8 October 2007 Vol. 9 / No. 37
On September 27-28, the University of La Sabana, a Catholic University located in Bogota, Colombia, convened a conference on “Population, Life, and Development.” Steven Mosher told the assembly, which included senior government officials, that Colombia was not overpopulated.
Are There Too Many Colombians?
Like other Baby Boomers, I lived through the unprecedented doubling of the global population in the second half of the 20th century. Never before in human history had our numbers increased so far, so fast: from 3 billion in 1960 to 6 billion in 2000. But our numbers didn’t double because we suddenly started breeding like rabbits. They doubled because we stopped dying like flies. Fertility was falling throughout this period, from an average of 6 children per woman in 1960 to only 2.6 by 2002.[1]
On the fantasy island of overpopulation human numbers are always exploding, but a close look at the real world reveals a different reality. The unprecedented fall in fertility rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every corner of the globe, including Latin America. The latest forecasts by the United Nations show the number of people in the world the population of the world will continue to creep up until about the year 2040, peaking at around 7.6 billion people.[2] Then it will begin to shrink. Many nations, especially in Europe, are already in a death spiral, losing a significant number of people each year. Listen closely, and you will hear the muffled sound of populations crashing.
This is the real population crisis, and it has now reached Colombia.
Latins Still Loving–But Not Procreating
The image of the loving Latin mamacita surrounded by a passel of barefoot children remains scratched on the minds of Americans, even when it has largely vanished in the pueblos of Latin America itself. Government-enforced sterilization campaigns, along with simple modernity, have dramatically shrunk family size south of the border in recent years. When I speak to American audiences, they are invariably surprised to learn that the average young Latino family in many countries now numbers no more children than its American counterpart.
Everywhere in Latin America, countries are seeing their birthrates fall. Most Latin American countries are now rapidly approaching replacement rate fertility, if they are not already there, according to the UNPD. Women in Brazil, the largest South American country, currently average only 2.25 children. In Mexico, 2.2 The inhabitants of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile are even less fertile. This is not a picture of a continent where fertility is wildly out of control, and cannot be said to justify the continuing attention that the U.S.AID and UNFPA, along with other population control groups, are devoting to the region.
The developed world has dangerously low birth rates. The third world is following suit.
Is Colombia Overpopulated?
We cannot speak of Colombia, with a population of 41 million occupying an area twice the size of Texas, as being "overpopulated." First of all, demographers don’t even know what "overpopulation" means; there is no working definition. Second, Colombia’s population density is less than that of Texas. No reasonable person would call the vast open spaces of Texas "overpopulated."
When people say "overpopulated," they actually mean "underdeveloped." But Colombia’s economy is booming. The economic policies of fiscal restraint that have been in place for the last four years in Colombia seem to be succeeding. Population control programs, on the other hand, have been in place for 40 years, and have produced no appreciable economic benefits. To put it bluntly, you don’t eliminate poverty by attempting to eliminate the poor through population control.
One way to illustrate how quickly Colombia has reached replacement rate fertility is to look at what are called population pyramids. These are pyramidal-shaped graphs that show the numbers of people in each age group. Note that the numbers of children in the earliest age groups is not growing.
The above population pyramids show that the number of children being born in Colombia is not increasing over time.
With population growth leveling off, how long will it take for Colombia’s population to peak and then decline? This depends upon the number of children that the next generation of Colombians have, and so is difficult to predict.
The low variant of the U.N. Population Division predicts that Colombia’s population will peak at 53.5 million in 2035, and then decline.
The medium variant has population peaking about 15 years later, at approximately 62 million, before beginning its descent.
In neither case can it reasonably be argued that this is explosive, or disastrous, population growth. It is not. The disaster comes later, as the population ages and declines.
(Figures taken from World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision Population Database, accessed at http://esa.un.org/unpp/p2k0data.asp)
Regardless of the projection used, Colombian population peaks by 2050
Colombia’s Current Population Policy
Makes No Sense
The U.N. Population Division carried out a recent survey of government population policies. What it found, in the case of Colombia, was a seeming contradiction: The Colombian government in 2005 averred that its population size and growth are "satisfactory," but then goes on to complain that the current fertility rate is “too high,” and that its policy is to lower it by providing “Direct Support” for “access to contraceptive methods.”
I believe that this position is both contradictory and short-sighted. It is contradictory because populations grow only through births and immigration. Colombian women are averaging 2.22 children, while the country has lost millions of people to emigration to Spain and to neighboring countries over the past decades. If the current growth rate is “satisfactory,” as the government says it is, and if Colombians are leaving by the millions, as they are, then the fertility rate must remain at current levels in order to maintain continued growth. It is shortsighted because Colombia’s fertility rate is rapidly falling towards replacement, as have discussed.
What has happened in Colombia is happening elsewhere as well. Once people are educated, urbanized, and begin to enjoy a certain level of wealth, birthrates plummet. More and more couples live in urban conditions where children provide no economic benefits, but rather are, as the Chinese say, “goods on which one loses.” Education delays marriage and provides other options for women besides marriage and family. For materially minded couples in countries where the state provides old age benefits, the way to get ahead is to remain perpetually childless. Why give up a second income to bring a child into the world who will never, at least in material terms, repay your investment? Why provide for your future in the most fundamental way, by providing the next generation, if the government has pledged to keep you out of the poorhouse in your dotage anyway.
Add to these factors the raft of powerful population control programs that have been forced on Colombia since the sixties. The U.S. and other developed countries consciously set out to engineer a radical decline in Colombia’s fertility. As a weak nation, dependent on the U.S. and Europe for financial aid, military security, or access to markets, Colombian leaders were bullied or suborned into mandating anti-natal measures. Paid for by the West, these measures ranged from the free provision of contraceptives to enforced sterilization programs. Colombians have been subjected to clever marketing schemes, bait-and-switch health ploys, anti-family TV soap operas, and even blunt coercion in an effort to deprive them of the free exercise of their fertility.[3] Tremendous pressure has been put on the government over the years by such actors as the U.N. Population Division, IPPF, and my own US Agency for International Development.
The hundreds of millions of dollars that foreign agencies like USAID poured into Colombian birth control programs is but a tiny fraction of the $100 billion or so that has been spent on fertility reduction programs in the world at large. Imagine putting billions of dollars into programs to undo the Industrial and Information Revolutions, and you will understand the insanity of our current approach. We are making the old age tsunami, which will hit Colombia in a few years, even worse.
What Should Colombia Do?
Many countries still have foreign-funded programs in place that they find uncongenial and which compromise their future. Take sparsely populated Bolivia, for example, a country whose nine million inhabitants are spread out over an area the size of Texas. The democratically elected government regards both its fertility rate (4.0) and its rate of population growth (2 percent per annum) as “satisfactory”—both have been falling in recent years—and has specifically adopted a hands-off policy of “no intervention” in these matters.[4] Yet the population control establishment is not content to leave well enough alone. USAID and others pour tens of millions of dollars into reproductive health programs in that country which have the effect, not unintentional, of further reducing the birthrate.
Given that fertility levels are already close to replacement and appear likely to continue to fall, what should the government’s population policy be? First of all, it should discard its anachronistic view that fertility levels in Colombia are "too high"–they are not–and abandon its policy of attempting to convince couples to bear fewer children by promoting various methods of contraception.
Second, it should tell the U.N. Population Fund, and other population control agencies, that its population control programs are no longer welcome in Colombia.
Third, the government should instead seek to strengthen marriage and families by enacting family-friendly tax policies that recognize, through tax deductions, the contribution that parents make to the nation’s economy by raising children. Couples should be encouraged, as were our first parents, to be fruitful and multiply.
[1] U.S. Census Bureau, Global Population Profile 2002, p. 22.
[2] The UN Population Division’s medium variant projection, which assumes that the TFR in low fertility countries will rise to 1.85, is 9.1 billion. Only the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, is still discussing a total population of 15.1 billion by 2100, a number that is supported by no demographic projections that I know of.
[3] In the absence of a general theory of fertility change, it is impossible to offer any reliable, quantitative estimates of the precise impact of these diverse programs. But, as we will see in succeeding chapters, these programs have often been coercive in character and their impact on fertility necessarily dramatic. To put it another way, one doesn’t require a general theory of fertility change to interpret or explain the low fertility rate of a woman who has been forcibly sterilized.
[4] U.N. Population Division, World Population Policies, 2005, http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WPP2005/Publication_index.htm.
Steven Mosher is the President of PRI.
