The African population explosion. A taboo subject?

Map of Africa, 1839. Photo: Edu-Tourist (CC)

Africa’s population has just reached the 1 billion mark. But instead of being cause for celebration the figure is cause for alarm, with major challenges and dangers to be overcome in the near future. How will participants at next week's UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) summit address the ongoing crisis?

The African continent along with its dependent islands covers over 20 percent of the world’s land area, and now that its population has reached 1 billion, it also accounts for very nearly 15 percent of its population.

Explosive increases in Africa’s birthrates over the last 30 years also mean that the population is getting younger, and that trend does not seem set to decline anytime soon. One birth in four on earth is now African.

There are several ways of defining birth and fertility rates, one of them being the “Total Fertility Rate” (TFR) which calculates the number of children which would statistically be born to a woman during her child-bearing years, taking current fertility rates as the reference point.

A quick look at the TFR classification of birthrates puts African countries in most of the top 30 places in terms of high fertility rates. By way of a comparison, the most developed countries are almost all to be found in the mid-to-upper 200s.

Those figures are a stark demonstration that exceptionally high birthrates generally go hand-in-hand with poverty.

At the same time, prognostics for the future are grim, with many estimates predicting that the African population will reach 2 billion in the early 2050s. In the 1950s, one-in-10 humans was African. Today that figure is one-in-seven. That figure would reach one-in-five in the 2050s, using the TRF model.

Whereas families in the developed world produce two to three children on average, the African average is five.

This high and concentrated population growth could -- and should -- be fueling African economic growth, as happened in America in the past, but it isn’t. On the contrary, it has led to widespread poverty and low life-expectancy. Life expectancy averages age 53 for the whole continent.

It is hoped that the touchy subject of demographics as an aggravating factor in malnutrition will not be ignored by the participants of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) summit which begins Monday, November 16, in Rome.

It is difficult to overlook the corollary FAO statistic that the 1 billion people (of which 265 million are African) suffering from malnutrition is linked to birthrate.

Lower birthrates are not, of course, the only requirement for economic development. The present worldwide economic configuration has often showed lower birthrates to be a springboard for economic activity which benefits the whole population of a developing country.

China’s economic growth may well have put China on the economic map, but it has also left large swathes of its enormous population on the economic sidelines. Many African leaders are tempted by the Chinese model of quick growth based on low standards and low-price labor. That can be seen in the soaring increase in Chinese investment in Africa, which has led to the virtual elimination of France as the master of Africa.

The negative aspects of Chinese investment methods have been well-documented and they include the importation of poor Chinese labor into Africa as well as a marked tendency in Chinese policy not to involve itself in local development activities.

This may worry the West, but African leaders do not seem to be unduly worried about it. That is because corruption and the concentration of wealth in major cities mean that African leaders are able to avoid pressing issues on rural poverty in their respective countries.

In addition, birth control outside of major population centers remains sparse, and rural populations are generally unwilling to adopt birth control methods because a large family enables a family to pay its way under present local economic configurations.

That suits politicians fine, as a sustained and active campaign to reduce birthrates on a national level is often considered to be politically risky.

Western countries and organizations haven’t been much more effective. They are still by-and-large using the same inefficient and complicitly corrupt methods against poverty which consist of throwing (not much) money at the problem, a large amount of which goes into the pockets of African leaders.

It’s time that the West stopped giving half-hearted and very occasional theoretical lessons on reducing demographics. Many Africans rely on a high birthrate to sustain their families given the actual economic systems in place in their countries.

It’s also time that the West openly accepted that the problems related to Africa’s growing population must be addressed by taking on future challenges and by trying to reduce birthrates using economic development as the prize.

All of this hinges on finding and applying ways of getting efficient and population-user development aid directly to the people of Africa, even if African leaders don’t like it.

Yes, even if African leaders don’t like it.

Rome would be a good place to start.