THE baby boom seems to be turning to baby bust. Not just in the rich world but increasingly in poor countries too. Within 50 years, the world’s population could be in free fall. And the only way out could be for men to behave more like women.
To see the future in its starkest form, take a look at Italy, where Isabella, Clara and Bianca are less likely to be making babies than young women anywhere else in Europe. With splendid irony, the country that is home to the Catholic Church, noted for its opposition to artificial birth control, is notching up super-low fertility rates way below replacement levels. At just 1.2 children born to each Italian woman, the rate is little more than half the figure needed to prevent the population plummeting. It’s a similar picture, if a little less extreme, the world over.
A future decline in the world’s population sounds like a good thing. Certainly, it will reduce the pressures on global natural resources. But a world of falling population will be very different from the one we know now: a much older world, and perhaps a less innovative, more conservative one. It will be a world in which labour is in increasingly short supply and the richest countries compete for immigrants who can supply it, not turn them away.
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And the relationship between the sexes will become a fundamental political issue, as countries seek to revive their child-bearing resources. Indeed, to stave off the spectre of demographic decline, some countries may become willing to take ever more radical, even draconian measures, with major implications for the personal liberties of us all.
It’s quite a turnaround. Ever since the 1970s, forecasters have been scaring us with population figures which appear to wildly outstrip even the most optimistic projections for resources such as food, water and land, while triggering runaway global warming and an even more polluted and paved planet.
And so far, the figures have borne them out. During the 20th century, the world’s population increased almost fourfold, from 1.6 to 6 billion. The baby boom, which peaked in mid-century, has not yet ended. But in the background, fertility has been falling fast. In 1950, worldwide the average woman had five children. Today she has just 2.7, and the continued collapse of fertility is set to become the dominant demographic feature of the 21st century.
Demographers have assumed that during this century most of the world’s women would settle down in a conventional Western-style nuclear family with mother, father and two children. That would ensure a stable world population by 2100 of perhaps 10 billion. But nobody told women about the plan, and there is a growing notion that Italy is leading the way to a future of fertility rates far lower than replacement levels.
The rule of thumb is that “replacement” fertility requires 2.1 children per woman; the extra 0.1 compensates for girls who do not live long enough to have families. At 1.2 babies per woman, Italy is clearly falling a long way short. But it’s not alone. Its southern European neighbours, Spain and Greece, have similar fertility rates, as do the Czech Republic and former Soviet states such as Russia and Armenia. The amazing bottom line is that new UN population forecasts, to be finalised later this year, are expected to conclude that within two generations four out of five of the world’s women will be having two children or fewer.
So why is the world still oblivious to this coming demographic shift? It’s largely because the children of the greatest population explosion in the planet’s history are now of childbearing age. Even with their much-reduced fertility rates, they are bringing many more babies into the world than ever before. This, combined with rising life expectancy, is keeping Europe’s population stable, and boosting that of the world as a whole by around 80 million a year. But by the time the 20th-century baby boomers start to die off and the tide turns, it will be hard to halt a population crash. Almost whatever happens now, the world’s population is primed to start diminishing for probably the first time since the Black Death in the 14th century.
Kids in cities are a liability
The key questions are why women are choosing to have fewer offspring, and how far their increasing reluctance to take up motherhood will go. Most obviously, the declining death rate, particularly among children, due to better health and medical services, has meant people don’t feel they need to have so many children. Other factors have accelerated the process. Urbanisation is certainly one. On a farm, even young children are an asset, minding the animals and helping with the harvest. In cities it’s a different story: kids are more likely to be a liability – in purely economic terms, at least. When they are young, they need looking after full-time, and when they are older they need educating to get any sort of job.
On top of that, cultural changes have increasingly liberated women from the home and child-rearing. In poor countries with a traditional patriarchal society, the spread of TV has opened many women’s eyes to a whole new world, and modern birth control methods have allowed them to turn those aspirations into reality. “Getting married and having children are simply not as important as they used to be,” says Tim Dyson of the London School of Economics.
Today, more than 60 countries have fertility rates below replacement levels. None shows any sign of sustained recovery. The club now encompasses much of the Caribbean, Japan, Korea and China, the world’s most populous nation. This year Thailand, Sri Lanka and Iran are likely to join. Mindful of the “enormous implications” for the future of our species, the UN population division’s director Joseph Chamie called a conference of experts in New York in March this year to analyse the phenomenon. A succession of scientists from large countries that have helped drive global population growth in the past half-century told the conference that they expected their own national fertility rates to fall below replacement levels within 20 years. They included India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey.
No forced contraception
Few of these countries, bar China, have forced contraception on their populations. Rather the reverse. Opposition from the Catholic Church has ensured that Brazil has no state family planning programme. Even so, millions of its women have attended sterilisation clinics, and fertility has halved in 20 years to today’s 2.3.
The case of Iran is even more remarkable. In 1994, the mullahs ruling the country went to a UN population conference in Cairo and declared opposition to much of the international agenda for cutting birth rates. But back home, women were taking charge of their bodies and sending fertility rates crashing from 5.5 children per woman in 1988 to just 2.2 in 2000.
Prosperity is no longer a necessary passport to reducing national fertility. Bangladesh remains among the half-dozen poorest nations outside Africa. Its girls are among the least educated and marry younger than most. Yet they give birth to just 3.3 children, half the number their mothers had. In Vietnam, which is poorer still, women halved their fertility to 2.3 children in the decade to the mid-1990s.
Rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, with tough family planning policies or none, most countries tell the same story: women are voting with their wombs. Two major studies have recently failed to find any common factors uniting nations with fast-falling fertility, other than availability of affordable contraception.
Dyson is among the demographers who have a new theory for what is happening, “cultural diffusion”. Not having children has become a statement of modernity and emancipation, and women are unlikely to give up the new freedoms. They are also taking over from their brothers and husbands the role of shaping their societies. “Go to rural India,” says Dyson, “and you find that women are fed up with the men, who seem to be going nowhere. It is the women who are running the farms. It is the women who are getting jobs and taking charge. They don’t have time to have children any more.” With men no longer in charge, their usefulness to society and the old Indian preference for sons may diminish as a result, he says. That, too, will help reduce fertility as couples see daughters as well as sons as potential heads of a new generation.
Where is this all leading? Jack Caldwell of the Australian National University in Canberra, doyen of demographers, is among those convinced that “Italy is the future”. Its super-low fertility arises from female emancipation, or rather from its faltering progress, he says. Isabella and her friends are educated as well as or better than their suitors. They have prospects. The last thing they want is to be like their mothers, stuck at home rearing children.
French demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais of the National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris goes further. With poor state childcare provision, and most men unlikely to help in looking after their offspring, “the obstacles to childbearing in countries like Italy are enormous and the economic sacrifices made by mothers are viewed as unbearable”.
Caldwell’s colleague at the Australian National University, Peter McDonald, argues that the southern European phenomenon is a result of the lopsidedness of moves to gender equality. Women have got the freedoms that arise from better education and employment, but not in their relations with their men or in terms of state services for the family. Economic liberalism has clashed with social conservatism. Result: a childbirth strike.
Not all of Europe is quite like Italy, however. In Sweden, for instance, Astrid and her friends feel more able to have a family than Isabella’s crowd. They have an average of 1.6 children. That’s not enough to maintain their country’s population in the long term, but neither is it demographic meltdown. Indeed, most of northern Europe has maintained higher fertility rates than those around the Mediterranean, with Norway at 1.8 and Britain and Finland at 1.7.
Why is Astrid happier to make babies than Isabella? She is just as keen to pursue a career. The difference is that she has more chance of combining a career with motherhood. Her suitors, who are more likely to have set up home on their own before marriage, are better house-trained, and Nordic governments are better at helping couples juggle family and work. About half the jobs held by Swedish women are part-time, crèches are near-universal and paid parental leave lasts for a year. All this is unheard of in Italy, where only 12 per cent of employed women have part-time jobs, and in eastern Europe, where fertility rates have plunged since the collapse of communism wrecked state-funded support services for families.
So will the rest of the world follow northern or southern Europe? Caldwell thinks the signs are clear: “The Mediterranean patriarchal model is far more common in the world than the northern European model of more helpful husbands.” McDonald says we can already see this in eastern Asia, where conservative family values lie behind the ultra-low fertility rates from Shanghai to Tokyo. Even in Australia, Italian and Greek families are significantly smaller than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
One part of the world where fast-falling fertility remains extremely patchy is Africa, where the five- or six-child family is still the norm in many countries. But here another factor is keeping the lid on population growth: AIDS. The UN expects 15 million deaths from AIDS in the next five years, the great majority in Africa. Life expectancy in Botswana and Zimbabwe has plunged from 60 years to close to 40 years.
In some more economically advanced African countries, birth rates are falling at the same time as death rates are rising. In Kenya, the fertility rate has fallen from 8 to under 5 in two decades, and it could be below 3 within a decade. With AIDS killing off many young children, that could be below the level needed to replace the present population. Kenya could become the first African country with a falling population.
Industrialised countries are already complaining about the effects of falling fertility. An ageing population is putting pressure on social services and pensions. In the next few years they will start to see absolute falls in their populations. Japan expects its population to peak in 2006 and then fall by 14 per cent, or almost 20 million people, by 2050. Germany expects a similar drop. Italy and Hungary may lose 25 per cent, and Russia could lose a third by then.
If today’s low fertility rates continue, then as the current baby boomers die, things will get drastically worse. If each generation’s adults continue to produce not much more than half the number of children needed to replace them, McDonald calculates that the population of Italy is set to crash from 56 million now to just 8 million by 2100. Likewise Spain would lose 85 per cent of its population within the same time frame and Germany 83 per cent.
This year, Chamie and his UN colleagues have been redrawing population projections on the assumption that the world will move towards an average level of 1.85 children per woman. Much depends on how long this move takes, but according to one of his projections it would result in a world population peaking at about 7.5 billion around 2050. It would then begin to implode. By 2150 there would be 5.3 billion people on the planet. Assume lower future fertility levels and the result is an even more drastic die-off. If women settled for a Swedish-style fertility level of 1.6 children, we would be down to 3.2 billion by 2150 – only a fraction over half today’s population. Chamie has not yet dared calculate the effect of universal Italian-style fertility.
Of course, it may never happen. Some countries seem to have levelled out at above-replacement levels. Argentina and Uruguay, for example, have been stuck at between 2.5 and 3 children per woman for 50 years. Israel and Malaysia stalled at around 3 in the 1990s. Many African countries have not begun the demographic transition yet. And some Muslim states such as Afghanistan (6.9), Saudi Arabia (6.1) and Pakistan (5.5) have also bucked the trend.
Demographers also suspect that if the downward fertility trend continues for much longer, then deep collective instincts of survival could be unmasked. Politicians will grow fearful of the social consequences of declining populations such as the growing burden of supporting the elderly, and an increasing need to find immigrants to augment the labour force.
Such changes will happen in Europe first. “There seems little question that pro-natalist policies will become a central part of the political agenda in the near future,” says McDonald. The authoritarian approach would be to try to cut women out of the workforce and keep them at home, to ban abortions, and restrict access to family planning services. But that is unlikely to work, says Dyson. Women wouldn’t stand for it. Instead, he argues for a continuation of the “renegotiation” of gender roles under way in much of northern Europe. Paradoxically perhaps, the more feminist attitudes that have helped bring about the dramatic decline in family size in the past 50 years will need extending rather than dismantling if family sizes are to rise from the worst-case Italian model.
But the new agenda may be less about creating new freedoms for women and more about instilling new responsibilities in men and the state. As Dyson puts it, in most of the world today, fertility rates are plunging because women have decided they want to become more like men. Right now that leaves little room for babies. To change that, men must take the plunge and start to become more like women. The future of humanity could depend on it.
