The great shift from farm to city

By Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief of the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail and the author of Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 19/06/11):

It is the little-noticed force behind the revolutions in the Arab world, the new protests in China and the economic booms in India, Turkey and South America: The largest population shift in human history, currently at its peak, is probably the most significant, and misunderstood, global event of our time.

In Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, hundreds of millions of people are rapidly moving from rural areas, where they practiced peasant agriculture, to cities — a shift that makes itself felt in the rough-and-tumble transitional neighborhoods where rural migrants first land, both in their own countries and in places like the United States, where they are make up the largest group of immigrants.

We need to pay attention to these neighborhoods, and to the huge demographic shift that is shaping them, for they are where either the next great economic opportunity or the next wave of violence and conflict will be born.

Never in human history have so many people changed their locations and lifestyles so quickly. Each month, there are 5 million new city dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. China alone has an estimated 200 million “floating” citizens with one foot in a village and the other in a city. If current trends continue as expected, between 2000 and 2030, the urban population of Asia and Africa will double, adding as many city dwellers in one generation as these continents have accumulated during their entire histories. Between now and 2050, the world’s cities will add another 3.1 billion people.

This will be matched by an almost as dramatic decline in rural population. The United Nations Population Division predicts that the population of the world’s villages and rural areas will stop growing around eight years from now and that, by 2050, the rural population will have fallen by 600 million due to migration to cities and urban encroachment on villages.

We need to remember our own history here. This is the same shift that transformed Europe and North America from peasant to urban life in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. That transition gave us both the violent revolutions and teeming slums of that period, but it also triggered, in the West, the end of starvation as a mass phenomenon, a vast rise in living standards and the end of uncontrollable population growth.

The shift began in the developing world during the decades after World War II, and it is now at its peak: The world has gone from being more than 70% peasant in 1950 to 50% urban today. By 2025, 60% of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70%; and by century’s end, the entire world will almost certainly be as urban as we are in the West.

How is this massive migration being felt? Take a look in the chaotic Cairo neighborhood of Boulaq el Dakrour, home to 650,000 people, most of them families of rural migrants from Upper Egypt. This slum’s frustrated residents formed the first crowd to storm Tahrir Square in January, driving a rebellion that ultimately forced President Hosni Mubarak from power. Or look at Guangdong, the enormous industrial city in southern China, where thousands of rural-urban migrants rioted for three days this month in anger at their mistreatment by officials, in the most serious uprising China has seen in years. China’s first-time apartment owners, typically the children of village migrants, have also become political activists, directing their anger not at Beijing but at municipal or neighborhood officials. The ex-peasant is increasingly the most potent political actor in the world.

Or look at Brazil and Turkey, two successful countries that have experienced a decade of democratic stability, open borders and economic growth after parties representing rural-urban migrants came to power. The “arrival city” neighborhood is increasingly producing the political leaders who can unite communities and end divisions: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are all children of rural-urban migrants who grew up in bottom-rung urban neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods want to succeed. They can be the birthplace of a new middle class, as many of America’s immigrant neighborhoods have been. But they can also spiral into violent failure and threaten entire countries when barriers are placed in the way of migrants’ natural inclination to succeed.

The barriers can be physical: the isolating absence of infrastructure or transportation links. They can be bureaucratic: the use of zoning, licensing or security regulations to prevent new-immigrant neighborhoods from becoming teeming mixes of industry, commerce, restaurants and homes. And they can be citizenship barriers. Around the world, there is nothing more damaging to a nation than the presence of a large population of residents who have no pathway to legal citizenship. Without a permanent legal stake, migrants’ networks of self-support are forced to become hidden, illegal and often violent, a huge lost opportunity and a threat to a nation’s security.

This is a population shift that will affect almost everyone, in every country. Never before have so many people reached for the bottom rung of urban success. Our challenge is to make sure there is a second rung waiting for the next wave of brave ex-villagers.

Fuente: Bitácora Almendrón. Tribuna Libre © Miguel Moliné Escalona

Demographic Tectonics

By Pierre Buhler, a former French diplomat and associate professor at Sciences Po, Paris (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 26/05/11):

Slow but steady contraction in the north, vigorous and sustained expansion in Africa; seven billion of us by October this year, eight billion sometime around 2025. The latest United Nations population figures provide a dramatic glimpse of how the demographic map of the planet is being reshaped.

For the latest revision of its biennial “World Population Prospects,” the U.N. Population Division has extended its forecasts by 50 years, to 2100. Long-term forecasts must be taken with a grain of salt — they “have no operational role,” as the French demographer Hervé Le Bras has written; they just help “staging and exaggerating today’s fears.”

Still, the margins of error allow for a fairly reliable picture of the world’s population in the decades to come. And what matters more is the breakdown of the aggregate figures, as their distribution holds far-reaching consequences.

For this, demography delivers a high level of certainty. The women liable to give birth within a generation are already born; life expectancy and mortality indexes evolve slowly. The most volatile factor is actually the fertility rate — the number of children per woman. Only if this rate is above the generation replacement level of 2.1 will there be a natural increase of a population. When it hovers between 5 and 7, as it does in some 20 countries, the “compounded interest” effect is extremely powerful.

Unsurprisingly, Asia remains the largest human reservoir, holding more than 60 percent of the world’s population — a proportion that should still be around 55 percent by 2050.

What is most striking, though, is the unabated demographic swelling of Africa. Africa’s population has almost doubled between 1975 and 2000, growing from 416 to 811 million; it will add another 75 percent to reach 1.4 billion people in 2025, and presumably another 55 percent to reach the staggering figure of 2.2 billion by mid-century.

The main reason is that the demographic transition — the decrease of birth rates following the drop of death rates when a country takes off — is slow to occur in the least developed countries. With the exception of Afghanistan, Timor and Yemen, all such countries, with current fertility rates above 4.5 children per woman, are located in sub-Saharan Africa — and there are some 25 of them.

The U.N. assumes this rate will decrease steadily from five to three children per woman, which is considered the medium. Still the population of Africa as a whole is expected to keep growing briskly, from only 9 percent of the world’s population in 1950 to 24 percent by 2050. The absolute figures will have increased tenfold within that century.

And while countries such as Nigeria (230 million in 2025, 390 million in 2050); Ethiopia (110 million and 145 million) and Congo (95 million and 148 million) have since long been identified as the demographic giants of sub-Saharan Africa, new applicants are following suit.

With a population of 45 million inhabitants today and a fertility rate of 5.5, Tanzania is on the path toward 71 million in 2025 and 138 million in 2050. Kenya is expected to jump from 41 million to 59 million and then to 97 million in that same time span, while Uganda might reach the 100 million mark after mid-century.

In the 1960s and 1970s the population growth rates — then of the same magnitude as those of sub-Saharan Africa today — fostered a number of controversies in the West about the capacity of the earth to feed a constantly growing mankind. They also prompted birth-control policies in a number of Third World countries.

The slowing of the exponential curve of demography after the 1970s muted the neo-Malthusian voices. But the toll that demographic growth in Africa will take on an already stressed ecosystem will no doubt reopen those debates.

Another consequence of the growth curve is the pressure to emigrate generated by the annual arrival on the African labor markets of some 20 million youths. That bulge is liable to increase year after year, reaching 40 million by 2050.

The migratory pressure will be directed in the first place toward Europe, whose population, in sharp contrast with Africa’s, is bound to age and stagnate.

Here the figures provided by the U.N. do not show any reverse trend. Even though they assume a surge in fertility rates close to the generation replacement levels, within a decade Europe — for the first time in peacetime — will have no natural increase of its population. Russia’s population has been declining for two decades; more recently so has Germany’s (and Japan’s). The issue is not only one of decline in absolute figures, but also one of a graying population and a shrinking workforce.

Not all European countries are equally affected. France, Ireland, Britain and some Nordic countries have fertility rates quite close to the generation replacement rate and are not threatened by demographic decline. But this does not change the trends for Europe as a whole, nor the fact that the Continent will remain a desired destination for immigrants from the South.

Another French demographer, Alfred Sauvy, once said that the 21st century would be “the century of demographic aging.” One should add that it might be the century of immigration.

The United States and some other countries have long turned immigration into a public policy that, despite some stumbling blocks, has helped preserve a balanced age pyramid. In Europe, recent developments have shown the extent to which immigration can corrode the European construction.

“Demography is destiny,” says the maxim attributed to Auguste Comte. It is about time for Europeans to take their destiny into their hands and to address it from both ends: the urgent need for massive development in Africa and sound management of the inescapable migratory flows from south to north.

Fuente: Bitácora Almendrón. Tribuna Libre © Miguel Moliné Escalona

¿Es oportuno fomentar la natalidad?

Por Gabriel Tortella, catedrático de Historia económica en la Universidad de Alcalá (EL PAÍS, 21/07/07):

Tengo la impresión de que la mayoría piensa que la respuesta a esta pregunta es afirmativa. Si yo coincidiera, no escribiría este artículo, pues ya he manifestado en estas mismas páginas mi peligrosa afición a escribir contra la corriente.

Por supuesto, la ocasión de este comentario es la inopinada promesa del presidente del Gobierno en el reciente debate sobre el estado de la nación de que se va a subvencionar con 2.500 euros todo nacimiento o adopción. La medida ha sido criticada en algunos medios por electoralista, populista y demagógica. Se ha dicho, no sin fundamento, que las deducciones por hijos en el impuesto sobre la renta ya cumplen esa función, y que bastaría con retocarlas o aumentarlas para lograr, con mucha mayor simplicidad y economía, y menor fanfarria, el mismo efecto. También se ha puesto en duda la honestidad política que comporta el hacer tal anuncio en tal ocasión. Pero apenas nadie ha criticado el fondo de la medida, es decir, su objetivo último, esto es, fomentar la natalidad en nuestro país. Es más, la oposición ha acusado al presidente de copiarles la idea, lo cual indica que están de acuerdo en el fondo.

Comúnmente, se basa la defensa del fomento de la natalidad en el razonamiento trivial de que la baja natalidad está modificando la relación entre jubilados y jóvenes de tal manera que en un futuro más o menos cercano los impuestos que pagan los cada vez más escasos jóvenes no van a bastar para subvenir a las pensiones de los cada vez más numerosos ancianos. Se trata de un problema indudable que aqueja en mayor o menor medida a todos los países europeos. Sin embargo, considerar que ésta es una cuestión insoluble si no es mediante un aumento de la población es ahogarse en un vaso de agua. Una solución que ocurre inmediatamente es flexibilizar las normas de jubilación. La terciarización de la economía y el desarrollo de las comunicaciones permiten la prolongación de la vida laboral en muchas profesiones en que la formación y la experiencia son tanto o más importantes que el vigor físico.
Puesto que la entrada en la vida laboral se ha ido retrasando al alargarse la etapa formativa, parece lógico que en correspondencia la salida se atrase también. En todo caso, el de la relación entre pensiones e impuestos es un problema técnico que planteará algunas dificultades políticas, pero que sin duda no debe servir de justificación para una política natalista.

Por añadidura, resulta que nos preocupamos por el estancamiento de la población cuando nuestro censo acaba de dar uno de los saltos más espectaculares de la historia. Después de pasar dos decenios acercándonos lentísimamente a la cifra de los 40 millones, en los primeros años del nuevo milenio nos hemos plantado en los 44 millones, cuadruplicando las tasas de crecimiento demográfico de los últimos decenios del siglo XX.

Además, como este salto se ha debido a la entrada masiva de inmigrantes, que siguen afluyendo en enormes proporciones, la natalidad también ha dado un salto, porque esta magnitud es mucho más alta entre los inmigrantes que entre los nativos. Y aquí se plantea una inquietante pregunta: ¿no tendrá este repentino natalismo un componente racista? ¿No se deberá al miedo subconsciente de que los inmigrantes nos abrumen y nos dominen, que desvirtúen nuestra cultura o nuestras señas de identidad? Temores de este tipo ya han sido abiertamente manifestados por los nacionalistas catalanes, tan “progresistas” ellos, tan proclives a adherir el adjetivo “rancio” a la palabra “español”. La identidad española, al parecer, es inherentemente rancia; la catalana, afortunadamente, no.

En todo caso, en un mundo cuya población aumenta desde hace un siglo a un ritmo verdaderamente alarmante, un ritmo totalmente sin precedente, que da lugar a emigraciones desesperadas y masivas, también sin precedente, que da lugar a fenómenos de deforestación y de agresión a la naturaleza que causan alarma entre los estudiosos mejor informados, la preocupación española y europea por el descenso (en realidad, ya, estabilización) de las tasas de natalidad resulta algo ridículo, provinciano y miope. El problema, a escala global, es la superpoblación, no el estancamiento demográfico.

Por otra parte, Europa ha sido siempre un continente de baja fecundidad demográfica, y éste ha sido uno de los secretos de su éxito económico. Los europeos, incluso en los años heroicos de la revolución industrial, crecieron a tasas mucho más bajas que las que hoy alcanzan los países del Tercer Mundo. Y éste es el problema del Tercer Mundo: los descomunales aumentos de su población son el freno principal a su desarrollo económico, no sólo porque el crecimiento demográfico anula el crecimiento de la renta por habitante, sino porque es imposible educar y formar a las nuevas generaciones con los escasos recursos docentes de que disponen.

El deber de los europeos, por tanto, en lugar de darse golpes de pecho y hacer contrición por una pasada explotación más imaginaria que real, en realidad es abandonar unas poco meditadas veleidades natalistas y ayudar a los países del Tercer Mundo a poner límites a una fecundidad demográfica desorbitada. Lo demás es demagogia.