Showing posts from category population.
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Book Launch: ‘The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security,’ by Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba
›“Demographic trends by themselves are neither inherently good nor bad. It’s really a state’s ability to address these issues that can determine the outcome,” said Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, the Mellon Environmental Fellow with the Department of International Studies at Rhodes College. At a book launch event at the Wilson Center on March 14 for The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security, Sciubba, along with Deputy Under Secretary Kathleen Hicks of the Department of Defense, discussed the national security implications of demography and its important role in understanding and managing conflicts around the world. [Video Below]
Demography as an Indicator, Multiplier, and Resource
Demography can be thought of in three ways, explained Sciubba: as “an indicator of challenge and opportunity; a multiplier of conflict and progress; and a resource for power and prosperity.”
A country’s age structure can pose a challenge, said Sciubba, because countries with a large percentage of their population under the age of 30 “are about two and a half times more likely to experience civil conflict than states with more mature age structures.” Tunisia’s recent revolution, she said, could be understood as a “story about demography.”
The 26-year-old fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire on December 17 after being hassled by police, was part of one of the largest age cohorts in Tunisia, those aged 25-29. There are some 64 million young men across the Middle East-North Africa region between the ages of 15 and 30, according to UN estimates. “If his death was the spark” for the unrest in the region, Sciubba said, “it’s the underlying demographic trends that were the fodder.”
Yet, Sciubba sees opportunity within this challenge. Citing the work of Richard Cincotta, she said that “states have half a chance – literally 50 percent – of becoming a democracy once their proportion of youth declines to less than 40 percent.” Tunisia has the best chance in the region of becoming a free democracy based on its demography, followed by Libya, where youth aged 15-29 are 43 percent of the adult population.
At the other end of the age structure, some of the world’s most powerful countries, such as Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, and China, are rapidly aging. This aging will “somewhat decrease the ability of these states to project political, economic, and military power” due to a shortage of labor and a smaller pool of funding, said Sciubba.
Countries with transitional age structures, such as India, Brazil, and South Africa, face different security challenges. With a majority of their populations between 15 and 60 years old, there are more people contributing to the economy than are taking away, which could bolster these countries economically and politically (the “demographic dividend”). Global institutions will have to reform and include these countries, she advised, “or else become irrelevant.”
But the defining trend of the 21st century, said Sciubba, is urbanization. While great sources of economic growth, cities are also quite vulnerable to natural disasters and terrorism because of their concentrations of people, wealth, infrastructure, and bureaucracy.
In looking to the future, Sciubba called for continued support for family planning initiatives. “At least 90 percent of future world population growth will take place in less developed countries,” which are least equipped to handle the demands of that growth, she said. In addition, Sciubba recommended that the United States seek out partnerships with countries that have transitional age structures, particularly India, which could be a stabilizing force in a tumultuous region. She also called on the United States to partner with states in the Western Hemisphere and remain open to migration.
Defense and Demography
“Understanding population is critical to our success in being able to prevent conflict, and also managing conflict and crises once we’re involved,” said Hicks, describing the Department of Defense’s (DOD) interest in demography. However, the DOD does not “treat demographics as destiny,” she said, but instead as “one of several key trends, the complex interplay of which may spark or exacerbate future conflicts.”
Recent world events, such as those in the Middle East and North Africa, “have demonstrated how critical our understanding of population is for security practitioners,” said Hicks. Similarly, the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan dramatically illustrate the vulnerability of large urban areas. Echoing Sciubba’s comments on population aging, she cited “incredible divestments in defense” in Europe, which, she said, “puts us, as a key partner in NATO, at a thinking stage.”
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy is “deeply interested” in demographic issues, said Hicks. She identified other demographic areas of great interest for her office: the youth bulge in Pakistan, urbanization in Afghanistan, the role of highly educated women in Saudi Arabia, the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, Russia’s shrinking population, and various trends in China, including aging, gender imbalance, urbanization, and migration.
Image credit: “Iraq,” courtesy of flickr user The U.S. Army.
Sources: ECSP Report 12, Financial Times, The New York Times, Population Reference Bureau, UN Population Division. -
Integrated Approach Helps “Model Farmers” Increase Productivity in Ethiopia
›March 24, 2011 // By Schuyler Null
To reach the village of Grar Gaber from Addis Ababa, you drive up over the Entoto Mountains overlooking the capital then motor down two hours of new Japanese-built highway to the town of Fiche. From there it’s 20 minutes on a broken dirt road across rocky hills. I was joined there by about 20 others from the PHE Ethiopia Consortium’s general assembly (see day one and day two coverage here) and Population Action International, to visit an integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) development program run by LEM Ethiopia.
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The Youth of North Africa
Surging on a Knife’s Edge
›March 23, 2011 // By Christina DaggettThe Middle East/North Africa region is experiencing a “youth surge,” said Jack Goldstone, director of the George Mason University’s Center for Global Policy, at a recent GMU event. “In the last two decades the number of people in their late teens and twenties has increased… It’s doubled in Egypt; it’s grown by half in Tunisia; and nearly doubled in Libya,” he told Warren Olney on KCRW’s To the Point.
Such youth surges are problematic because, Goldstone wrote in ECSP Report 13, “population distortions – in which populations grow too young, or too fast, or too urbanized – make it difficult for prevailing economic and administrative institutions to maintain stable socialization and labor-force absorption.”
In the case of Egypt, the youth surge put enormous pressure on a government system that could no longer guarantee jobs to every college graduate, said Goldstone. When government guarantees dried up, graduates found that their poor-quality degrees were of little use, especially in a system that prioritized connections and bribery. The result was an unemployment rate of 25 percent among Egyptian youth and a mounting sense of frustration with the economic system and the government.
This frustration found a symbol when Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian, set himself – and an entire region – on fire after his third run-in with the police cut off his only source of income. Youth across North Africa and the Middle East, Goldstone said, could identify with Bouazizi’s desperation and frustration after years of dealing with a closed economic system and a corrupt government.
While overall economic growth has been strong in the region – a fact which had misled many observers (including himself, Goldstone admits) into thinking the region was more stable – these economic gains were apparently being captured by the ruling elite to a far greater degree than previously thought, said Goldstone. For example, it is estimated that ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his family are worth between $40 and $70 billion.
Meanwhile, a burgeoning surge of young people were struggling to get by. Goldstone pointed to a Gallup poll conducted in 2010 in which only 12 percent of Egyptians and 14 percent of Tunisians would classify themselves as “thriving” – down from 25 and 24 percent, respectively, in 2007 and 2008.
While the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes have fallen, these revolutions do not ensure the youth in these countries will have a prosperous future. They need not only access to capital, said Goldstone, but also access to information and social networks so that they can identify market opportunities and stay connected.
Immigration to more developed countries could also be an important avenue for economic growth and education. In a Foreign Affairs article, “The New Population Bomb,” Goldstone writes, “Given the dangers of young, underemployed, and unstable populations in developing countries, immigration to developed countries can provide economic opportunities for the ambitious and serve as a safety valve for all.”
The future of Middle Eastern youth, and that of the region at large, depends on the quality of their education and their ability to be productive, said Goldstone. They stand on “a knife edge,” he said, and the transition to democracy will not be smooth or easy.
Image Credit: “Protest Face Paint,” courtesy of flickr user Ahmad Hammoud.
Sources: The Economist, ECSP Report 13, Foreign Affairs, Gallup, International Monetary Fund, KCRW, Voice of America. -
Watch: David Lopez Carr and Liza Grandia on Rural Population Growth and Development in Guatemala
›March 22, 2011 // By Hannah MarquseeDemographers today are largely concerned with two trends: aging in the developed world, and rapid urbanization in the developing world. The majority of people in the world now live in cities, “but this tiny fraction of people that live in rural areas – concealed by the data because it’s a small fraction – still have very high fertility rates, precisely where protected areas are,” said David Lopez-Carr, associate professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara in this ECSP interview.
“You see a gradient. The more rural, the more remote, the higher fertility,” said Carr. In Guatemala, for example, fertility rates range from below four children per woman in Guatemala City, to as high as eight in the remote Maya biosphere reserve, which is mostly indigenous. “These are the populations that are growing the fastest and the ones who are living in direct proximity and whose livelihoods are predicated directly on the rainforest, whether it’s through resource extraction or…agricultural expansion,” said Carr.
Liza Grandia, assistant professor of international development and social change at Clark University, spent many years working in the Maya biosphere reserve with the Guatemalan NGO ProPeten to address deforestation. However, after years of alternative livelihood projects, “it became clear that many of those efforts would be undermined by population growth and continued migration into the region,” she said in an interview with ECSP.
Grandia and ProPeten conducted a study as part of the Demographic and Health Surveys to examine the linkages between health, population, and environmental trends in the Peten region. Based on these findings, Grandia founded Remedios, a program that partnered with International Planned Parenthood Foundation and the Guatemala Ministry of Health to provide family planning services to “one of the most remote places in Latin America.”
Remedios used mass media, such as the radio soap opera “Between Two Roads,” broadcast in Spanish and Q’eqchi’ Maya, to reach people across this remote region. In the popular soap opera, “the villain is a cattle rancher, the heroine is a midwife, and through the tales of daily life in this village we weave in messages about domestic violence, use of family planning, agrarian problems, like land speculation, and a whole host of other issues that come up in people’s daily lives,” said Grandia. “In three years as a result of that work, the total fertility went from 6.8 to 5.8. To date, 10 years later, it’s dropped to 4.3.” -
The Continuing Challenges of Integrated Development
›March 20, 2011 // By Schuyler Null
“How are we going to feed all these mouths?” asked Bekele Hambissa, director of the Environmental Protection and Development Organization in Addis, on day two of the PHE Ethiopia Consortium general assembly (read about day one here). Environmental resources are directly tied to Ethiopia’s population growth, said Hambissa, during a discussion of balancing efforts to address population growth, environment, and livelihoods. While poverty alleviation is an important goal of population, health, and environment integration (PHE), it must be environmentally sustainable, he said.
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“Better Bang for the Buck”: Blogging From Ethiopia’s Population, Health, and Environment General Assembly
›March 18, 2011 // By Schuyler Null
Hello from Addis Ababa, where I am blogging from the 5th annual general assembly of the Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) Consortium of Ethiopia (see further coverage here). Along with the Philippines, Ethiopia is the largest PHE programmer in the world, both in terms of number of programs and people affected, and for good reason: The country combines dire need, willing donors, and a great deal of local capacity and will.
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Managing the Planet’s Freshwater
›“The impact of human activities on the planet and on its biology has risen to a scale that deserves a commensurate response,” said Tom Lovejoy, professor at George Mason University, introducing a discussion on “Managing the Planet’s Freshwater,” the second of a monthly series led jointly by George Mason University and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Karin M. Krchnak, director of International Water Policy at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and Dann Sklarew, sustainability fellow at George Mason University, joined Lovejoy to discuss the increasing stress placed by population growth, urbanization, and environmental change on freshwater resources and potential solutions to global water insecurity. [Video Below]
Water: “A Global Crisis”
Water insecurity and pollution is “a global crisis,” said Sklarew. Water scarcity is growing and aquatic biodiversity is declining around the world. According to the World Water Council, over one billion people do not have safe drinking water.
Inadequate water management contributes to these problems, said Sklarew. But, human activities “impact water connectivity, quality, and flows” at all scales, he said, and combined with climate change, have fundamentally altered the global water cycle.
“The water-rich and the water-poor are intimately connected,” said Sklarew. National, international, and global trade “water transfers” often move water from dry rural areas to urban centers, he said. “We’re taking from areas that don’t have [water] and moving water, by itself or via food products, to places where they might actually have more water in their local environment.”
But there are many opportunities – from the incremental to the bold, exciting, and revolutionary – to address these problems, said Sklarew, including growing more food with less water, reducing destructive subsidies, restoring natural river flows via dam re-design or removal, encouraging greener infrastructure in urban areas, and supporting participatory decision-making about water. He also pointed to promoting lower population growth and allowing migration that “brings the people to the water rather than the water to the people” as additional ways to improve water security. In the future, “bio-mimicking and techno-fixes,” may also provide promising solutions, he said.
Clear national goals and a global-scale response are critical to making these solutions a reality, said Sklarew: “Even though these challenges are often local, in the end, we have one interconnected water system.”
Watershed Protection: Innovative Solutions
“I know we all wish that there was a silver bullet for global water challenges,” said Krchnak, “but there’s not just one solution.”
As population grows by an additional 2 billion people before 2050, “solutions must take population growth into account,” said Krchnak. One-third of the world’s population is now subject to water scarcity, which is expected to double in the next 30 years
More water will be necessary to meet growing demands for food, energy, and other commodities, said Krchnak. In particular, “the poor in urban centers will be the dominant challenge for us in the next decades.”
Krchnak described three possible strategies to protect watersheds: market-based mechanisms, integrated water resource management, and incentive approaches.
Water funds, a market-based mechanism in which downstream water users pay for protection of the upper watershed, are one possible way to better manage freshwater, said Krchnak. With the help of local partners, TNC’s Quito Water Fund, for example, creates a sustainable finance mechanism and protects watersheds that supply 2 million people. Similar programs “can be taken to other geographies and replicated across the globe,” she said.
Another TNC program, the Great River Partnership, uses an integrated water resource management strategy that focuses on stakeholder collaboration and working with public and private partners to help create “one vision” for major rivers like the Mississippi, Magdalena, Paraguay-Parana, Yangtze, and Zambezi, said Krchnak.
The Alliance for Water Stewardship uses an incentive-based approach to promote “responsible use of fresh water that is socially beneficial and environmentally and economically sustainable.” One of the main objectives of the Alliance is to develop performance standards and create a certification program that recognizes water providers who work to protect freshwater resources.
Strategies like these may not be appropriate everywhere, and programs need to be adapted to make local implementation possible, said Krchnak, but effectively managing the planet’s freshwater is vital for human health, spiritual and cultural well-being, ecosystems and biodiversity, and economic opportunity.
Sources: World Water Council, UNDP.
Photo Credit: “Rio Magdalena,” courtesy of flickr user Esparta. -
Rural Poverty: The Bottom One Billion
›March 10, 2011 // By Hannah MarquseeThere are currently 1.4 billion people in the world living in extreme poverty, and 70 percent of them – about one billion people – live in rural areas, according to the Rural Poverty Report 2011, published recently by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The two regions most affected by rural poverty are South Asia, home to half of the world’s rural poor, and sub-Saharan Africa, where, team leader Ted Heinemann points in the accompanying trailer, “the number of rural people living in extreme poverty is actually increasing and the proportion is a very high 62 percent.”
The State of Rural Poverty
While the number of rural poor in the world has actually declined sharply since the late 1980s, the decline is due almost entirely to gains made in East and Southeast Asia, particularly China. Despite these gains, rural poverty remains a stubborn challenge in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa: three-quarters of the poor in these areas are rural, and “the proportion is barely declining, despite urbanization,” says the report. In the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the majority of the extremely poor live in urban areas.
The number of undernourished people in the world has also declined slightly from its historic high of 2009, after a doubling of international food prices between 2006 and 2008 left a staggering one billion hungry. (However, food prices recently passed 2008’s historic high point, and some have argued they may have been a factor in the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.) From a high of one billion, the world’s hungry have since decreased to 925 million, a figure that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization nonetheless calls “unacceptably high.” The current rate of decline is far from meeting the MDG target of halving the number of people who suffer from hunger by 2015, says the IFAD report, and with continuing population growth and resource and energy scarcities, they predict little change in the number of hungry worldwide.
Meeting Rising Demand, Sustainably
“Feeding a global population of just over 9 billion in 2050 will require a 70 percent increase in global food production,” says the report. To do this, the report calls for more sustainable agricultural intensification driven by small-holder farmers. “Small-holder agriculture…can offer rural people a route out of poverty just as they can offer the world a solution to meeting its future food needs,” says IFAD President Kanayo Nwanze, in the trailer.
Increasing global agricultural production must be done “in the context of a weakened natural resource base, energy scarcities, and climate change,” says the report. This will require more efficient use of water, less waste, and a shift towards more resilient crops. It will also require linking scientific knowledge with local farmer knowledge in order to create a sustainable, context-specific approach. The report recommends a sustainable small-holder agriculture system that gives rural people incentives to protect their environment, while helping them adapt to climate change.
Providing Economic Opportunities
Since 80 percent of rural households “farm to some extent,” agricultural intensification will be “a primary engine of rural growth and poverty reduction,” says IFAD, especially in the poorest countries. In a statement to announce the launch of the report, Nwanze said, “rather than romanticizing the concept of lifting poor rural women, men, and children above the poverty line, like a plague that can be eradicated by charity and humanitarian gestures, we are advocating the proactive creation of vibrant rural economies.”
But lifting the one billion rural people out of poverty is not just about stimulating rural farm economies, says the report; it also means creating opportunities in the rural non-farm economy to minimize the risk of economic shocks that drive people into poverty in the first place. While agriculture remains central to rural economies, urbanization, globalization, improved information systems, and growing investments in renewable energy all offer opportunities for growth in rural, non-farm economies. Helping rural people take advantage of these opportunities will require multiple investments, says the report: in education to improve the capabilities of rural youth; in infrastructure and social services to make rural areas better places to live; and in governance mechanisms and collective organizing so that rural people can better represent their own interests.
“Robust action is required now to address the many factors that perpetuate the marginalization of rural economies,” says IFAD. “Above all, this action needs to turn rural areas from backwaters into places where the youth of today will want to live and will be able to fulfill their aspirations.”
Sources: AFP, FAO, IFAD, United Nations, The Washington Post.
Video Credit: “Rural Poverty Report 2011,” courtesy of YouTube user IFADTV.
