
The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated - kawera
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21679781-fertility-rates-falling-more-slowly-anywhere-else-africa-faces-population
======
sevensor
As always, the article is a lot more nuanced than the headline. Stability,
liberal government, and prosperity increase demand for and access to
contraception. Eventually population stabilizes. The explosion from the
headline is simply a forecast for growth to slow later than expected. But the
message is that nobody really knows what's going to happen in Africa. News at
11.

~~~
tokenadult
Yes. As the article notes,

"The tendency for societies to have fewer children as they become richer
appears to be universal. It holds good across races, religions and
ethnicities. Thus the fertility rate is the same (2.3) in Azerbaijan (which is
largely Muslim), Mexico (largely Christian), Myanmar (largely Buddhist) and
Nepal (largely Hindu). By the same token, many countries that remain
relatively rural—Bangladesh, India and Vietnam, for example—have nonetheless
seen sharp falls in fertility, albeit not quite to the levels of heavily
urbanised ones, such as Brazil."

The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated in
earlier projections, although the article points out that Addis Ababa has a
fertility rate below two children per woman, just like the rates in rich
countries. The article includes other nuanced information about what might
help African people adjust to planning family sizes appropriate for the new
economic realities in their countries as those countries prosper. Further
economic development throughout the continent, which depends on improvements
in governance, is still crucial.

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joenot443
"The UN reckons that the share of Ethiopian women aged 15-49 who use some form
of contraception has risen from 6% in 2000 to 40% last year."

What a remarkable statistic. While 40% is still far from ideal, it does show
that the push for sexual education has been at least somewhat successful.

~~~
stevoski
Take UN statistics for a country like Ethiopia with a huge grain of salt. It
is mostly just guesswork and later revisions tend to be extreme.

It is not quite the UN's fault - I'm sure their raw data comes with caveats.
It is hard for anybody to get accurate data for a country with Ethiopian-style
government, administration, and infrastructure.

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theklub
Interesting this came up today. I was looking at maps of Greenland and then
became reminded of how most of the maps we normally look at are wrong.
(proportion-wise) Including the one in the article. Here is a Peter's map -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection)

My point is Africa is huge.

~~~
helb
Perhaps you've already seen it, but this is a nice comparison –
[http://kai.sub.blue/en/africa.html](http://kai.sub.blue/en/africa.html)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thanks for sharing this, I had never seen it. I'm astounded that you can fit
the entire US in Africa and still have room left over.

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AtlasLion
Relevant: "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E)

~~~
vlehto
From the article:

>The declining birth rate elsewhere has brought the world to the verge of what
Hans Rosling, a Swedish demographer, calls “peak child”

But then:

>The revision of population predictions for Africa partly reflects the fact
that HIV/AIDS has not proved quite as catastrophic for the continent as seemed
likely ten years ago.

------
lucio
The comments are better than the article itself.

From: NdiliMfumu Dec 14th, 03:10

Today's problems with overpopulation are directly related to Mankind's
evolution, as are many other modern discontents:

Prior to the modern era (especially, prior to the beginning of organized
agriculture in the Middle East, 12,000 years ago), Mankind was a predominantly
nomadic beast who wandered about, following natural herds and eating whatever
fruits, nuts and other small vegetables he could find, whenever he couldn't
fell another water buffalo or gazelle.

In this condition, food was generally scarce, disease common and rampant,
children frequently taken by the passing lion or wave of dysentery, and the
population constantly under threat. It made sense for us to evolve to be
continuously fecund, always seeking meat, salt and sweets (fruits), and to
avoid anything foul, bitter or unduly acidic. People tended to be lean and
stringy, eager to sock away a bit of fat or sodium for the next dry and
desperate week ahead.

We were not used to regular access to food, drink, salt or sugar, nor were we
quite used to seeing our numbers grow.

Ah, then, we learned settled agriculture and everything began to change.
Suddenly, there was a much more certain supply of food and drink. Sweets
became more commonplace. Salt was easier to come by. And there was ever so
much more opportunity for sex, now that the new girl just moved in next door.

Over the centuries after the onset of settled agriculture, human populations
grew rather steadily. From merely about 25,000 souls in 50,000 BCE, we grew to
around 100,000,000 souls around the year 1 CE. This is an intrinsic rate of
population growth of only 0.016 % per year. Hardly much, but enough to be very
successful as a species over a long period. Yet, it pales in comparison to the
modern rate of intrinsic population growth, which has often been above 2.5%
per year.

What has happened in the meantime? The Industrial Revolution enabled human
populations to intensively urbanize, elevating millions from abject poverty,
bringing in its train electricity, among other things, and the development of
artificial ammonia production. This was critical.

Together with artificial fertilizer and increasing agricultural mechanization,
farm productivity bounded and food became increasingly cheap in most parts of
the world during the last 200 years. At the same time, SANITARY practices
(especially, sewage system development and water purification projects)
deprived the River Styx of legions of children who would otherwise have died
of dysentery and early childhood respiratory illness. All this came about long
before modern medicine could penetrate into most parts of the world, and well
before antibiotics were developed and could play their role.

Between 1800 and 1950 (when penicillin began to become much more prevalent),
death rates plummeted and the intrinsic rate of population growth exploded. At
the same time, Mankind began to fall ill from diseases of excess: Excess salt
leading to hypertension, excess sugar and fat tending towards morbid obesity
and adult-onset diabetes, excess nicotine tending to heart attack, stroke and
cancer.

What we see, here, are very swift cultural, economic and political changes
sweeping over the Human Condition, much faster than can be accommodated by the
usual evolutionary processes, alone. The Human Genome simply cannot respond
quickly enough to doff the tendency to want more: More food, more sex, more
sugar, more fat, more stimulation. All those things which for millennia we
longed for, now, we have in great surfeit.

The tendency for wealthier, urbanized families to have fewer children and to
start later is a direct reflection of the population pressure experienced by
large numbers of people living in close quarters. We can help this along by
encouraging people to continue leaving the countryside: Raise taxes on idle
farmland and pastureland, on rural homes, and on train/bus rides terminating
in the hinterland !

Similarly, give families income support and training to relocate into cities.
Offer them apartments, jobs, healthcare and continuous education. Pay them to
forego having more children, and to educate the ones they have better. Offer
particularly young women money and apartments to stay single and childless
until they're at least 25 years old thereby cutting their fecundity in half.
And of course, make reproductive health services, including contraception and
abortion services, broadly available, safe and cheap for young women.

The current and continuing crisis of world-wide deleterious climate change is,
like overpopulation, a direct reflection of our evolutionary challenge and
current inadequacy. Were it not for the 7.32 BN of us already alive in such
vast numbers, there would be many more fish in the seas, much more oil in the
ground and much less carbon in the atmosphere. Time for a thorough-going and
purposeful change: Let’s not leave it to evolution, lest we go the way of the
dinosaurs !

Continuing fecundity in Africa is the direct result of the general lack of
urbanization, there, as compared with other continents, as well as cultural
values emphasizing fecundity and large families, and the general level of
poverty and illiteracy.

But this is rapidly changing, as the article points out.

As African nations lift themselves from poverty and progressively urbanize,
e.g., Nigeria, today, fecundity drops and the intrinsic rate of population
growth along with it. Nigerian women, especially those who live in Lagos and
other large cities (e.g., Abuja, Port Harcourt, Benin City, Ibadan, Kano,
Kaduna) are increasingly interested in getting an education, making money and
deferring marriage. Deferring the start of childrearing has a dramatic effect
on overall fecundity. Deferring a first pregnancy to the age of 25 cuts an
average woman's lifetime fecundity in half.

The major impediments to successful population control are largely culturally
determined resistance -- especially male chauvinism, heterosexism, paternalism
and religiously-driven moral imperatives to "be fruitful and multiply" (this,
largely an attempt on the part of these religions to secure and increase their
numbers by indoctrinating newborns in the faith).

But all these impediments tend to fall by the wayside, when young women and
families enter into urban areas: The anomie of the cities assists young people
in escaping the control of their parents and their clergy. "Traditional
values" tend to fall victim to "modernism". "Contraception" is no longer a
dirty word. Liberality and social mobility go hand in hand. Staid and stoic
traditionalist parents tend to shut up, when their well-educated daughters are
sending home then rent cheque from Lagos !

Africa's population will bound towards 2 billion or more by the end of the
21st century, but then it will stabilize. By that time, if we're lucky, the
Earth will host more than 12 BN souls, and we shall be straining the world's
resources to the limit.

If we have some real luck, hydrogen fusion power will replace fossil fuels and
nuclear fission, entirely. We will devote the new, cheap and nearly limitless
power to cleaning up the environment, sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere
and burying it in the deep seas, planting billions of trees, and building tall
and narrow cities, leaving vast tracts of open land to the animals, the
insects and the other flora and fauna. We shall swing from mile-high elevators
much like our distant ancestors swung through tropical forests.

And we shall begin to colonize the Moon, Mars and other regions of space, as
well.

Time for a thorough-going change!

------
killerpopiller
Parasites (round worms) in Africa boost fertility in women since they seem to
suppress imuno-reactions paving the way for sperms. (see Aaron Blackwell
University of California)

Probably one reason why their fertility is with 4,7 children/women (2015)
higher than 1,6 in EU.
[http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1724/umfrage/w...](http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1724/umfrage/weltweite-
fertilitaetsrate-nach-kontinenten/)

~~~
OneOneOneOne
If true that is a minor factor compared to differences in birth control use,
abortion rate and mother's age at first child.

------
VLM
Every time I read an ever more ridiculous "present continues into the future,
unchanged, unlimited" claiming ever more billions of Africans, I think to
myself a quote right out of this article “I couldn’t feed more children,”.

What I'm not sure is why. My guess is its financial propaganda such that if
you assume food, jobs, energy, and economic activity will magically fall from
heaven, then a company selling housewares would logically expect tripling the
population would result in triple revenue leading to more than triple profits.
That sounds like nice clickbait, and the bar rises every time clickbait is
published, so I'm not surprised the bar right now is 4 billion africans. I'm
sure to keep the financial press happy it'll be up to 8, maybe 10 billion by
the end of next year.

Reality of course, with declining energy supplies and declining raw material
and declining farmland, and increased lethality of weapons, is the 3rd world
is going to take a bigger hit than the rest of the planet, so there's likely
to be a modest population decline via the traditional unpleasant to think
about methods.

There's a tragedy of the commons effect where on a societal level if at the
gut level you know declines are coming, you're better off if everyone has
fewer kids, but on an individual level both you AND all your other kids are
better off if you have a larger family unit.

~~~
vlehto
I'd like to nitpick a little. I'm bit of history buff and weapons buff and as
a result military history buff.

"Lethality" of weapon could be defined in many ways. You could claim that
lethality has not increased significantly since Hellenic period. Depends
entirely form definition.

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acd
Hans Rosling Gapminder
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4vFAGBG5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4vFAGBG5k)

Babies per woman in Africa
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7P1UiAo09E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7P1UiAo09E)

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jokoon
Well yeah, that's what happens when you bring food aid without sexual
education.

~~~
dragonwriter
Its what happens when you bring any kind of improvement individual immediate
circumstances without strong social safety nets, because family, especially
immediate family, is the social safety net.

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theworstshill
I've got no issues with a population explosion over there. They are sovereign
people and noone should tell them what to do. As long as the west doesn't have
idiots like Angela Merkel at the helm, everybody can mind their own business.

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SRSposter
And what people will be blamed when the eventual famine comes?

