Population: Human headcount falling alarmingly, warns UNFPA

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: Earth’s human population is falling in many countries, and resource crunch is among the key reasons for this decline, according to the United Nations Population Fund, the world body’s agency for reproductive rights.

The agency has taken its strongest line yet on fertility decline, warning that hundreds of millions of people are not able to have the number of children they want, citing the prohibitive cost of parenthood and the lack of a suitable partner as some of the reasons, the media reported on Tuesday.

The UNFPA (previously known as the UN Fund for Population Activities), surveyed 14,000 people in 14 countries about their fertility intentions. One in five said they haven’t had or expect they won’t have their desired number of children.

The countries surveyed—India, the US, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, and Nigeria—account for a third of the global population of nearly 8.2 billion.

They are a mix of low, middle and high-income countries and those with low and high fertility. The UNFPA surveyed young adults and those past their reproductive years.

“The world has begun to experience an unprecedented decline in fertility rates, Dr Natalia Kanem, head of UNFPA, said.

“Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis,” she says.

“Calling this a crisis, saying it’s real. That’s a shift I think,” demographer Anna Rotkirch, who has researched fertility intentions in Europe and advises the Finnish government on population policy, said.

“Overall, there’s more undershooting than overshooting of fertility ideals,” she says. She has studied this at length in Europe and is interested to see it reflected at a global level.

She was also surprised by how many respondents over 50 years of age (31 percent) said they had fewer children than they wanted.

The survey, which is a pilot project for research in 50 countries later this year, is limited in its scope. When it comes to age groups within countries, for example, the sample sizes are too small to make conclusions.

But some findings are clear.

In all countries, 39 percent of people said financial limitations prevented them from having a child.

The highest response was in South Korea (58 percent), while the lowest was in Sweden (19 percent).

In total, only 12 percent of people cited infertility – or difficulty conceiving – as a reason for not having the number of children they wanted to. But that figure was higher in countries including Thailand (19 percent), the US (16 percent), South Africa (15 percent), Nigeria (14 percent) and India (13 percent).

“This is the first time that (the UN) have really gone all-out on low fertility issues,” says Prof Stuart Gietel-Basten, demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Until recently, the agency focused heavily on women who have more children than they wanted and the “unmet need” for contraception.

Still, the UNFPA is urging caution in response to low fertility.

“Right now, what we’re seeing is a lot of rhetoric of catastrophe, either overpopulation or shrinking population, which leads to this kind of exaggerated response, and sometimes a manipulative response,” Dr Kanem said.

Forty years ago, China, Korea, Japan, Thailand and Turkey were all worried their populations were too high. By 2015 they wanted to boost fertility.

“We want to try as far as possible to avoid those countries enacting any kind of panicky policies,” Prof Gietel-Basten said.

“We are seeing low fertility, population ageing, population stagnation used as an excuse to implement nationalist, anti-migrant policies and gender conservative policies,” he says.

The UNFPA found that an even bigger barrier to raise children than limited finances was a lack of time. Professionals, particularly women, are too exhausted by the end of their working day to think of raising children.