 7pm at the latest - are legally enforced.

In addition, more than 40% of men aged 35-39 still live with their parents. Many cite job instability and a culture of work that leaves them with little time to meet potential marriage partners.

As a result there were fewer marriages in 2010 than at any time since 1954, and there has been a noticeable shift towards living alone.

"People are marrying much later, and that causes an inevitable slowdown in the birthrate," says Ishii. "That may change of course, but we believe the trend towards having fewer children will continue for the foreseeable future."

The current government, led by the left-of-centre Democratic Party of Japan, swept to office in August 2009 armed with ambitious spending plans designed to ease the financial burden on families.

To encourage spending and, it is hoped, more procreation, families have received monthly allowances of 13,000 yen per child since April 2010.

But the initiative is one of several DPJ policies to have fallen victim to Japan's perilous public finances and the cost – estimated at 19 trillion yen over five years – of rebuilding the region destroyed by the March earthquake and tsunami.

A doubling of the allowance planned for this year was never implemented, and the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, has agreed to review child allowance and other pledges in an attempt to win opposition support for extra disaster budgets and tax reforms.

The double-whammy of a low birth rate and bigger elderly population raises the question of how Japan – which already has the highest public debt in the industrialised world – will fund state pensions and meet health and social security costs.

There has been little serious discussion about relaxing immigration laws. "One possible solution would be to bring in a large number of foreigners to perform jobs in which there are labour shortages," says Ishii. "But Japan does not have a history of mass immigration, and the consensus is that it isn't a desirable way forward."

Until recently, politicians were similarly reluctant to discuss tax rises that could cost them votes. But faced with a huge post-disaster reconstruction bill and resistance to issuing new debt, Japan's leaders are finally talking about doubling the current consumption [sales] tax to 10%, partly to help fund welfare.

The problem is being compounded by impressive longevity statistics in Japan, where more than a fifth of the population is over 65.

Women can expect to live, on average, 86.4 years, and men for 79.6 years. The country has more than 40,000 centenarians, more than triple the number a decade ago. According to one projection, more than half a million Japanese will be over 100 by the middle of the century.

By contrast, the number of 20-year-olds is expected to fall rapidly over the next 30 years, sinking to just 780,000 by 2040.

Other countries in the region are experiencing similar demographic problems. South Korea is finding that the price of a successful economy driven by youthful dynamism is a shrinking population and a potential cash crunch. Over the past four decades, it has gone from having one of the highest birthrates among OECD countries to one of the lowest.

What follows is expected to mirror Japan's experience: labour shortages, higher public debt and soaring pension and health insurance costs.

In just seven years' time, 14% of South Korea's population of just under 50 million will be over 65, according to the Samsung Economic Research Institute. By the middle of the century, it will have the highest proportion of senior citizens in the world, the institute adds.

Justin McCurry

How the world population got to 7 billion - interactive

How the world population got to 7 billion - interactive:

From the neolithic revolution to the first rubber condom, here is the story of how human beings came to dominate earth, and reach 7 billion in number

China's one-child policy means many benefits for parents – if they follow the rules

China's one-child policy means many benefits for parents – if they follow the rules:

Rule-abiding parents get preferential hospital treatment and extra land allowances – but the rich can afford to flout the rules

Li Tianhao has just given birth to a baby boy blessed with his mother's nose, his father's mouth and an impressive ability to sleep through even the loudest disturbance.

It is a skill the newborn will be fortunate to maintain as he has been born in Henan, the most crowded province in the world's most populous nation as the human family edged closer to the 7 billion mark.

Yet he will probably grow up alone. Although Henan last year became the first province in China to register its 100 millionth resident – giving it a population bigger than any country in Europe – it also claims some of the greatest successes in taming demographic growth through its family planning policies.

This has not happened by accident. Henan is one of the most environmentally stressed areas of China with a quarter of the water and a fifth of the land per capita compared to the already low national average.

Senior family planners say this justifies rigid restrictions. "The large number of people has put very big pressure on all resources, especially water," said Liu Shaojie vice director of the Population Commission in Henan. "Over 30 years of effort, we have put in place a systematic procedure for controlling the population. That has eased the impact on the environment. We are doing glorious work."

Many environmentalists agree that population control is essential if humanity is to move on to a more sustainable track, but how can this be done? China has gone further than any nation in trying to answer this question over the past 30 years. But both the means and the ends remain the subject of fierce controversy.

When the one-child policy started in the 1970s, Liu says, women in Henan gave birth to an average of 5.8 children in their lifetimes. Their counterparts today have less than 1.7. The change, he said, means 30 million fewer births – equivalent to preventing one every 30 seconds for three decades. And that is just in Henan. Across all of China, the government claims there would be more than 300 million more children without the family planning policy.

This policy was initiated primarily for economic and education reasons, but it is increasingly cited as an environmental blessing. According to Liu, the population controls have kept sulphur dioxide emissions down by 17.6% and the main source of water pollution by 30.8%. Without it, he says, the average person in Henan would have a third less land and a quarter less forest. It has also, he claims, prevented between 137m and 200m tonnes of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

Such extrapolations are questionable. The current measures were not put in place to save the global environment, but to redress one of the biggest errors made by Mao Zedong. The founder of the People's Republic was advised in the 1950s that China's population was growing dangerously fast, but he urged women to have more babies because, as he put it, they were like aircraft carriers launching fighter planes. Today, Chinese officials and scholars privately describe this as Mao's greatest mistake. If he had put in place a two-child policy in the fifties, today's one-child policy would not be necessary.

The description of the system as a "one-child policy" is misleading. Most married women in China have the chance to bear two offspring, but the entitlement to breed beyond a solitary child is determined by a complex set of rules that vary from province to province and are often applied differently from village to village.

Broadly speaking, urban couples are allowed one child, rural families can try for a second if the first is a girl and women from ethnic minorities are permitted to give birth two or three times in their lifetime. But there are close to a dozen exceptions, including if a baby has disabilities or if the mother and father are both single children. Communist cadres and government officials can be fired for procreational transgressions because they are supposed to set an example. By contrast, Tibetans have the fewest restrictions.

Money is another key factor. The rich in Shanghai and Beijing can easily afford the penalties for a second or third child. The poor in Gansu and Yunnan, by contrast are at risk of having their meagre property confiscated if they fail to remain within birthing quotas.

For family planners like Liu, these injustices and disturbances are seen not as failures, but as aberrations that call for policy tweaks. Countless adjustments over the past 30 years have created a mind-bogglingly complex system that touches on everything from contraception and sterilisation to pensions and tax incentives. In Henan alone, Liu says the family planning policy employs 17,000 administrators and 22,000 nursing and technical staff. In addition, support organisations claim a combined membership of 9,600,000 volunteers, who engage in work as diverse as spreading propaganda to monitoring menstruation cycles- something that is still common in villages though rare in cities.

The state has gone to remarkable lengths to try to fill the gaps left by the missing children. Rule-abiding parents can get a monthly stipend, extra pension benefits when they are older, preferential hospital treatment, first choice for government jobs, extra land allowances and, in some case, free homes and a tonne of free water a month. Their children are even given bonus points in middle school entrance exams.

The system is incredibly expensive. The provincial government sets aside 40 yuan per person for the policy, which adds up to 4bn yuan (£400m) or about four percent of its budget, but this is just a small fraction of the total amount paid by central and village authorities.

Enforcement requires a huge and powerful bureaucracy. "Henan has much to teach the world in family planning, but it is a hard lesson to learn. Officials from Africa and India come to study what we are doing in China, but I'm not sure that they can apply it the same way," said Liu. "That's because they don't have a Communist party so it is difficult for them to take such strong steps."

In theory, the only penalties are hefty fines - in Henan's case, three times the annual net income of the couple who have violated the rules. But the system still relies on a high degree of intrusiveness and communal pressure to achieve targets.

Others argue that the impact of family planning is overblown and simply accelerated what would have happened anyway as a result of improvements in infant mortality, greater participation by women in the workforce and greater availability of contraception.

As China becomes richer and better educated, women in rich cities like Shanghai and Beijing are opting for few children just like their counterparts in wealthy nations. And with the nation's population is forecast to peak around 2030 many say the family planning policy had outlived its usefulness.

"Everybody agrees change is necessary. But the debate is about how to start and when", said Zheng Zhenzhen, a population specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Science.

"We debate the relationship between the size of the population and resource consumption. But it is not a fixed formula. It depends on how you utilise your resource. We waste and pollute. I think those problems – behaviour – are more important than the size of the population."

In Henan, however, the message that you can consume more if you breed less appears to be more persuasive than threats and penalties.

At the Hui hospital, the new father Li Yongli says he would rather have a first car than a second child. The shift towards fewer legs and more wheels in his family is part of a carefully worked out plan. The final goal is to ensure a better life and education for his son, who was of course, born exactly to schedule.

"It's all part of the program," said the beaming father.

• Additional reporting by Cecily Huang

Jonathan Watts

China's family planning policy enforced with heavy-handed tactics

China's family planning policy enforced with heavy-handed tactics:

Authoritarian measures such as sterilisation common – and some provinces reporting methods such as forced abortions

Family planning in Xiaotun village is deemed a success. Its population of 1,871 people increased by only 10 last year, or less than 0.5%.

The progress towards stabilisation is marked in red pen on a white board at the Xiaotun village family planning centre. It notes that 401 of the 1,871 residents are married women of child-bearing age. Of them, 156 have one child and 228 have two or more. A further column shows the measures that have been taken to prevent further births. A total of 228 are in this category. Only four are using contraception. The other 224 have been sterilised, a remarkably high proportion.

Hu Ruiling, director in charge of women, acknowledged a considerable degree of intrusiveness. "We check every women in the village each month," she says. "If we find someone is pregnant with a second child, we suggest abortion."

But reports from other provinces reveal the sinister methods used by officials to reach their family planning targets.

This month, a woman in Lijin, Shandong, died during a forced abortion on her seven-month foetus. It would have been Ma Jihong's third child. Relatives told the Guardian that 10 men turned up at Ma's home, forced her to go to the hospital and pressed her fingerprint to an authorisation form for the abortion. The operation went horribly wrong, but the relatives were not told for hours that she had died. "Her eyes were black and her nose was bloodied," said the relative. "We know we lost the mother. We have no idea what happened to the child."

Li Heping, a lawyer who has represented victims of similar cases, said this is certainly not the first death. "It's wrong to use violence to enforce the policy. It goes against human nature and tradition. But it happens everywhere in China."

Instead of punishing murderously zealous local officials, the authorities have tried to silence the lawyers, activists and individuals who try to complain. In one of the most egregious of modern China's injustices, the blind civil rights activist and lawyer Chen Guangcheng was imprisoned for three years after he tried to alert the health ministry to the abductions and forced abortions carried out by family planning officials in Linyi, Shandong province. He has been released but remains under extra-legal house detention. Lawyers and journalists who try to visit have been beaten up by thugs employed by the government.

The heavy-handed tactics and coercion by officials have turned one-time champions against the policy. Liang Zhongtang, of the Shanghai Academy of Social Science, was one of its earliest and most influential advocates, but he now thinks it is ineffectual and wrong.

Many rural people have ignored the rules. And Thailand, by contrast, has achieved a sharper drop in its fertility rate over the same period without such tough measures.

More important, though, are his ethical concerns. "I realised that what we did was not right. It infringes people's rights. Births are a matter than should be decided by individuals and families, not the government. We should halt the policy immediately."

• Additional reporting by Cecily Huang

Jonathan Watts

Why current population growth is costing us the Earth | Roger Martin

Why current population growth is costing us the Earth | Roger Martin:

Our population is rising while our ability to sustain life on Earth is shrinking – we must change before nature does it for us

The 7 Billion Day is a sobering reminder of our planet's predicament. We are increasing by 10,000 an hour. The median UN forecast is 9.3 billion by 2050, but the range varies by 2.5 billion – the total world population in 1950 – depending on how we work it out.

Every additional person needs food, water and energy, and produces more waste and pollution, so ratchets up our total impact on the planet, and ratchets down everyone else's share – the rich far more than the poor. By definition, total impact and consumption are worked out by measuring the average per person multiplied by the number of people. Thus all environmental (and many economic and social) problems are easier to solve with fewer people, and ultimately impossible with ever more.

Since we passed one billion in 1800, our rising numbers and consumption have already caused climate change, rising sea levels, expanding deserts and the "sixth extinction" of wildlife. Our growth has been largely funded by rapidly depleting natural capital (fossil fuels, minerals, groundwater, soil fertility, forests, fisheries and biodiversity) rather than sustainable natural income. Our global food supply is heavily dependent on cheap oil and water. Yet peak oil means rising prices, while irrigation is quarrying out vital aquifers in many countries.

Thus our population rises at the same time as the number of people Earth can sustain shrinks, while spreading industrialisation and western consumption patterns only accelerate this process.The poor should get richer; but high birth rates, compounded by resource depletion and environmental degradation actively hinder development.

The crunch point is that indefinite population growth is physically impossible on a finite planet – it will certainly stop at some point. Either sooner through fewer births by contraception and (non-coercive) population policy, the "humane" way – or later through more deaths by famine, disease, war, the "natural" way. As Maurice Strong, secretary general of the 1992 Earth Summit put it: "Either we reduce our numbers voluntarily, or nature will do it for us brutally."

Some people, notably George Monbiot, argue that western over-consumption is the sole culprit, so criticising expanding population means "blaming the victims". Of course he is right that our self-indulgent lifestyles are grossly inequitable, and must become much more modest – each additional Briton has the carbon footprint of 22 more Malawians, so the 10 million more UK people the ONS projects for 2033 would equate to 220 million more Malawians. But all poor people aspire to become richer; if they succeed, their numbers will matter immensely.

That is why Population Matters campaigns to stabilise the UK's as well as the global population, effecting a culture shift in favour of smaller families here, while massively increasing the priority and resources for family planning and women's empowerment programmes in developing countries, enabling the 215 million women with an unmet need for contraception to control their own fertility.

Perhaps we can feed 9.3 billion people in 39 years' time – I don't know. We're barely feeding seven billion now. But Norman Borlaug, accepting his Nobel peace prize in 1970 for his "green revolution", said: "I have only bought you a 40-year breathing space to stabilise your populations."

On a finite planet, the optimum population providing the best quality of life for all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare survival. The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean better lives.

Roger Martin is chair of the charity Population Matters

Roger Martin

Sunday, 4 September 2011

USSR 20 years on: winners and losers - interactive

USSR 20 years on: winners and losers - interactive:

Rapid economic growth and falling birth rates have defined the post-Soviet era, World Bank data suggests