Tick, tick, boom: Pakistan’s population bomb
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The problem with doomsayers is that all too often, they turn out to be right. When Thomas Malthus first sounded the alarm about uncontrolled population growth back in 1789, the world’s population was a mere one billion souls. Fast forward about two centuries and the world’s population stood at around 3.5 billion, prompting biologist Paul Ehrlich to say: “We have a finite planet with finite resources. In such a system you can’t have infinite population growth.”
Today, the world’s population stands at over 7.6 billion, and while Malthus’s most dire predictions have not completely come true, the effects of this ballooning population are evident when it comes to the depletion of global resources and the added burden of pollution, all exacerbated by climate change and other factors. Simply put: we can’t go on multiplying like this while also maintaining some semblance of quality of life for the majority of this ballooning population.
There is some ‘good’ news though, and this is that while the world’s population is expected to reach 11 billion by 2100, the population growth rate at that time is expected to be almost flat (less and 0.1 percent annually) which means that we won’t be making new people at quite the same rate that we have been in the past. Why is that? For one thing, this has to do with the fact that fertility rates – defined as the number of children a woman gives birth to- are in decline globally, falling from an average of 4.5 children in 1950 to a little under 2.5 today.
By 2100, this is expected to fall to around 1.9 children per women. While this trend is most pronounced in industrial and post-industrial nations, just about every country in the world is reporting a sustained decline, and this is largely due to rising levels of education, and thus empowerment, in women and more women entering the workplace as well as having greater access to effective contraceptives, leading to women deferring pregnancies or choosing to have fewer children.
More alarming, our growth rate remains at 2 percent or higher, which outpaces any other Muslim country and while our fertility rate is also declining, it isn’t doing so nearly fast enough. If this continues, and there is no reason it won’t, we will be the world’s fifth most populous country by 2100 with a projected population of 403 million.
Zarrar Khuhro
In the West in particular, this is being compounded by a drastic fall in sperm counts for men, a trend that shows no signs of reversing. How drastic? According to an analysis by reproductive epidemiologist Shanna Swan, men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have seen their counts fall by more than 59 percent from 1973 to 2011 and if this continues, Swan warns that “in the future, it may not be possible for most people to reproduce in the old-fashioned way.”
The reasons are unclear, but most scientists point to environmental pollution, the overuse of chemicals in everyday items and particularly foodstuff as well as lifestyle changes.
Looking at this, it seems that the book ‘Children of Men’ was less a work of fiction and more a warning from the future. For the affected countries, this means that they will soon enough have an aging population on their hands without enough young people to care for them, and when you factor in medical and technological advancements that have and will continue to extend human lifespans, you cannot help but reach the conclusion that by 2100, most developed countries will have declining populations and an overabundance of senior citizens with all the economic and socio-political consequences that entails.
The prognosis for Pakistan, however, is quite different but no less alarming. Here we have seen a sixfold increase in population since independence and every year we add some 4 to 5 million people to the count, which is equivalent to the entire population of New Zealand.
More alarming, our growth rate remains at 2 percent or higher, which outpaces any other Muslim country and while our fertility rate is also declining, it isn’t doing so nearly fast enough. If this continues, and there is no reason it won’t, we will be the world’s fifth most populous country by 2100 with a projected population of 403 million.
Why is that a bad thing? Simply put, we will have far too many mouths to feed and when you factor in the shrinking of agricultural land in favor of housing societies (a trend that will escalate in the future) you can safely assume that food shortages and food inflation will be the norm.
Even by 2050, we will have a labor force that has doubled in size, from 100 million today to an estimated 200 million, meaning that to keep unemployment under a semblance of control, we will need to add 60 million more jobs by then. This then means that our GDP growth will have to be in the double digits just to keep pace and if our economy were to, by some miracle, gallop at the speed of Usain Bolt on a good day, we will – if we’re lucky — end up standing still. And yet, this is not even a discussion that we are having. We are not seeing that this ticking population bomb is perhaps the greatest existential threat we are facing.
Forget about solutions, we haven’t even acknowledged the problem.
*Zarrar Khuhro is a Pakistani journalist who has worked extensively in both the print and electronic media industry. He is currently hosting a talk show on Dawn News. Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
