by Paul Morland
For the region as a whole, there are demographic grounds to be pessimistic, with a large youth wave passing through populations, bearing the potential for much instability ahead. Yet if this vast human wave can be channelled productively, it need not be destructive. Sharply falling fertility from Morocco to Iran suggests changing norms and expectations. Europe was a violent and war-torn continent when its age profile was similar to today’s Middle East. There is reason to hope that when the Middle East’s demography comes to resemble that of Europe–a prospect which seems remarkably closer now than it did a few decades ago–it might be as peaceful as Europe is today.
10
Nothing New Under the Sun?
Final Frontiers and Future Vistas
The truly extraordinary thing about the human tide is that it is global. At first it looked as if it might be just a phenomenon of the peoples of the British Isles and their offspring in North America and Australasia; then it seemed to be a purely European phenomenon. But the second half of the twentieth century proved that it tells us something about people the world over, almost regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion or continent, albeit local variations of timing have made a great difference. This is clear when we look at two vast, complex and utterly different regions–Latin America and south Asia. Each has a unique and distinct history, but shares a recent demographic pattern that is now thoroughly familiar.
Meanwhile in sub-Saharan Africa, we are presented with a final frontier in terms of demography: a last, vast region on the globe still in the middle of its demographic transition. The pace at which Africa continues through this transition will have huge implications for the future of the whole planet. It can be predicted with near certainty that this transition will occur, but its precise timing is unclear at this stage.
Nothing New Under the Sun: Latin America
Latin America can be divided into three very unequal subregions (unequal at least in terms of population size), namely South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Because each is culturally as well as geographically distinct, it is worth considering them separately, although we should not lose sight of their relative weights: in 2015, South America had more than 400 million people, Central America a little over 170 million and the Caribbean barely more than 40 million.
Moving irrepressibly from high tide to low tide, the pattern of fertility in the region is striking. In the post-war period all three subregions had the kind of fertility rates you would expect, of between five and seven children per woman. By 2017, all three had fertility rates of between two and two and a half. When the musical West Side Story received its premiere in 1957, featuring the line ‘Puerto Rica–you lovely island… always the hurricanes blowing, always the population growing’, the women of this US dependency in the Caribbean were bearing nearly five children each; today they are having one and a half. (In fact, even in the late 1950s the population was not growing, despite the high fertility rate, thanks to mass migration to the US mainland.)
The rise in life expectancy and fall of infant mortality are objectives which all societies will achieve if they can. It is a biological imperative and part of human nature to want to preserve one’s own life, to put off the moment of death and to do what one can to preserve the lives of one’s nearest and dearest, particularly one’s children. In this, if in not much more, humans are pretty uniform. Only species with these inbuilt drives can survive and thrive. Nature has, however, mediated the urge to procreate. People do not necessarily want children (although many do), but they do overwhelmingly want sex. Once humans have learnt to dissociate sex from childbearing, to enjoy the former without necessarily incurring the latter, fertility becomes a matter of choice. Yet although it may not be biologically driven, it is nevertheless the case that in most societies, once people have the ability to limit their number of children, they normally do, especially if they are assured high survival rates from those children they do have. In this, Latin America and the Caribbean are no exception. In the region as a whole, 128 children in a thousand did not reach their first birthdays in 1950: the latest data suggests that this has fallen steadily to below twenty per thousand, a figure that is still high–five or six times the best achieved in the most developed countries–but clearly an extraordinary transformation to be celebrated rather than taken for granted. Life expectancies across the region have risen from a mid-twentieth-century fifty to around seventy-five today.1
It would of course be a gross simplification to view the region as one which has simply moved from ‘backwardness’ to ‘modernity’ in the sixty years since the Second World War, although for many countries when looking at literacy rates or per capita incomes, for example, this would be true. Argentina was in many ways an advanced and modern country in the mid twentieth century, the product to a large extent of a sizeable wave of European emigration and investment over the preceding seventy years. The countries which in 1950 were most advanced have made the least progress, and those that were least advanced have made the most. Argentina’s life expectancy has only increased by around ten years since 1950, testimony to its high level then as well as to the political and economic challenges the country has faced since. (Still, at seventy-five, it is not bad, being just four years short of the United States.) Countries like Honduras and Guatemala, by contrast, with a low starting point, have made more dramatic progress, with life expectancy over the same period growing by around thirty years.2
Data is more readily available and uniform at the national level than at the local, and failing to dig beneath the former means some useful insights can be lost. Brazil is a noteworthy case, deserving of special comment, because it is by far the largest among the countries of the region, both geographically and in population terms, being home to around a third of the total population of Latin America and half the population of South America. It is also worth closer examination because it incorporates regions which are economically advanced and largely peopled by Europeans, and others, particularly the north-east, where the population is much more African in origin and where levels of development are much lower, yet it has a fertility rate that has been universally declining. Whereas in the early 1960s women in the north-east had a child and a half more than the national average (nearly seven and a half as against six), by the early 1990s they were having only one child more (three and a half versus two and a half).3 Thus the gap has narrowed within countries as well as between them.
Brazil’s steady urbanisation, like that of the rest of the region, has also been closely associated with falling fertility rates. As early as 1950 it was noted that urban areas such as Rio had a fertility rate one-quarter below the national average.4 As the country became more urban, so urban (i.e. lower) fertility rates became more common, as in other parts of the world: this trend was as true of Germany under the Kaisers as it was of China under Mao. By the start of the twenty-first century, Brazil was already three-quarters urban,5 a pattern that is typical not only of the region (it is almost inevitable, of course, given its regional preponderance) but also of countries around the world. Its demographic transition has occurred along with economic development, and while fertility fell sharply so life expectancy lengthened well before the arrival of high levels of prosperity.
The immediate cause of the fall in fertility in Brazil appears to be the usual mix of increased use of contraceptives and abortion (and perhaps increasingly disrupted marital patterns), although one much discussed social factor has been increased access to mass media and in particular to the soap opera, presenting and popularising a vision of modernity which features smaller families.6 Television lowers fertility rates not because ‘people have something else to do in the evenings’–a decline in sexual activity, even if it is occurring, need not meaningfully reduce the fertility rate; very little sex, if well timed, is required for a woman to fall pregnant six or seven times in her life–but because television in the right circumstances can offer a vision of a different sort of life, and this plays a role in shaping aspir
ations as effectively as does education. The impact of television on fertility has less to do with sex than with aspiration, and the link is not just the result of anecdote; research in Brazil has shown that, particularly among lower socio-economic groups, access to TV soap operas has a significant impact on fertility rates.7 In the past, significant material and educational progress had to be made before fertility rates were reduced. More recently it has become easier and cheaper to achieve. Of course, it is far better to educate a girl and give excellent work opportunities to a woman, and this will inevitably lower her fertility rate at least at the aggregate level (allowing for the fact that there are always exceptions). If, however, the objective is simply to lower fertility, it appears this can be done much more cheaply by providing contraceptives and access to TV shows portraying smaller families in a positive light. Educated women are unlikely to want six or more children, but the same is true of women looking to buy cars and fridges even if they do not have an education. As a result, countries from Thailand to Brazil, which are still relatively poor, are seeing their fertility rates falling below replacement level. This whirlwind has been picking up speed, overtaking the wave of economic development, with the result that some relatively poor or middle-income countries are coming to have fertility rates more usually associated with the wealthy developed world.
Faster into and out of the whirlwind was Cuba. Because of its early adoption of low fertility, Cuban women were having fewer than four children before the revolution, and although with the arrival of the Castro government in 1959 there was a surge, perhaps related to a clamping down by the socialist regime on abortion, this was later reversed. By the late 1970s the fertility rate had reached replacement level, and today it is a little above one and a half children per woman, almost as low as some of the lowest in Europe and east Asia. The low starting point can be attributed to the island’s higher level of economic development compared with many nearby countries, and to a population more largely of European extraction than many other countries in the region. (The European ethnic composition of the populations of Argentina and Uruguay is also an important consideration in these countries too, as they also had relatively low fertility in the middle of the twentieth century.) The Castro regime not only reversed its abortion policies but, from the mid 1970s, made contraception increasingly available.8 The regime’s fairly inconsistent approach to abortion in particular is reminiscent of both the USSR and China, where an initial socialist cornucopian outlook–proclaiming in line with Marx that only capitalism consigned expanding populations to economic misery–later gave way to a more accepting attitude. This may be driven by rising belief in a woman’s right to choose or concern for rising population and a preference for a cheap form of contraception. That women in Cuba and Germany should have almost the same fertility rate currently is astonishing, underlining the fact that people in poor countries no longer necessarily have large families.
Given rising longevity and high but then falling fertility rates, it was to be expected that the region would undergo a population explosion which is now diminishing, and this is exactly what has happened. Overall since 1950, Latin America and the Caribbean have seen their populations nearly quadruple from over 150 million to about 600 million. Annual growth rates have fallen from almost 3% in the 1960s to barely 1% today. That is approximately the difference between doubling every twenty-five years and doubling every seventy years. Some Latin American countries have seen faster growth than others, predictably those where fertility came down more slowly and life expectancy grew more strongly. Guatemala is a case in point: since 1950, its population has grown more than fivefold. Yet here too the slowing trends are clear: its fertility rate has fallen from seven to three children per woman (still high by the standards of the region) and its annual population growth rate has fallen from 3% to 2% over the past half-century.9 The median age of the region has moved from the teens to nearly thirty.
Mexico has in many ways been typical of the region, but its proximity to the United States has meant that the impact of its demography has been more noticed and commented on than most, as we saw earlier in Chapter 6. Mexican women were bearing nearly seven children each in the early 1970s, when the impression of the ‘perennially fertile’ Hispanic was born. (This was a long way from the position 120 years earlier when the Americans had annexed half of Mexico with almost no people in it and in which some had thought the Mexicans would evaporate before the Yankee hordes, just as the native Americans had done.10) Instead of being a people to be disregarded with an arrogant wave of the hand, Mexicans had grown to become a people to fear, above all because of their burgeoning numbers. It was of course not the case that Mexican women were having more children than before, but that more of them were surviving and life expectancies were rising, and as a result their numbers were increasing dramatically just as had those of the Americans before them.
The mass arrival of Mexicans into the US was typical of what happens when one neighbour is poor and young and the other is rich and relatively old. The young go in search of economic opportunity and to some extent are drawn in by the old needing additional hands in factories or farms, gardens or care homes for the elderly. Yet the great age of Mexican immigration to the US may have come to an end. Since around 2012 more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving,11 and this has to do with improving prospects in Mexico. As one returnee puts it:
Mexico is up and coming and I see a better future for my daughter in Mexico. She wants to study medicine and being able to go to school in Mexico might be beneficial cost-wise. If… she decides she wants to live in Mexico, it will be her choice.12
The improving standard of living in Mexico is linked to its altered demography. Mexico is enjoying the demographic dividend which often comes when a fertility rate drops. Regardless of the economy, the number of young Mexicans has stopped growing, and so the need for Donald Trump’s wall, at least insofar as it is designed to prevent Mexicans coming to the United States, is highly questionable.
Demography in South Asia
South Asia–the Indian subcontinent (for our purposes including not only India, Pakistan and Bangladesh but also Afghanistan)–is home to 1.75 billion people, close to a quarter of all humanity and nearly three times the population of South America, Central America and the Caribbean combined. Its population as well as its geography is dominated far more by one country, India, than the Latin region is dominated by Brazil. India’s population is around 1.33 billion and is projected to overtake China’s as the world’s largest at some time in the 2020s. Some say that it already has.13 (It should not come as a surprise that there is some uncertainty in counting such large numbers of people in countries which have until recently been poor. The consensus view, however, is that India will not overtake China as the most populous country on earth until 2027.14)
The tremendous if now slowing rise in the populations of the countries of South Asia since independence began later than in many other parts of the world. From 1891 to 1921 the population of British India grew at barely a fifth of 1% per annum.15 In the second decade of the twentieth century its population fell.16 Famines were still demographically significant up to the end of British rule; by the end of this period, however, population growth was established, since when it has nearly quadrupled.
A significant distinction between the south Asia region and Latin America is its religious diversity, which is relevant in terms of demography. Whereas Latin America as a whole is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic–or at least has a strong Roman Catholic heritage even if evangelical Protestants are today making major inroads into countries like Brazil and Guatemala–south Asia has more religious variety. India, around 80% Hindu, has a large and growing Muslim population and other minorities such as Sikhs. Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh are overwhelmingly Muslim, while Sri Lanka is predominantly Buddhist. This matters where religion and fertility tend to be linked.17
Religious differences explain much of the region’s demographic change. Imm
ediately after independence in 1947 (1948 in the case of Sri Lanka), the fertility rate of Muslim Afghanistan was one and a half children higher than India’s, and Pakistan was half a child higher. Since then, India has experienced a steady fall in fertility, from nearly six to barely two and a half children per woman. Sri Lanka, considered in late imperial times to be a ‘model colony’ and more economically advanced than the rest of the subcontinent, experienced an earlier fertility drop and has been at below two and a half for most of the last quarter of a century. It is worth noting that while Sri Lanka was one of the first developing countries to experience the demographic transition, its fertility rate has stabilised at around replacement level, unlike many countries in the developed world, which have had fertility rates that undershot replacement and then continued to fall.Countries like Sri Lanka prove that once replacement level is reached, it need not then be undershot, even if it often is. This could become an important precedent, because if the world is not ultimately to fall into large-scale population decline, other countries will need to follow the example of reaching and then hovering at replacement fertility levels rather than plunging below them. For all its other problems, Sri Lanka has become a model of demography if the ideal is a steady-state; its fertility rate has been hovering a little over two for the best part of thirty years, making it in demographic terms the equivalent to the economists’ ‘Goldilocks’ scenario: not too hot and not too cold, not too fast and not too slow.
Each of the three Muslim countries in south Asia has experienced a different fate. Bangladesh, with much heralded woman-centric policies, has brought its fertility rate down since independence from Pakistan in the early 1970s from nearly seven children per woman to fewer than two and a half. It can therefore be held out as a strikingly successful example of a Muslim country which has brought down its fertility rate. This has been achieved not by accident but by the provision of family planning clinics and often family planning counsellors–invariably women–who travel from village to village. Along with the reduction in fertility, Bangladesh has managed to pull itself up from the direst level of poverty and to bring infant mortality down from over 10% to around 3% in just thirty years. In the long run, its population will stabilise, but not before it reaches 200 million in the middle of the current century.