Popcorn

UN Statistics: Population Decline Coming?

The latest population statistics from the United Nations (U.N.), released just prior to the U.N. Conference on Population and Development convened last September in Cairo, point to a declining world population beginning about the year 2045.1 Although completely contrary to the widely held view of both the public and the media, the possibility of a coming population decline was ignored almost everywhere.

Indeed, except for columnist/demographer Ben Wattenberg, the PRI staff at the Cairo Conference, and long-time overpopulation debunker Dr. Robert Sassone, the story of a declining world population was a non-event. Nevertheless, the “low variant” projection of the official U.N. population report predicts a peak world population of some 7.960 billion in 2045 — just 1.2 million more than the 2040 total — followed by a decline of more than 42 million to a 2050 population of 7.917 billion.2

While predicted world population growth figures have historically fallen between the low and medium variants — the high variant is always much too high — this time around some of the fertility rate assumptions underlying the medium variant’s projection appear rather dubious. For instance, the future total fertility rates (TFR)3 predicted for the countries of Europe seem overly generous considering the well-below replacement level fertility rates that most of the continent has experienced for the past two decades. Thus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine, all now experiencing population declines due to their low TFR’s,4 are nonetheless projected to return to replacement level fertility — the mythical 2.10 children per reproductive lifetime — in the years 2030 to 2045 according to the U.N. estimates.5

At present there is no trend apparent anywhere in Europe to indicate a return to replacement level fertility is in the cards. A recent U.S. government report on world population growth specifically noted that, “Fertility levels have fallen so low in some countries, mainly in Europe, that no return to ‘replacement level’ fertility is expected in the foreseeable future.”6

Accordingly, the U.N.’s low variant population projection appears to be the more reasonable. World, prepare for the age of negative population “growth,” a time when more graves will be dug yearly than babies being born!

Lester Brown Never Gives Up

After 25 years of predicting imminent famine and starvation for a world allegedly beset by an intrinsic food vs. population imbalance — predictions which subsequent events have always proven to be wrong — Worldwatch Institute president Lester Brown is at it again.

This time Brown leaps ahead 35 years to the year 2030, when, he claims, China’s grain needs will be so huge that worldwide starvation will result from China’s attempt to garner the world’s grain stocks.7 According to Brown, China’s “demand for grain [will] increase from 335 million [metric] tons in 1990 to 479 million in 2030” based on the country‘s projected population increase. But this 43% rise in grain consumption equates to an increase of more than 500 million Chinese, a number corresponding to the U.N.’s high variant projection (see above) which is invariably wrong. The low variant projection corresponds to a grain increase of some 12%; the medium about 27%.8 These projections would yield more modest grain demands of 375 MMT and 425 MMT in 2030. As usual, Brown took the worst-case possible statistic.

Brown also argues that China’s grain production in 2030 will “likely…fall by at least 20 percent [from 329 MMT to 263 MMT] between 1990 and 2030,” an extremely pessimistic and unwarranted assumption. According to Brown this will result in a grain shortfall of 216 MMT in 2030, a figure “exceed[ing] the world’s entire 1993 grain exports of 200 million tons.”

But the USDA reports that increases of more than 5% have already occurred from 1990 to 1993 in China’s wheat and corn production.9 Moreover, a 1993 study, “The World Food Outlook,” by Dennis Mitchell of the World Bank, forecasts (195) that China’s grain production in 2010 — 20 years earlier than Brown’s fateful year — will total more than 483 MMT, a number greater than the 479 MMT which Brown says China will require in 2030 but be unable to produce.

Recently, the USDA reported that China had amassed a grain stockpile of nearly 500 MMT, a figure almost twice that of all the rest of the world combined!10 Fred Crook, a noted USDA senior agricultural economist, has independently verified this figure, a carefully guarded state secret. China, the world’s number one producer of both wheat and rice, second largest corn producer, and fourth in soybean production, is entirely self-sufficient in food production and likely will remain so, no matter what foolishness Lester Brown alleges.