The Population Bomb

World population growth -- and how to slow it -- continues to be a subject of great controversy. The planet's poorest nations have yet to find effective ways to check their population increase -- at least without restricting citizens' rights and violating such traditions as the custom of having large families as insurance in old age. India, for example, has abandoned coercive birth control procedures, even though the country, with a population of 635 million, is growing by a million new people per month.
Except for thermonuclear war, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces over the decades immediately ahead. In many ways it is an even more dangerous and subtle threat than war, for it is less subject to rational safeguards, and less amenable to organized control. It is not in the exclusive control of a few governments, but rather in the hands of hundreds of millions of individual parents. The population threat must be faced -- like the nuclear threat -- for what it inevitably is: a central determinant of mankind's future, one requiring far more attention than it is presently receiving.
In 1976 the world's population passed 4 billion. Barring a holocaust brought on by man or nature, the world's population right now is the smallest it will ever be again. How did it reach 4 billion ? For the first 99%, of man's existence, surprisingly slowly. For the last 1% of history, in a great rush. By 1750, the total had reached only about 800 million. Then, as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, population growth began rapidly to accelerate. By 1900, it had doubled to 1.6 billion; by 1964, it had doubled again to 3.2 billion; and by the end of the century, it is projected to double again to about 6.3 billion. Given today's level of complacency in some quarters, and discouragement in others, the likely scenario is for a world stabilized at about 11 billion.
The sudden population surge has been a function of two opposite trends: the gradual slowing down of the growth rate in the developed nations, and the rapid acceleration of the rate in the developing countries. The experience of the developed countries gave rise to the theory of the demographic transition. It holds that societies tend to move through three distinct demographic stages: (1) high birth rates and high death rates, resulting in near stationary populations; (2) high birth rates but declining death rates, producing growing populations; and finally, (3) low birth rates and low death rates, re-establishing near stationary populations.
The fundamental question is: What, if anything, can rationally and humanely be done to accelerate the demographic transition in the developing world ? Is that acceleration realistically possible? It is.
With the help of modern mass communications, which are both more pervasive and more influential than ever, an increasing number of governments in the developing world are committed to lowering fertility, and an even larger number to supporting family-planning programmes. Family-planning services are essential, but can succeed only to the extent that a demand for lower fertility exists. That demand apparently does not now exist in sufficient strength in most of the developing countries.
There are a number of policy actions that governments can take to help stimulate the demand. None of them is easy to implement. All of them require some re-allocation of scarce resources. Some of them are politically sensitive. But governments must measure those costs against the immeasurably greater costs in store for societies that procrastinate while dangerous population pressures mount.