GLOBAL DEMOGRAPHY
FINALS (LESSON 1)-CONTEMPORARY WORLD
METALANGUAGE
1 Demography
2 Demographers
3 Urban Families
4 Rural Families
5 Urbanization
6 Industrialization
7 Population Bomb
8 Malthusianism
9 Neo-Malthusianism
10 Nightmarish
11 Reproductive Health (Birth
Control)
12 Baby Boom Generation
(Boomers)
13 Green Revolution
14 Feminism
15 Food Security
MEANING / DEFINITION
A discipline that integrate various social scientific
data to know the growth of population and its
different effects.
They are the one who study the flow of population
and the effects of its immense change.
They desire just one or two progenies.
They believe that the more children the better it will
be for the farms or the small by-the-street corner
enterprises.
It is the process of turning the rural area to an urban
area by integrating industries and residences.
It is the development brought about by urbanization
which is usually pertains to buildings and machinery.
A book written by an American biologist Paul R.
Ehrlich and his wife, Anne.
A belief that population growth will inevitably exhaust
world food supply by the middle of the 19th century.
Advocates for the use of contraception and other
population control method to reduce population.
It is an explosion of people which is a potentially
disastrous environmental, social, and industrial
threat to the world.
An advocacy of Neo-malthusianism which focus on
reducing population by means of birth controls.
They are those who are born between 1965 and
1990.
They have created high yielding crops which
eventually disprove the Malthusian theory.
A women movement pursuing the rights of women
and equality in the society.
It is a securement of food sustainably as the
population grow.
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(C) Essential Knowledge

When couples are asked why they have children, their answers are almost always
about their feelings. For most, having a child is the symbol of a successful union; it also
ensures that the family will have a successor generation that will continue its name. The
kinship is preserved, and the family’s story continues.

A few, however, worry about how much strain a child can bring to the households as
he/she “competes” for the parents’ attention, and in reverse, how much energy the family
needs to shower its love to an additional member. Viewed from above, however, having or
not having children is mainly driven by economics. Behind the laughter or the tears lies the
question. Will the child be an economic asset or a burden to the family?
Rural communities often welcome an extra hand to help in crop cultivation,
particularly during the planting and harvesting seasons. The poorer districts of urban centers
also tend to have families with more children because the success of their “small family
business” depends on how many of their members can be hawking their wares on the
streets. Hence, the more children the better it will be for the farms or the small by-the-
street corner enterprises.
Urbanized, educated, and professional families with two incomes, however, desire
just one or two progenies. With each partner tied down, or committed to his/her respective
professions, neither has the time to devote to having a kid, much more to savings plans.
They set aside significant parts of their incomes for their retirement, health care, and the
future education of their child/children.
Rural families view multiple children and large kinship networks as critical
investments. Children, for example, can take over the agricultural work. Their houses can
also become the “retirement homes” of their parents, who will then proceed to take care of
their grandchildren. Urban families, however, may not have the same kinship network
anymore because couples live on their own, or because they move out of the farmlands.
Thus, it is usually the basic family unit that is left to deal with life’s challenges on its own.
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These differing versions of family life determine the economic and social policies that
countries craft regarding their respective populations. Countries in the “less developed
regions of the world” that rely on agriculture tend to maintain high levels of population
growth.
The 1980 United Nations report on urban and rural population growth states that
“these areas contained 85 percent of the world rural population in 1975 and are projected
to contain 90 percent by the end of the 20th century.

Since then, global agricultural population has declined. In 2011, it accounted for over
37 percent of the total world population, compared to the statistics in 1980 in which rural
and urban population percentages were more or less the same.
The blog site “Nourishing the Planet,” however, noted that even as “the agricultural
population shrunk as a share of total population between 1980 and 2011, it grew
numerically from 2.2 billion to 2.6 billion people during this period.”
Urban populations have growth, but not necessarily, because families are having
more children. It is rather the combination of the natural outcome of significant migration
to the cities by people seeking work in the “more modern” sectors of society.
This movement of people is especially manifest ion the developing countries where
industries and businesses in the cities are attracting people from the rural areas. This trend
has been noticeable since the 1950s, with the pace accelerating in the next half-a-century.
By the start of the 21 st century, the world had become “44 percent urban, while the
corresponding figures for developed countries are 52 percent to 75 percent.”
International migration also plays a part. Today, 191 million people live in countries
other than their own, and the United Nations projects that over 2.2 million will more from
the developing world to the First World countries.
Countries welcome immigrants as they offset the debilitating effects of an aging
population, but they are also perceived as threats to the job market because they compete
against citizen for jobs and often have the edge because they are open to receiving lower
wages. Voters’ pressure has often constrained their governments to institute stricter
immigration policies.

The “Perils” of Overpopulation

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Development planners see urbanization and industrialization as indicators of a
developing society, but disagree on the rule of population growth or decline in
modernization. This lengthy discussion brings back ideas of British scholar.
Thomas Malthus who warned in his 1798 “An Essay on the Principle of Population”
that population growth will inevitably exhaust world food supply by the middle of the 19 th
century.

Malthus’ prediction was off base, but it was revived in the late 1960s when American
biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, wrote The Population Bomb, which argued that
overpopulation in the 1970s and the 1980s will bring about global environmental disasters
that would, in turn, lead to food shortage and mass starvation.
They proposed that countries like the United Stated take the lead in the promotion
of global population control in order to reduce the growth rate to zero.
Their recommendations ranged from the bizarre (chemical castration) to the policy-
oriented (taxing an additional child and luxury taxes on child-related products) to monetary
incentives (paying off men who would agree to be sterilized after two children) to
institution- building (a powerful Department of Population and Environment).
There was some reason for this fear to persist. The rate of global population increase
was at its highest between 1955 and 1975 when nations were finally able to return to
normalcy after the devastations wrought by World War II. The growth rate rose from 1.8
percent per year from 1955 to 1975, peaking at 2.06 percent annual growth rate between
1965 and 1970.
By limiting the population, vital resources could be used for economic progress and
not be “diverted” and “wasted” to feeding more mouths. This argument became the basis
for government “population control” programs worldwide. In the mid-20 th century, the
Philippines, China, and India sought to lower birth rates on the belief that unless controlled,
the free expansion of family members would lead to a crisis in resources, which is turn may
result in widespread poverty, mass hunger, and political instability.
As early as 1958, the American policy journal, Foreign Affairs, had already advocated
“contraception and sterilization” as the practical solutions to global economic, social, and
political problems. While there have been criticisms that challenged this argument, it
persists even to this very day.
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In May 2009, a group of American billionaires warned of how a “nightmarish”
explosion of people was “a potentially disastrous environmental, social, and industrial
threat” to the world.
This worry is likewise at the core of the economist argument for the promotion of
reproductive health. Advocates population control contend for universal access to

reproductive technologies (such as condoms, the pill, abortion, and vasectomy) and, more
importantly, giving women the right to choose whether to have children or not.
They see these tools as crucial to their nation’s development. Thus, in Puerto Rico,
reproductive health supporters regard their work as the task of transforming their “poor
country” into a “modern nation.”
Finally, politics determine these “birth control” programs. Developed countries
justify their support for population control in developing countries by depicting the latter as
conservative societies. For instance, population experts blamed the “irresponsible
fecundity” of Egyptians for that nation’s run-on population growth, and the Iranian
peasant’s “natural” libidinal tendencies for the same rise in population.
From 1920 onwards, the Indian government “marked lower castes, working poor,
and Muslims as hypersexual and hyper-fecund and hence a drain on national resources.
These policy formulations lead to extreme policies like the forced sterilization of twenty
million “violators” of the Chinese government’s one-child policy. Vietnam and Mexico also
conducted coercive mass sterilization.
It’s the Economy, Not the Babies!
The use of population control to prevent economic crisis has its critics. For example,
Betsy Hartman disagrees with the advocates of Neo-Malthusian theory and accused
governments of using population control as a “substitute for social justice and much-needed
reforms – such land distribution, employment creation provision of mass education and
health care, and emancipation.
Others pointed out that the population did grow fast in many countries in the 1960s,
and this growth “aided economic development by spurring technological and institutional
innovation and increasing the supply of human ingenuity. They acknowledged the shift in
population from the rural to the urban areas (52percent to 75 percent in the developing
world since the 1950s).
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They likewise noted that while these “megacities” are now clusters in which income
disparities along with “transportation, housing, air pollution and, waste management” are
major problems, they also have become, and continue to be, “centers of economic growth
and activity.”

The median of 29.4 years for females and 30.9 for male in the cities means a young
working population. With this median age, states are assured that they have a robust
military force. According to two population experts”
“As a country’s baby-boom generation gets older, for a time it constitutes a large
cohort group of working-age individuals and, later a large cohort of elderly people…In all
circumstances, there are reasons to think that this very dynamic age structure will have
economic consequences. A historically high proportion of working -age individuals in a
population means that, potentially, there are more workers per dependent than previously.
Production can therefore increase relative to consumption, and GDP capita can receive a
boost.”
The productive capacities of this generation are especially high in regions like East
Asia as “Asia’s remarkable growth in the past half century coincide closely with demographic
change in the region. As infant mortality fell from 181 to 34 per 1,000 births between 1950
and 2000, fertility fell from six to two children per woman. The lag between falls in mortality
and fertility created a baby-boom generation: between 1965 and 1990, the region’s
working- age population grew nearly four times faster than the dependent population.
Several studies have estimated that this demographic shift was responsible for one-third of
East Asia’s economic growth during the period (a welcome demographic dividend).”
Population growth has, in fact, spurred “technological and institutional innovation”
and increased “the supply of human ingenuity.” Advances in agricultural production have
shown that the Malthusian nightmare can be prevented. The “Green Revolution” created
high-yielding varieties of rice and other cereals and, along with the development of new
methods of cultivation, increased yields globally, but more particularly in the developing
world.
The global famine that neo-Malthusians predicted did not happen. Instead, between
1950 and 1984, global grain production increased by over 250 percent, allowing agriculture
to keep pace with population growth, thereby keeping global famine under control.
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Lately, a middle ground emerged between these two extremes. Scholars and
policymakers agree with the neo-Malthusians but suggest that if governments pursue
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population control programs, they must include “more inclusive growth” and “greener
economic growth.”
Women and Reproductive Rights
The character in the middle pf these debates–women–is often the subject of these
population measures. Reproductive rights supporters argue that if population control and
economic development were to reach their goals, women must have control over whether
they will have children or not and when they will have their progenies, if any. By giving
women this power, they will be able to pursue their vocations–be they economic, social, or
political–and contribute to economic growth.
This serial correlation between fertility, family, and fortune has motivated countries
with growing economies to introduce or strengthen their reproductive health laws, including
abortion. High-income First World nations and fast-developing countries were able to
sustain growth in part because women were given the power of choice and easy access to
reproductive technologies. In North America and Europe, 73 percent of governments allow
abortion upon a mother’s request.
Moreover, the more educated a woman is, the better are her prospects of improving
her economic position. Women can spend most of the time pursuing either their higher
education or their careers, instead of forcibly reducing this time to take care of their children.
Most countries implement reproductive health laws because they worry about the
health of the mother. In 1960, Bolivia’s average total fertility rate (TFR) was 6.7 children. In
1978, the Bolivian government put into effect a family planning programs that included the
legalization of abortion (after noticing a spike in unsafe abortion and maternal deaths). By
1985, the TFR rate went down to 5.13 and further declined to 3.46 in 2008.
A similar pattern occurred in Ghana after the government expanded reproductive
health laws out of the same concern as that of the Bolivian government. As a result, “fertility
declined steeply;;;and continued to decline [after] 1994.” Such examples seemed to draw
the attention of other countries. Thus, in 2014, the United Nations report noted that the
proportion of countries allowing abortion to preserve the physical health of a woman
increased from 63 percent to 67 percent, and those to preserve the mental health of a
woman increased from 52 percent to 64 percent.
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Opponents regard reproductive rights as nothing but as false front for abortion. They
contend that this method of preventing conception endangers the life of the mother and
must be banned. The religious wing of the anti-reproductive rights flank goes further
abortion as a debauchery that sullies the name of God; it will send the mother to hell and
prevents a new soul, the baby, to become human.
This position was a politically powerful one partly because various parts of the
developing world remain very conservative. Unfailing pressure by Christian groups
compelled the governments of Poland, Croata, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and even Russia to
impose restrictive reproductive health programs, including making access to condoms and
other technologies difficult.
Muslim countries do not condone abortion and limit wives to domestic chores and
delivering babies. Senegal only allows abortion when the mother’s life is threatened. The
Philippines, with a Catholic majority, now has a reproductive health law in place, but
conservative politicians have enfeebled it through budget cuts and stalled its
implementation by filing a case against the law in the Supreme Court.
A country being industrialized and developed, however, does not automatically
assure pro-women reproductive regulations. In the United States, the women’s movement
of the 1960s was responsible for the passage and judicial endorsement of a pro-choice law,
but conservatives controlling state legislatures have also slowly undermined this law by
imposing a restriction on women’s access to abortion.

While pro-choice advocates argue that abortion is necessary to protect the health of
the mother, their conservative rivals shift the focus on the death of the fetus in the mother’s
womb as the reason for reversing the law. This battle continues to be played out in all the
political arenas in the United States.
The Feminist Perspective
Feminists approach the issue of reproductive rights from another angle. They are,
foremost, against any form of population control because they are compulsory by nature,
resorting to a carrot-and-stick approach (punitive mechanisms co-exist alongside benefits)
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that actually does not empower women. They believe that government assumptions that
poverty and environmental degradation are caused by overpopulation are wrong.
These factors ignore other equally important causes like the unequal distribution of
wealth, the lack of public safety nets like universal health care, education, and gender
equality programs. Feminists also point out that there is very little evidence that point to
overpopulation as the culprit behind poverty and ecological devastation.
Governments have not directly responded to these criticisms, but one of the goals of
1994 United Nations International Conference of Population and Development suggests
recognition of this issue. Country representatives to that conference agreed that women
should receive family planning counseling on abortion, the dangers of sexually transmitted
diseases, the nature of human sexuality, and the main elements of responsible parenthood.
However, the conference also left it to the individual countries to determine how
these recommendations can be turned into programs. Hence, globally, women’s and
feminist arguments on reproductive rights and overpopulation are acknowledged, but the
struggle to turn them into policy is still fought at the national level. It is the dilemma that
women and feminist movements face today.
Population Growth and Food Security
Today’s global population has reached 7.4 billion, and it is estimated to increase to
9.5 billion in 2050, then 11.2 billion by 2100. The median age of this population is 30.1, with
the make median age at 29.4 years and female, 30.9 years.
Ninety-five percent of this population growth will happen in the developing
countries, with demographers predicting that by the middle of this country, several
countries will have tripled their population. The opposite is happening in the developed
world where populations remain steady in general, but declining in some of the most
advanced countries (Japan and Singapore).
However, this scenario is not a run-off that could get out of control. Demographers
predict that the world population will stabilize by 2050 to 9 billion, although they warn that
feeling this population will be an immense challenge.
The decline in fertility and the existence of a young productive population, however,
may not be enough to offset this concern over food security. The Food and Agriculture
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Organizations (FAO) warns that in order for countries to mitigate the impact of population
growth, food production must increase by 70 percent; annual cereal production must rise to
3 billion tons from the current 2.1 billion; and yearly meat production must go up to 200
million tons to reach 470 million. The problem here is that the global rate of growth of
cereals had declined considerably – from 3.2 percent in 1960 to just 1.5 percent in 2000.
The FAO recommends that countries increase their investments in agriculture, craft
long-term policies aimed at fighting poverty, and invest in research and development. The
UN body also suggests that includes develop a comprehensive social service program that
includes food assistance, consistent delivery of health services, and education especially for
the poor.
If domestic production is not enough, it becomes essential for nations to import. The
FAO, therefore, enjoins governments to keep their markets open, and to eventually “move
towards a global trading system that is fair and competitive, and that contributes to a
dependable market for food.”
The aforementioned are worthy recommendations but nation-state shall need the
political will to push through these sweeping changes in population growth and food

security. This will take some time to happen given that good governance is also a goal that
many nations, especially in the developing world, have yet to attain.

Conclusion
Demography is a complex discipline that requires the integration of various social
scientific data. As you have seen, demographic changes and policies have impacts on the
environment, politics, resources, and other. Yet, at its core, demography accounts for the
growth and decline of the human species. It may be about large numbers and massive
effects, but it is ultimately about people. Thus, no interdisciplinary account of globalization
is complete without an accounting of people. The next lesson will continue on this theme of
examining people, and will focus particularly on their global movement.
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(D) Self Help

1. Article: Ashraf, Quamrul and Galor, Oded (2008). Malthusian Population Dynamics:
Theory and Evidence. Retrieved: June 3, 2020

https://www.econstor.eu/obitstream/10419/62638/1/571838952.pdf

2. YouTube: Prof Next Door (May 15, 2020). Global Demography – Discussion and Analysis.
Retrieved: June 4, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpyzikMhrAI

3. Recommended Film: The Thinning (2016)

(E) Let’s Check

Exercise no. 9: Identification: Find what is asked in every item. Wrong spelling is wrong.

1. What do you call those who were born around 1965 – 1990?

2. Who view multiple children and large kinship networks as critical investments?

3. Who predict that the world population will stabilize by 2050 to 9 billion?

4. Who warned about the exhaustion of world food supply by the middle of the 19th
century?

5. What type of family desires just one or two progenies?

6. Who are foremost against any form of population control as they are compulsory
by nature?

7. Who suggest that in order to mitigate the impact of population growth, food production
must increase by 70 percent?

8. How many people live in countries other than their own?

9. What was written by American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife about population?

10. Who disagrees with the advocates of Neo-Malthusian theory and accused
governments of using population control as a “substitute for social justice and much-
needed reforms?
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(F) Let’s Analyze

Using the lessons we had above, Is it necessary in our country Philippines to

adapt the different methods to lower our population? Explain.

(G) In a Nutshell

Activity no. 9: Using the discussion we have on global demography, kindly explained the
following:

1. Perils of Overpopulation
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2. Malthusianism

3. Neo-Malthusianism

4. Methods of controlling overpopulation

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5. Feministic View on Overpopulation and Population Control

6. Food and Over Population