Essay on Increasing Population!
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The total number of people inhabiting this planet as of July 1993 has been estimated to be 5.57 billion by the United Nations, with 1.23 billion (or 22.1% living in economically more developed countries of Europe, North America, Oceania, former Soviet Union and Japan, and the remaining 4.34 billion (or 77.9%) living in the less developed countries.
The average density of population per square kilometre of land area in 1993 is 55 in the less developed countries compared to 21 in the more developed regions. In 1950, when the total population of the globe was 2.516 billion or only 45% of its present size, the less developed countries had a lower percentage of the world’s population, 66.9% or 1.684 billion people.
The number of people that were added to the less developed countries since 1950, that inhabit less than 60% of the land area of the globe, is slightly more than the 1950 world’s total population. Three people every second or more than 250000 persons are added to this planet, and about 95% of this addition is occurring in developing countries.
While the annual addition was 93 million at the beginning of this decade, it will increase to 100 million per year by the last year of this decade, 1999-2000, despite a moderate decline in the fertility levels of the population because of large increases in the population base of all the developing countries.
There is no doubt that the world is getting to be an extremely crowded planet, getting worse in the already over-crowded less developed regions.
In terms of rates of growth, presently the world population is growing at 1.7% per year, being the difference of a birth rate of 26 and a death rate of a per thousand population per year. In the more developed countries, the growth is 0.5% per year, being a difference of a birth – rate of 14 and a death rate of 9, while in the less developed countries it is growing four times higher, or 2.0% per year, the difference of a birth-rate of 29 and a death rate of 9 in their populations.
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The peak in the rate of growth of human beings has been crossed during the quinquennium 1965-70 when it was 2.1% per year, and the slow-down in the rate of growth has since commenced with China leading the pace of demographic control.
The table reveals that since 1950, while the growth rate in the developed countries has continued to decline from 1.28% in 1950-55 to 0.86% in 1970-75 and to 0.54% in 1985-90, the growth rates in the less developed countries rose from an already high level of 2.04 in 1950-55 to 2 38% during 1970-75 with a moderate decline subsequently to 2.11% during 1985-90.
The decline in the global growth rates in the past fifteen years is largely due to sharp reductions in facility. The population growth rate in almost all the developed countries has been reduced by 50% or more since 1950.
According to the medium warrant projections of the population into future years carried out by the United Nations, even with moderate declines in fertility levels in the developing countries, the population of the world is expected to be 6.261 billion by the year 2000 and 8.092 billion by 2020.
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The share of the developing countries will increase to 79.8% by 2000 and to 83% by 2020. Because of the persistence of relatively high rates of growth in her population, the share of Africa in the world’s population will increase from the existing 12% to 18% in 2020. The population of Europe, especially in Southern and Western Europe, will be experiencing negative growth rates by the end of the next decade.
The crude death rates in the developed world are expected to increase in the coming decades because of the ageing of the population and continued decline in their fertility levies.
For example, according to UN projection, the crude death rates of Europe and North America are projected to be 11.5 and 9.9 during the period 2020-25 compared to 7 in Africa and Latin America and 7.2 in Asia. While the structural effects will operate in the direction of raising the birth rates in the developing world, they will work in the opposite direction in the developed world.
Globally the annual growth rate is expected to decline to 1.5% and 1.0% per year during 2000-2005 and 2020-2025, with the birth rates declining to 22.9 and 17.5 and the death rates the 8,2 and 7.6 during these two periods, without any major cataclysmic events pushing up the mortality to very high levels in the world, even in the context of a moderate to substantial reduction in the fertility levels of the population, a continuous further rise in population can be expected and a global size of about 8.5 billion by the year 2025 seems unavoidable.
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Even to contain the future size to this limit, the total fertility rate of present level of 3.7 children per woman to 2.3 during 2020-2025 and the maximum reduction has to occur in Africa from a total fertility rate of 6.1 in 1990-1991 to 3.0 during 2020-2025.