Everywhere, even in Africa, the World is Running out of Children

It is not hard to understand how most of us form the impression that overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. Turn on your television and you see asylum- seekers slipping across border fences, or throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East. We hear of child soldiers in Africa, the disappearing rainforests of Brazil and melting polar ice caps -- all caused by a human population that has nearly doubled in the past 40 years. We shake our heads when we read that, every year, the earth gains another 75 million human beings while losing approximately 27,000 plant or animal species.

Yet, beneath the surface of events, something else is happening. Though world population is still rising, it is doing so at barely half the rate of the late 1960s, and is now heading, many demographers believe, for absolute decline. The United Nations Population Division estimates that the number of infants and toddlers in the world (ages 0-4) will begin to contract within little more than ten years. The number of children under 15 will begin to decrease in little more than 20 years. This means, strange as it may sound, that all subsequent population growth will be due to increases in the numbers who survive to older ages. By 2050, there will be 35 million fewer children in the world than today, and 1.2 billion more people aged over 60.

Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria predict that total population will reach nine billion, mostly greying souls, by 2070 and then start to contract with compounding force. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically.

The new demographic currents in the world get stranger. During the second half of the 20th century, the median age in the UK increased by little more than three years, to 37.7. During the first half of the 21st century, according to UN forecasts, it will increase another 6.1 years. Yet this is nothing compared to the hyperageing occurring in Iran. There, before mid-century, the median age will increase by 20 years, according to UN projections, leaving more than half the population aged over 40.

Virtually anywhere one looks in the developing world -- Egypt, Iraq, Mexico -- the pattern is the same. Today, televised images from China show hordes of humanity crammed into tenements or camped out in railroad stations. Yet China's working-aged population will begin to shrink within ten years. By mid-century, 30 per cent of China's population will be aged over 60, and its total population could easily be less than it was in 1980. Even Africa is ageing at nearly double the rate of the US, and during the remainder of this century it will likely grow older than Europe is today.

Countries such as Italy and Japan at least got a chance to grow rich before they grew old. Most developing countries are growing old before they get rich.

Why is this happening? The primary reason is a dramatic fall in birth rates that began in western Europe in the 1930s and is now spreading to every corner of the globe. Since the start of the 1970s, while fertility rates were falling by 27 per cent in the industrialised countries, they were plummeting by 46 per cent in what the UN terms "less developed nations". The average woman in the world now bears just 2.69 children, down from more than 4.48 in 1970. That change is sufficient to cause rapid ageing of the population, particularly in regions where fertility has fallen most dramatically, such as the Middle East. If fertility rates continue to fall, as nearly all demographers believe they will, global population decline becomes almost inevitable.

It is easy to explain why children have become scarce in developed countries. In today's advanced economies, many people are not even done with school, much less established in a career, before their fertility (or their partner's) begins to decline. Then there is the rising cost of raising children. A recent survey found that parents in Britain spend on average