> From 1965 to 2009, contraceptive usage has more than tripled (from 13% of married women in 1970 to 48% in 2009) and the fertility rate has more than halved (from 5.7 in 1966 to 2.4 in 2012)
> India's fertility rate has greatly decreased in recent years and is now distinctly below the global rate.
I'm serious. If you want to curtail the out-of-control growth rate, and consensually so, women need to be able to choose birth control; they need to not fear rape; they need to not be viewed as an economic liability (where e.g. parents with a son might stop there but parents with a daughter say "hey, we need another child so that someone cares for us in our old age").
The places with high birth rates will be the places where birth control is either hard to find or culturally discouraged.
To test this, I went to the CIA World Factbook and multiplied their population growth rates (which are sadly from 2002) against populations to find that the situation looks approximately like this:
Country Millions added/yr
India 15.79
China 6.45
Nigeria 4.34
Ethiopia 2.98
Pakistan 2.95
United States 2.82
Indonesia 2.58
Bangladesh 2.55
Brazil 2.26
Philippines 1.94
Congo, D.R. of 1.90
Egypt 1.61
Uganda 1.28
Mexico 1.25
Kenya 1.05
Iran 0.99
Vietnam 0.96
Turkey 0.96
Tanzania 0.85
Iraq 0.73
The net is 76.46, summing over all countries, so India is 21% of the problem, China is 8.4% of it. One nice thing about this metric is that both Bangladesh and China are reasonably high here -- Bangladesh of course is struggling with some of the highest population density in the world, while China has a low growth rate but their population is absolutely staggering. It's very hard to get them both to appear in a top 10 list of "where the problem is".
If past history is any indication, China will self-regulate its population by descending into civil war, so the major thing to focus on is India + Pakistan. However, if you could make a dent in the United States somehow, that could also help to reduce our population-deficit.
I’m amazed you haven’t heard of this before now. The entire West has had a fertility rate below replacement for decades and now even China has joined the party and India is going to be there really soon. The way Africa is developing they probably only have a few decades left. If we don’t find a way to turn this around then all of our golden years are going to spent desperately trying to prevent the global economy from collapsing.
It's working everywhere. India dropped below replacement fertility a couple of years ago. The only part of the world left with above replacement growth is sub-Saharan Africa, and even the very highest, like Niger, has seen substantial drops in fertility rates.
If anything we're a few decades away from a rising panic about increasing them again.
From Pakistan, talk of contraceptives is very taboo and early cousin marriage is the norm, our population crossed ~240 million acc to latest census this year, so it's mostly us driving the global population growth.
But it does mean India joins much of the rest of the world with sub-replacement fertility with just a few outliers.
The challenge now switches to how to move from sub-replacement to sustainable fertility.
Japan and South Korea are leaders in sub-replacement fertility with not that much success in finding a path towards sustainable population. Both I believe are still dropping.
This is the grand social engineering challenge of the next 20 to 40 years I figure.
"Asia" is pretty broad, but India was at 2.2 in 2020 and dropping pretty rapidly; as of earlier this spring it hit 2.0. Note that the Statista numbers are moving 5-year averages, so the "spot" number for India is lower than the number you see on that graph.
As an aside, India's birth rate has been dropping precipitously over the last few decades. In 1960 the birth rate was 5.9 per woman; today it's 2.4 and still falling. India's birth rate is now lower than America prior to 1970. At current trends, the birth rate in India will drop below the replacement rate within a decade.
The average fertility rate in India is 2.2 now I think. It is below 2 in Southern states and still relatively high in BIMARU states which are the biggest problems.
That fertility rates have been consistently dropping in line with recent models for a long time [1]. Global fertility rates are already below 2.4, with ~2.1 the replacement rate.
China is currently set to face a reversal somewhere from the middle of this decade to 1-2 decades away depending on who you believe. India is set to follow. Many smaller countries are also reversing around now, but those two for obvious reasons have a huge impact.
The last holdouts with high fertility are a handful of sub-Saharan states, with Niger by far the worst (Somalia second - the two are the only countries in the world left with fertility rates above 6), but even Niger is seeing fertility rates plummet as it's economic growth have sped up.
The estimates varies massively based on various scenarios. E.g. on a current trajectory, China will see its population halve by 2100. It's likely you'll see the Chinese government do a lot to prevent the decline from being that steep because it will be an economic nightmare to manage, and so we can't assume the trajectories will remain unchanged.
But nobody is actively trying to get much above-replacement fertility rates, so any political interference is likely to moderate delay the peak not prevent it.
The developing world. Lack of birth control + poverty + lower cost of raising children has our population exploding in all the places that haven't developed yet.
No, in Asia the population control efforts started back in the 1930s and 1940s. Japan’s birth rate has already dropped to replacement levels by the time the birth control pill became prevalent in the 60s and 70s.
> From 1965 to 2009, contraceptive usage has more than tripled (from 13% of married women in 1970 to 48% in 2009) and the fertility rate has more than halved (from 5.7 in 1966 to 2.4 in 2012)
> India's fertility rate has greatly decreased in recent years and is now distinctly below the global rate.
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