When population exploded a few centuries ago alongside the Industrial Revolution, it sparked a wildfire of nihilism and doomsaying in Europe. At the turn of the 19th century, English economist Thomas Malthus infamously warned that if humans kept breeding unabated, they would soon run out of food.
Speaking up against reproduction (or “passion between the sexes”, as Malthus put it romantically) must have been as unpopular back then as it is today, because Malthus first published those thoughts anonymously. But as technology revolutionised productivity, Malthus’ apocalyptic prophesy did not come to pass.
Fate is finally being tempted now. In the face of war, pandemic and biblical disasters driven by climate change, food shortages have begun to spread. As many as 828 million people — over a tenth of the world — go to bed hungry every night, according to the World Food Programme. Since 2019, those facing acute hunger have nearly tripled from 135 million to 345 million. A total of 49 million people in 49 countries are teetering on the edge of famine.
To be clear, these are unprecedented numbers, reflecting a crisis of historic proportions. In that sense, it’s probably more than a bit ironic that the global population hit 8 billion around the same time as a UN climate summit in Egypt and a G20 summit in Indonesia.
I don’t mean for this column to read like the return of Malthus. Global population growth is expected to slow in the coming years. It took the world 11 years to go from 7 billion to 8 billion, but it could take another 15 years to go to 9 billion, and then another 40 years to go to 10 billion.
But the wicked thing about population growth is how unequal it is. About 70 per cent of the growth from 7 billion to 8 billion came from low and lower-middle income countries, according to the UN. When the next billion is added, over 90 per cent of it is expected to come from those same countries.
There are, of course, two ways to look at this statistic. If more babies are born in poorer countries, that means that poorer countries will have more young people — and therefore, a younger workforce — in the years to come. That’s great if governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America can begin to create millions of jobs each year.
But the likelier reality is that poorer countries will only have ever more mouths to feed, with already scarce and fast-depleting resources. And in the absence of dramatic increases in skill and productivity, most poor countries will see heightened competition. Not the healthy kind between individuals, but the more fiendish kind between clans, tribes and ethnic, religious and linguistic groups.
Faced by a dearth of opportunities and a higher risk of conflict, more people will be forced to tease death by crossing the Mediterranean into Europe or the Darien Gap into North America. That challenge may well trigger even more narrow-minded populism in the West — and make it harder even for skilled labour to migrate there.
With the swift retreat of globalisation over the last few years and the spread of Covid-19, the world was already becoming steadily more unequal. The destinies of the younger generation were becoming increasingly determined by where they were born and to whom. A lopsided distribution in population growth is only certain to make that lottery all the more unfair.
But for Indians, there is yet some ‘good news’. India is finally expected to win a race against China next year – the one on population.