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7.4: Population, Malthusians, and Critics

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    173624
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    Learning Objectives
    1. Explain population distribution and demographic patterns in South Asia.
    2. Describe the demographic transition model and the population patters of each stage.
    3. Critique Malthusian conceptions of overpopulation through examples in South Asia.
    4. Describe the impacts of Malthusian logic on women and girls in India. 

    *This page is in drafting and review*

    A Human Epicenter

    At the end of 2022, the world’s population reached 8 billion. About 60 percent of the world’s people live in Asia, a region with a long history of large populations. In South Asia, landscapes are engraved by long-standing patterns of human settlement, especially along its river valleys that have sustained high population densities from antiquity to this day. Now with two billion people, South Asia is home to a quarter of the world’s people, a giant hub within Asia’s population epicenter. In 2023, India surpassed China as the world’s most populous country - the world’s two “population billionaires” have about 1.4 billion people each. Pakistan and Bangladesh, too, are among the most populous ten countries in the world.

     

    most of the world's people live in South and East Asia
    UN population projections graphed
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): For hundreds of years, South and East Asia have been an epicenter of human population. This map indicates the high concentration of the world's peoples in the region effectively: there are more people living inside the area circled than outside it. The circled area encompasses some of the world's most populous countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Japan, and Indonesia (Public Domain; NASA via Wikimedia Commons). The two population billionaires are projected to stabilize in population size. China is no longer growing and India's population is projected to peak by 2060, as depicted in this chart (CC BY; Our World in Data).

     

    Population scholars largely attribute the monumental growth in human population (in South Asia and everywhere) to improvements in medicine, sanitation, and crop yields. These factors have decreased human deaths and extended human lives everywhere in the world. And now that more babies are surviving to become adults, more people living in cities, and more women studying and joining the workforce, mothers all over the world are also having less children. These statements are true on a global scale, but different countries are making the progression towards longer lives, more education, and smaller families at a different pace. 

     

    The Demographic Transition Model Explained

    Population growth is determined by births and deaths. Every country has seen very substantial changes in both: mortality and fertility rates have fallen across the world. But declining mortality rates and declining fertility rates alone do not explain why populations grow. If these changes happened at the same time, the size of the population would not increase. What is crucial is the timing at which mortality and fertility changes.

    The demographic transition model (DTM) explains why countries go through a period of rapid population growth is called the ‘demographic transition’. The DTM charts population patterns through the birth rate, death rate, and population growth rates to make connections to larger socioeconomic changes happening within countries and at a global scale. It ultimately depicts how improvements in medicine, agriculture, infrastructure, and education drive population patterns that are generalized into five stages. As countries progress through these stages, populations peak, stabilize, and might begin to decline. See each stage below:

    Stage 1: high mortality and high birth rates. No country today remains in this stage. In the long time before rapid population growth the birth rate in a population is high, but since the death rate is also high we observe no or only very small population growth. This describes the global population patterns of most of human history. Societies around the world remained in stage 1 for many millennia, with extremely slow population growth. At this stage the population pyramid is broad at the base but since the mortality rate is high across all ages – and the risk of death is particularly high for children – the pyramid gets much narrower towards the top.

    Stage 2: mortality falls but birth rates remain high. Ex: Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya, Guatemala.  In the second phase the health of the population slowly starts to improve and the death rate starts to fall. Since the health of the population has already improved, but fertility remains as high as before, this is the stage of the transition at which the size of the population starts to grow rapidly. Historically it is the exceptional time at which the extended family with many (surviving) children is common.

    Stage 3: mortality is low and birth rates begin to fall. Ex: India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Mexico. Later the birth rate starts to fall and consequentially the rate at which the population grows begins to decline as well. When the mortality of children is not as high as it once was parents adapt to the healthier environment and choose to have fewer children; the economy is undergoing structural changes that makes children less economically valuable; and women are empowered in education and work and have fewer children than before.

    Stage 4: low death rates and low birth rates. Ex: Canada, China, US. Rapid population growth comes to an end in stage 4 as the birth rate falls to a similar level as the already low mortality rate.  Populations begin to stabilize as the mortality rate at young ages is now very low the younger cohorts are now very similar in size and only at an old age the cohorts get smaller very rapidly.

    Stage 5: birth rates lower than death rates, declining natural increase rates. The demographic transition describes changes over the course of socio-economic modernization. What happens at a very high level of development is not a question we can answer with certainty since only few societies have reached this stage. Contemporary Japan is a vivid example, a rapidly aging population and future population decline is likely (as discussed in the next segment). 

     

    each stage of the DTM graphed
    Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): The demographic transition model (DTM) explains why countries go through a period of rapid population growth is called the ‘demographic transition’. It charts population patterns through the birth rate, death rate, and population growth rates to make connections to larger socioeconomic changes happening within countries and at a global scale. This diagram depicts the stages described above. As countries industrialize and populations urbanize, improved socioeconomic conditions like better access to healthcare, education, food, and work result in decreased birth death rates and birth rates overtime (CC BY; Roser via Our World in Data). 

     

    South Asia’s Growing Pains

    South Asia has experienced rapid population growth during the latter half of the twentieth century. India’s population quickly climbed from 350 million in the 1950s to over one billion in the late 1990s, nearly tripling the population within less than fifty years. This rapid growth was a by-product of demographic transitions discussed above. As death rates declined and birth rates remained high, the population soared. While the population of Pakistan and Nepal continue to reflect this pattern of rapid growth, India and Bangladesh have progressed into a mature Stage 3 of the demographic transition model. This transition is largely due to a remarkable drop in the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman. In the 1960s, there were about 6 child births per woman in India (7 in Bangladesh). In 2022, there were about 2 child births per woman in both India and Bangladesh. This is below the replacement level, or the number of children needed to replace their parents and maintain a population. Based on the current trends, the number of children under five years old in both countries peaked in 2005 and on a steady decline ever since.

    Expanding education for women and girls and greater participation of women in the workforce means that Indian and Bangladeshi families are getting smaller, especially those in urban areas. While declines in fertility rates are expected as economic opportunities and access to education and family planning expand, the declines in India and Bangladesh are also largely attributable to concerted government efforts to control population growth (See "Impacts of Malthusian Logic on Women and Girls in India" below).

     

    birth and death rates in India overtime
    Drops in fertility rates overtime
    Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): [left/top] The demographic transitions of India are charted through the birth and death rate overtime (1911-2008). The birth rate has continued to decrease since 2008 and India has entered a mature stage 3 of demographic transition, where the gap between the birth rate and death rate is starting to close and the population is projected to stabilize (CC BY; Roser via Our World in Data). [right/bottom] Women are having less children everywhere in the world, and this is well exemplified in South Asia: India and Bangladesh have seen steep declines in the fertility rate, and now families are having less babies the replacement level (CC BY; Our World in Data).

     

    Still, despite having reached a fertility rate below replacement levels, the population in South Asia are expected to continue to grow rapidly because of a demographic momentum. This is means that the large number of young people will continue to drive population growth as they have their own babies. India is projected to reach a population peak of 1.7 billion people in 2060. The population of Pakistan will have nearly doubled by that time. By 2060, it is projected that South Asia will be home to an additional 400 million people – the equivalent of the entire population of the United States (plus some). The population growth patterns of the past and the present has placed South Asia at the center of academic discussions pertaining to population growth and concerns about overpopulation.

     

    The Malthusian Doctrine  

    In his famous 1798 essay, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus presented one of the first discussions on overpopulation. In this infamous publication, Malthus warned that the human population would grow more rapidly than our ability to grow food, and that this would eventually lead to mass starvation and conflict. His calculations compared the arithmetic growth of food production versus the exponential growth of the world’s population, sending alarm about a mathematical impossibility of feeding the world’s people. As a solution, Malthus endorsed some extreme measures to facilitate mass deaths, what he called “necessary mortality,” including the conscious planning of swampy, crowded, and unsanitary living spaces for the poor, spread of disease, and withholding remedies for lethal diseases.[1]

    Malthusian alarmism pertaining to population growth has continued to resound through time. In 1968, Ehrlich, a Stanford University population biologist, wrote the bestseller called The Population Bomb, which echoed the same warnings of Malthus of impending mass starvation due to overpopulation. (Elrich still warns us that there is too many people and humanity is heading for calamity). In 1970s and 1980s, Malthusian views became widespread and population control became a focal strategy of the United Nations that saw overpopulation as the root cause of environmental destruction and poverty. At around the same time, Eugenicists were aiming to “perfect the human race” by preventing the reproduction of people they regarded as inferior, supporting plans to “breed out” traits they thought to be undesirable. Malthusians and Eugenicists alike supported sometimes aggressive measures to population control perceiving the growing numbers of people (primarily nonwhite people in poor countries) an existential threat to the “common good.” Both would lead to policies that sorted which humans were worthy of reproduction and which were not.

     

    Malthusian Critiques

    India became a posterchild for Malthusian logic. Overpopulation was a common explanation for reoccurring famines and mass starvation. Malthusian logic followed that population growth outpaced food production, and there was simply not enough food to sustain the large and rapidly growing population. What is often omitted from such explanations is the profound impact of colonialism on the ability of farmers to feed themselves. The colonization of India resulted in the appropriation of crucial arable land for the cultivation of cash crops to meet the demands of the British Empire. This forced Indian farmers to shift cultivation from food crops to cash crops such as cotton or indigo for export, thereby endangering the food security of the Indian people to satisfy British demands.

    The situation became especially dire when lapses in monsoon rains resulted in crop failures and caused a series of devastating famines under the British Raj. The Bengal famine of 1943 stands as one of the most catastrophic famines in history, costing the lives of nearly 4 million people in India. Yet, Malthusian narratives focusing on overpopulation as a cause of famine have dismissed the impact of British exports of immense amounts of food grains from India while civilians starved en mass. Prime Minister Winston Churchill notoriously ordered the diversion of food from Indian civilians to well-fed British troops and to stockpile food in Europe.[2] Adding to the insult, Churchill resorted to blaming the Indian people for the staggering death toll of famines, making derogatory remarks about Indians "breeding like rabbits" and deflecting from British responsibility in the catastrophic proportions of famine.[3]

    There is something compelling about Malthusian logic: a finite land area has a finite carrying capacity and cannot continue to feed a growing population indefinitely. From such a perspective, famine-afflicted countries simply have too many mouths to feed. However tempting this simplistic rationale continues to be, it fails in the face of a simple fact: The world’s population has continued to increase from less than one billion in 1800 to eight billion today, but the number of people dying due to famine has decreased and become only a tiny fraction of that in previous eras.[4] India exemplifies this well. From 1992 to 2017, the population in India grew by 44.5%, but child wasting, undernourishment, child stunning, and child mortality (as captured by the Global Hunger Index, GHI) has decreased by 14%. Bangladesh, also growing by population size at a similar rate, has seen a 27% decrease of the same indicators of hunger.[5]  

    The explanation to this trend lies in increased agricultural productivity. The technological innovations of the Green Revolution that employed mechanization, irrigation, agrochemicals, and the use of high yielding seed varieties produced a substantial change in agriculture all over the world. To address recurring cycles of severe famine under British, independent India made large economic, technological and social investments in improved agricultural practices. The technological innovations of the Green Revolution were introduced to India in the 1960s improving food production dramatically. Shown below, we see that since around 1970, cereal output has grown at a faster rate than India’s population (increasing by 238%, and 182%, respectively). This remarkable increase of food crops such as rice and wheat enabled India to avert Malthusian predictions. Over the last five decades, India transitioned from being food scarce to food sufficient, now a top producer and exporter of staple crops such as wheat and rice.

    Still, focusing solely on the mathematics of agricultural productivity in discussions about overpopulation is short-sighted because it overlooks issues of resource distribution and the various factors that lead hunger to persist in many parts of the world. Despite producing enough food, India has one quarter of the hungry population in the world, with 195.9 million undernourished people lacking sufficient food to meet their daily nutritional requirements. Clearly, other factors aside from agricultural productivity are at play. Among these is how the shifting agricultural production to high yielding monocrops has put a variety of indigenous crops that had been cultivated for thousands of years into non-existence.[6] Furthermore, the productivity of monocrops is based on the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and groundwater. The overuse of agrochemicals and of freshwater has led to water pollution, infertile lands, and depleted groundwater sources. Along with climate change, these factors will continue to challenge boosting food production to meet the demands of a still growing population.

     

    Impacts of Malthusian Logic on Women and Girls in India

    Reiterations of Malthusian concerns have motivated India’s government to control population growth since the early years after independence. From 1975-1977, India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national “Emergency,” pioneering a population control program that mandated mass sterilizations of men and women. Under this program, more than 8 million Indians were rounded up and coerced to have surgical sterilization procedures.[7] Mandatory sterilizations under the Emergency were quite unpopular and were soon discontinued, and the government expanded family planning measures and established clinics, provided information, and distributed free or low-cost birth control pills, injectables, and condoms. However, sterilization remains the primary form of birth control in India: more than ninety percent of sterilizations are of women, and 37 percent of women in India have undergone sterilization (in comparison to 1 percent of men).[8] The massive scale of government sponsored sterilization has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of women who have undergone procedures in sterilization camps under abhorrent conditions. (The Indian Supreme Court finally banned mass sterilization camps in 2016).[9]

    As observed all over the world, empowering girls and women is the best contraceptive. Few socioeconomic factors are as influential in lowering the fertility rate as expanding education and economic opportunities for women and girls. India’s indicators largely exemplify this as the states with the highest fertility rates have the lowest socioeconomic indicators for women. In Bihar, where India’s fertility rate is the highest (at 3.2), there is also the highest percentage of illiterate women (26.8 percent). By contrast, Kerala’s low fertility is matched a 99.3 percent literacy rate, a by-product of governmental campaigns dedicated to improving health and education. In urban areas, fertility rates are much lower because women are more likely to go to school, marry later, and work.

     

    woman educator in traditional clothing amongst her peers
    Village Indian women are seen sitting in a circle
    Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): [left] Anju Salvi (in the middle), photographed with UN Women’s Second Chance Education programme beneficiaries. Anju is the president of the Sakhi Sangam Women’s Federation, representing 4,500 women from the remote villages of Chittorgarh district in Rajasthan, India. She is also a community educator for UN Women’s Second Chance Education programme in India which is helping women re-enter formal education, get vocational and skills training, and secure employment or entrepreneurial opportunities. Anju is one of the few women in her community to complete a college education. The Second Chance Education programme is running in four Indian states – Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Odisha – covering 12 districts and 200 villages which have some of the highest rates of poverty and lowest indicators for gender equality. [right] Women from a village in Gaya (a district in the state of Bihar, India), are seen sitting in a circle, attending a community meeting (CC BY NC ND; UN Women via Flickr).

     

    But pressures for smaller families, motivated by Malthusian logic or policy, can exacerbate pre-existing gender bias. In India, widespread cultural norms place a preference for sons when inheritance is passed along male descendants who are seen as caretakers of their aging parents. Traditionally, men are also recipients of dowries, a substantial direct payment given from the bride’s family to the groom upon marriage. The pervasiveness of these cultural practices varies by geography, but, where prevalent, these traditions act as economic disincentives for having girls, many times leading to reproductive decisions based on a son bias. Once pre-natal testing allowed for sex detection of fetuses, selective abortions of females in India took off. The Pew Research Center estimated that between 2000 and 2019, at least 9 million female births went “missing” because of female-selective abortions.[10] In expected biological ratios, boys slightly outnumber girls at birth, with the natural population ratio of 105 male babies per 100 female babies. This natural ratio existed in India in the 1950s-1960s but was severely skewed to 110 male babies to 100 female babies by the 2000s.[11] Between 2000-2020, India had one of the most skewed sex ratios at birth in the world.

    While the imbalances in the sex ratio at birth seems to be averting in recent years, the cumulative legacy of decades of sex-selective abortion will continue to shape India’s demographic challenges for some time to come. With an excess of about 37 million males in 2018, India faces several societal issues because of its gender imbalance. The large number of bachelors are now facing a marriage squeeze, or a shortage of women and a surplus of men seeking a bride. Many are not successful, which in turn adds pressure to the aging mothers caring for adult sons who are unable to marry and start their own families. This is especially acute in rural areas, where men of less economic means will be least eligible to compete to marry scarce prospective wives. The high demand for wives is also fueling the trafficking of women and girls into a bride market and increasing harassment and violence against women and girls.[12]

     

    sex ratio at birth graphed
    uneven sex ratios mapped
     
    Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\): China and India have among the most imbalanced sex-ratios in the world. Cultural preferences for a son and pressures for smaller families through governmental policy and narrative have been contributing factors for sex-selective abortions in both countries. While sex-ratio figures indicate the sex ratio imbalances at birth are beginning to improve, the large population of males without prospect for a bride generate societal problems (CC BY; Our World in Data).

     

     


    [1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html?chapter_num=47#book-reader

    [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study

    [3] Inglorious Empire. pp

    [4] https://ourworldindata.org/famines#does-population-growth-cause-famine

    [5] https://ourworldindata.org/famines#within-countries

    [6] Eliazer Nelson, A. R. L., Ravichandran, K., & Antony, U. (2019). The impact of the Green Revolution on indigenous crops of India. Journal of Ethnic Foods6(1), 1-10.

    [7] Chandrashekhar, V. (Dec 12, 2019). Why India is making progress in slowing its population growth. Yale Environment 360.

    [8] Chandrashekhar, V. (Dec 12, 2019). Why India is making progress in slowing its population growth. Yale Environment 360.

    [9] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-women-sterilisation/indian-activists-welcome-top-court-ban-on-sterilization-camps-after-womens-deaths-idUSKCN11M1YT

    [10] Pew Research Center. (Aug 2022). India’s Sex Ratio at Birth to Normalize.

    [11] Pew Research Center. (Aug 2022). India’s Sex Ratio at Birth to Normalize.

    [12] Denyer, S. and Gowen, A. (April 18, 20218). Too Many Men. Washington Post.

     


    Attributions:

    "The Demographic Transition Model" is from Roser, M. (2023) - Demographic transition: Why is rapid population growth a temporary phenomenon? Published online at OurWorldInData.org. 


    7.4: Population, Malthusians, and Critics is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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