Welcoming the Six Billionth Baby

Amit Sen Gupta

World population reached six billion on 12 October this year. It has 
tripled in our lifetime and is projected to increase by half as much again 
in the next century. The world, today, adds one million to its population 
every 110 hours. India alone grows by one million, every 23 days. We are 
living through a spectacular phenomenon in demographic history. Three 
quarters of the 1,000-fold increase in human numbers since agriculture 
emerged 10,000 years ago has occurred during this past century — 75 per 
cent of the absolute increase in one per cent of the time.

Wherever each individual can produce, on average, more than one reproducing 
offspring, the capacity for exponential population growth exists.

In nature, the tendency of animal populations to exponential growth is 
constrained by predation, by limited food supplies, by increased mortality 
due to infectious diseases, and by changes in reproductive behaviour that 
depend on density.

Population size of most animal populations is constrained by the 
carrying capacity of the environment.

Whereas, humans, since their hunter-gatherer origins, have been remarkably 
mobile — depleting one patch and moving on to another. The eventual 
domestication of food species increased food yields and hence local 
"carrying capacity".

The emergence of agriculture led to a substantial increase in fertility: 
from four or five births per completed reproductive lifetime, as reported 
for traditional hunter-gatherers, to five to seven births per reproductive 
lifetime.

As agrarian populations increased in size and density they altered, and 
often seriously degraded, local environments.

Dependence on essentially starchy foods reduced nutrient quality, causing 
endemic deficiency diseases, malnutrition and famines.

Enlarged settlements nurtured the emergence of new infectious diseases, 
thereby limiting the demographic impact of the increased fertility.

Thus pre-modern agriculture, while building the base for human 
civilisation, probably also led to the lowest health levels yet 
experienced. For example, in India around 1900, life expectancy was 20-25 
years, with half dying by age 10.

The environmental limits to demographic expansion in Europe lifted with the 
industrial and technological revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, 
supplemented by the gains from colonisation.

Declining mortality in Europe and fast population increase in America, 
brought sustained growth in world population from 1750.

Public health measures, famine control, and the modern availability of 
drugs and vaccines led to precipitous falls in mortality in much of the 
developing world, where life expectancy now averages 64 years.

But the gains have not been uniform: life expectancy in some sub-Saharan 
countries is only 40 years.

No other species, has exhibited the kind of sustained exponential growth in 
population, exhibited by humans over the last 200 years. But then, no other 
species to date, has had the ability to tailor the environment to sustain 
such a growth.

Annual rates of increase of population peaked at just over two per cent, in 
the late 1960s, and the absolute annual increases peaked at around 87 
million, in the late 1980s.

Since then it has fallen to around 81 million. The human population now 
seems to be in transition towards a stationary (non-increasing) population 
size, 70-90 per cent greater than today 's population.

Adverse consequences

However, a smooth transition to a stationary population size cannot be 
assumed. There are two main adverse outcomes to which excess human numbers 
might contribute: recurrent subsistence crises on a sub-national or 
national level, and planetary overload.

The second outcome would become manifest unevenly, with vulnerable local 
populations being first affected (by such things as depletion of freshwater 
supplies or climatic impairment of agricultural yields).

Local crises in subsistence occur when numbers increase beyond the carrying 
capacity of the local environment, especially the cropland and water needed 
for food production.

Undernutrition forces death rates up towards equilibrium with high 
fertility, and the disruption in human activity prevents economic 
development — thus creating a vicious cycle and leaving such populations 
demographically entrapped.

So far, developments in this direction have not generally been seen. The 
famines in recent decades have been less associated with a decline in food 
producing resources per person than with economic mismanagement, or with 
warfare.

A major consequence of the increasing scale of human productive endeavours 
is the advent of global environmental changes. Population size and the 
material intensity of the larger economies are now so great that, at the 
global level, they are disrupting some of the biosphere's life support 
systems.

We are changing the gaseous composition of the atmosphere; there is a net 
loss of productive soils on all continents; we have over-fished most ocean 
fisheries; we have severely depleted many great aquifers on which irrigated 
agriculture depends; and we are extinguishing at an unprecedented overall 
rate whole species and many local populations. These changes to Earth's 
basic life-supporting processes pose long-term, and somewhat unfamiliar, 
risks to human health. Meanwhile, the accompanying increases in local 
environmental pollutant levels, especially urban air pollution, exacerbate 
more familiar risks to health.

Pressure consumption patterns

Other things being equal, human disruption of the biosphere will be 
proportional to human numbers. But the disruptive impact of population 
increase on the biosphere (estimated at 1.8 per cent at present) is much 
smaller than the potential disruption due to rise in global consumption 
patterns.

An increase in mean global incomes (currently about US$5,000/person/year) 
to the current level of rich countries (currently about 
US$25,000/person/year) would multiply global productive activities five 
times. The debate on climate change illustrates the relative effects of 
population and consumption levels.

During the 20th century, the rate of fossil fuel emissions (the major cause 
for global warming, which can radically disrupt the earth's environment) of 
carbon dioxide increased 12-fold while population size increased by around 
3.5 fold.

It is estimated that population growth between 1985 and 2100 will 
contribute an estimated 35 per cent of the increase in carbon dioxide 
emissions; economic development will account for the remaining 65 per cent.

To limit the carbon dioxide build-up to a doubling of its pre-industrial 
concentration (from 275 ppm to 550 ppm) — a level that climatologists 
think may be tolerable — carbon dioxide emissions per person would need to 
be reduced by about two thirds from today's level.

Thus, the economic system and consumption patterns of the rich countries 
are putting a much larger pressure on the resources of the planet, than 
present rates of population increase.

Most of the environmental impact of the productive activities of these 
countries occurs beyond the boundaries of these countries.

It is, for example, estimated that more than 70 percent of the materials 
that flow through the Dutch economy never touch Dutch soil.

Overall, then, the larger potential threat is not from the increase in 
human numbers in itself but from increasing consumption patterns.

Is population the villain?

The complex relationships between economic development, population size, 
environmental conditions, and health have long stimulated discussion. The 
issue is not about just population increase.

Everybody agrees that population growth rates are slowing down, the world 
over. The issue really is whether this slowdown will be fast enough for the 
poorest countries in Africa and Asia.

Analysts — demographers, social scientists, economists, scientists — are 
divided in their response to this phenomenon. A section is not convinced 
that the present rate of population increase is a cause for alarm.

Although population has been increasing a little faster than globally 
averaged grain yields per person since the mid 1980s, this view expects 
that technical advance will allow food production rates to "catch up" with 
population growth rates.

This view also posits that education — particularly female education — 
combined with economic development will bring down growth rates to 
replacement level — i.e. where birth rate and death rate balance each 
other.

The second view is not confident of science's ability to double global 
grain production sustainably.

It is concerned that large parts of sub-Saharan Africa (where population is 
set to more than triple) and south Asia (set to almost double) may already 
be "demographically trapped" that is, without indefinite food aid they are 
committed to a future of starvation and slaughter.

This view, while advocating female education and empowerment, cannot see 
such advances, nor general economic development, reducing fertility fast 
enough.

There are further concerns that rapid population increase is leading us 
towards an environmental catastrophe.

Both sides are missing out on a fundamental point in this debate.

The first view, while correctly identifying "development as the best 
contraceptive", does not go far enough to identify the constraints to such 
development taking place at a fairly uniform rate all over the world.

The second view while correctly identifying the fact that development will 
continue to be uneven and hence unable to stabilise populations fast 
enough, does not question why the world has to learn to live with such a 
dispensation.

The critical issue really is that if the (underdeveloped) South is to 
restrict its population growth, the (developed) North, should restrict its 
resource consumption. Burgeoning consumption patterns of the North impinge 
on the resources of the globe.

Equally importantly, in order to sustain these consumption patterns, the 
North increases the exploitation of the resources of the South.

The South, therefore, is forced to expend more of its resources to 
subsidise its rich brethren in the North than it expends to provide its own 
people with basic necessities.

Over the last two decades economic disparities between the North and the 
South have increased. The slogan of globalisation has been utilised by the 
North to more effectively predate upon the resources of the South.

A secret 1948 US State Department document (recently released under the 50 
year rule) said:

We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its 
population ... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy 
and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern 
of relationships which will commit us to maintain this position of 
disparity without possible detriment to our ultimate security.

To do this we will have to dispense with sentimentality and day-dreaming, 
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate 
national objectives.

the luxury of altruism and world benefaction ... The day is not far off 
when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.  The less we 
are hampered by idealistic slogans the better.

Fifty years on, this continues to be the abiding philosophy that drives the 
richer nations of the planet.

Unless this is overturned, the future of the sixth billionth baby will be 
determined not by the fact that there are six billion individuals competing 
for the resources of the planet, but by whether the baby was born in a 
Manhattan penthouse or in a dilapidated tenement in Sub-Saharan Africa or 
South Asia.

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People's Democracy