Alarmed at the prospect of becoming the world’s most populous nation by at least the year 2050, Indian officials are experimenting with incentives to curb the birth rate. The latest is a pilot program in the Satara district of Maharashtra which offers couples a reward of 5,000 rupees (£62) if they defer having children for two years after their wedding. If they wait another year, they will receive a further 2,500 rupees. They also become eligible for family planning advice and free condoms. The first cheques are going to be issued on August 15.

Over 2,000 couples are participating at the moment. The district has about 25,000 marriages a year and 4 out of 5 couples have a child within the first year.

Other methods are being mooted, as well. Recently Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad made headlines with an impassioned plea at a function to mark World Population Day for India. His solution is to bring electricity to all its villages.

"When there is no electricity, there is nothing else to do but produce babies. If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won't get a chance to produce children.".

Mr Azad insists that he was being serious, although family planning officials were scornful. "Such bizarre ideas are only suggested when the government has no intentions or is too scared to find solutions," one told AFP.

However, this does seem to be an issue that the Minister feels strongly about, although he has stressed that he does not support coercive measures. "We are sitting on a volcano. But nobody is talking about birth control. The country has to rise to the occasion," he said in a recent speech in Chennai. India has 17% of the world's population, but only 2% of its land mass, he said. Land for agriculture is shrinking and is being used to develop infrastructure like railways and housing.

Mr Azad has urged all political parties to unite and back an "aggressive campaign" in favour of small families. And he denied that there could be any religious objections.

"No religion prohibits control of population. At the most, there could be difference of opinion on the methods to check population." ~ Guardian, Aug 2

A birth rate that has crashed to .88 children per woman and a population ageing fast have led officials in the Chinese coastal city of Shanghai to start knocking on doors to get couples to have more children. But they are still straight-jacketed by the national one-child policy, so only certain “eligible” couples can expect a visit along with counselling and financial advice.

The policy already allows couples to have two children if, for example, they belong to an ethnic minority or if they are both only children. But now, that permission looks like becoming a “duty to the Party”, or at least to the city.

"We just hope more people can have a second child because for Shanghai, as a city which started family planning quite early, the process of ageing is fast," said Zhang Meixin of the Shanghai population and family planning commission. "If eligible couples have two children, it might help to relieve the pressure."

Chinese demographers and officials increasingly acknowledge that the government’s draconian population control policy is having severe unforseen effects. By suppressing births while life expectancy is increasing they have accelerated the ageing of the population.

Earlier this year the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies warned that China would have more than 438 million over-60s by 2050. Each would have just 1.6 working-age adults to support them, compared with 7.7 in 1975.

But, as other Asian countries have discovered, it is no simple matter to get urban couples to have more children. Far from longing to have a second or third child, many Chinese in the cities are either indifferent to the idea of more children or scared of the cost. The Guardian quotes one woman:

"I don't want a second child. One is enough, and I hope it is a girl, said expectant mother Yu Nan, 25. "It is very nice to be the only child; you don't need to share or grab things from others. You can have all your parents' attention. My parents have brothers and sisters, but when my grandparents died they quarrelled over the legacy. That was horrible and hurtful. Being the only child, you won't have those problems."

A sociologist says it may take incentives such as child benefits to encourage more births.

Another distressing consequence of sex-selective abortion: censorship! Government officials in Vietnam have confiscated and burned 30,000 copies of books instructing couples how to choose the sex of their child. Twenty-seven titles were included. Offending material was removed from seven websites as well. Vietnam’s sex ratio is steadily rising. The natural ratio is about 105 boys for every 100 girls at birth, but the ratio nowadays in Vietnam is about 112 to 100. If it continues, by the year 2030 son preference could mean that 3 million Vietnamese men will find it difficult to marry, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan has declared. ~ AP, July 3; China News Daily, May 13

In English, Siberia is a synonym for frigid desolation. Actually, it’s much the same in Russian as well. And now that Russians are no longer forced to live there, they are emptying the vast spaces of the Russian Far East, which stretches from Lake Baikal to Vladivostok. According to an article by David Blair in the London Telegraph, only 6.7 million people live there – 14% fewer than in the late 1980s. Furthermore, over a third of these live in only nine towns. The countryside is nearly empty. By 2015 there will only be 4.5 million people in the Russian Far East.

However, just over the border in China, there are 100 million people. “This means that Manchuria already has a population density 62 times greater than the Russian Far East,” says Blair. “This vast disparity between the neighbours, unmatched anywhere else in the world, can only grow in the years ahead.”

For the leaders of China, this must be exasperating. Under the steppe, tundra and ice of the Far East lie enormous deposits of large reserves of natural gas, oil, diamonds and gold. Above it are huge forests which could supply timber for China’s economic boom.

“All this amounts to an astonishing combination: a densely packed country trying to keep its economy roaring ahead by laying its hands on natural resources, living alongside a largely empty region with huge mineral wealth and fewer inhabitants year on year.”

Blair says that Russia is in danger of losing control of the Far East an inch at a time. It seems all but inevitable that Chinese labour will seep over the border in a kind of population osmosis. The vast territory could become a source of conflict in the future. But that’s almost inevitable if Russia is depopulating. ~ London Telegraph, July 16

Pope Benedict XVI recently released an encyclical, a long letter to the Catholic Church and “all people of good will” about progress and development. Coming as it does in the middle of an economic crisis the media reported it as a critique of the market economy and the benefits of globalisation.

But anyone reading the document, called Caritas in veritate (“Charity in truth”) as another government white paper will be disappointed. The Pope’s focus is theology, human rights and social morality, not policy-making. The key message is that “The truth of development consists in its completeness: if it does not involve the whole man and every man, it is not true development.” In other words, economic and technological progress is incomplete if it stunts personal growth. As Benedict puts it, “There cannot be holistic development and universal common good unless people's spiritual and moral welfare is taken into account, considered in their totality as body and soul.”

So it’s not surprising that he deals with the population control and global ageing. Not surprisingly, he endorses the view that human ingenuity will eventually overcome the problems associated with population growth:

“Morally responsible openness to life represents a rich social and economic resource. Populous nations have been able to emerge from poverty thanks not least to the size of their population and the talents of their people. On the other hand, formerly prosperous nations are presently passing through a phase of uncertainty and in some cases decline, precisely because of their falling birth rates; this has become a crucial problem for highly affluent societies. The decline in births, falling at times beneath the so-called “replacement level”, also puts a strain on social welfare systems, increases their cost, eats into savings and hence the financial resources needed for investment, reduces the availability of qualified labourers, and narrows the “brain pool” upon which nations can draw for their needs.”

He also predicts that smaller families will put a strain on social capital:

“Furthermore, smaller and at times miniscule families run the risk of impoverishing social relations, and failing to ensure effective forms of solidarity. These situations are symptomatic of scant confidence in the future and moral weariness. It is thus becoming a social and even economic necessity once more to hold up to future generations the beauty of marriage and the family, and the fact that these institutions correspond to the deepest needs and dignity of the person.”

And, unlike most demographers, who normally take an interest in numbers of individuals, the Pope insists that governments should take families in account.

“In view of this, States are called to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, the primary vital cell of society, and to assume responsibility for its economic and fiscal needs, while respecting its essentially relational character.”

It is dense document but inspiring because of its emphasis on “integral human development”. Check it out.

There is a story that has made the rounds a couple of times in papers around Canada, it seems people are not ready for retirement. Headlined, "Demographic storm could crush retirement dream" the international survey finds among Canucks,

A "perfect storm" of demographic, financial and individual factors will derail people's retirement plans if they don't change course, according to a new retirement report.

Most Canadians, as with much of the Western industrialised world, will be relying on a public pension for a large portion of their retirement income. What the survey from HSBC Insurance shows, and not just for Canada, is that the number of dependent adults over 65 will outpace the number of dependent children under 14. Here in the Great White North that should happen sometime between 2010 and 2015. In Britain, seniors will outstrip children sometime next year and France the year after that. Japan passed this landmark a decade ago.

Mark Steyn wrote a book that still remains controversial over it’s claims and it’s title American Alone yet among the G8 countries that’s exactly where America is, for now, standing alone. The U.S.A. won’t be passing the more seniors than children threshold until 2010 according to HSBC. Developing countries and up and coming economies like Brazil are even further off, the report speculates that around 2030 there will be more people ordering from the senior’s early-bird menu than the kiddie’s menu but that’s a big assumption given that it is 21 years away.

All this to say once again that if nation states want to build public services such as pensions or state run healthcare then they also need to encourage people to have children. The model of the modern welfare state developed after the Second World War was predicated on an ever-expanding population, younger workers would pay for the benefits of older retirees. Sometime in the 1970s people in the most “modern” countries all but stopped having children, or enough children to keep the system going. The pyramid this system is based on is about to be inverted and some leading “experts” and advisors to the most powerful governments on earth keep saying there are too many people.

For a hard-hitting attack on the over-population scare, it’s hard to go past Brendan O’Neill’s speech in a London debate with a spokesman for the Optimum Population Trust. O’Neill is the editor of Spiked, a web magazine whose watchword is “humanity is under-rated”. Although Spiked has some positions (notably on abortion) which I don’t share, it has become a vigorous and effective defender of human potential. It’s great to read O’Neill’s demolition of population pessimism: he actually welcomed hundreds of billions of people on our planet.

“The fact that the presentational arguments of the population-reduction lobby can change so fundamentally over time, while the core belief in ‘too many people’ remains the same, really shows that this is a political outlook in search of a social or scientific justification. It is an already-existing prejudice, held by certain kinds of people, which looks around for the latest trendy or respectable ideas to clothe itself in.”

“The habit of presenting fixable social problems as demographic disasters is one of the most backward trends in contemporary public debate. And this is the fatal distraction of Malthusianism: it diverts people’s attention away from arguments and visions for overhauling society and towards the supposed catch-all solution of reducing human numbers.”

“Yet human beings are not simply the burping, biological users of resources; they are also the discoverers of resources, the creators of resources, the makers of communities, cities, history. A human being is not only a mouth that must be filled but a brain that can think and a pair of hands that can work. Today’s Malthusians have the temerity to present their own finite faith in people as something scientific, despite the fact that their ‘facts’ don’t add up: Malthus was wrong when he said people would starve to death as a result of population growth running ahead of food production; so were the 1970s population-controllers who said massive famines would sweep the populous Third World and wipe out millions.”

Japan's ageing population threatens its scientific and technological pre-eminence, says the leading science journal Nature in a blistering editorial (July 9). In May last year, a government white paper warned that increasing international competition, especially from China, and older work force at home, Japan might "be forced out of the ranks of major international players and will risk losing [its] current plentiful and stable lifestyle". The outlook for Japanese science is grim.

"Between 1998 and 2007, the number of researchers in universities rose by 15%, from 146,000 to 168,000. But in the same period, the number of researchers younger than 37 years old shrank from 36,773 to 35,788, and now only account for 21% of the total. The future is bleaker. The number of university students who want to study science and engineering plummeted from roughly 1 million in 1992 to around 630,000 in 2008. How much longer can Japan afford to lose the talent that its system is either chewing up or simply not developing properly?"

One way of compensating for its ageing workforce is to attract foreigners. But formidable linguistic and cultural barriers make it difficult to draw scientists from overseas. Only 10% of PhDs from Japanese universities go to foreigners (compared with 42% in the US and 41% in the UK). Only 1.34% of scientists at Japan's universities and research institutes are foreigners. Contact with other countries is essential to prevent stagnation, but young Japanese scientists are homebodies. According to another white paper released last month, only 2% of Japanese researchers plan to work overseas. "As international competition for scientific talent intensifies, Japan is closing in on itself," warns Nature.

The government is aware of the problem and has some innovative policies. Kyoto University is trying to have one-third of positions for young scientists filled by women and half by foreigners. In Yokohama it is building a a ¥9.5-billion (US$100-million) science high school. Nearly 30 institutions have tenure-track systems offering independence to younger scientists. But with fewer and fewer young people, there are bound to be fewer young scientists.

"With little hope for a massive influx of creative thinkers from outside, Japan needs to fix the system that frowns on giving professorships and other opportunities to young independent scientists. How much longer can Japan afford to lose the talent that its system is either chewing up or simply not developing properly? In its chronic failure to provide sufficient incentives and support for young researchers' independence, Japan as a scientific power is marching right past its tipping point."

The exuberant vitality of the Cuban band Buena Vista Social Club seems to confirm advice from the government newspaper Granma, that ageing is terrific. After all, 26% of Cubans will be 60 or over in 2025, the highest proportion in Latin America:

"Analysts agree that the aging of country’s population shouldn’t be seen as a negative thing, but as an achievement of the political, economic, and social systems that provide longer lives and better quality of life."

I am second to none in my admiration of the nonagenarian muscians. Just listen to Omara Portuondo singing "Candela". So smooth. So mellow. So young.

However, facts are facts, and Cuba has to face the fact that it is shrinking and ageing, a bit like its fearless leader Fidel. In 2006, the country’s population of about 11 million stopped growing and began to decline. The problems are two-fold: young people are emigrating and women are having fewer children. The birth rate of 1.4 children per woman is the lowest in Latin America. According to Nick Miroff, of Global Post,

"The statistics highlight a risky demographic experiment that has been developing here for years. While Cuba’s socialist health care system takes good care of the elderly and has prolonged life expectancy rates, the island’s lousy economy--squeezed by US trade sanctions and its own inefficiencies--is driving young people to emigrate, while limiting family size."

Not everyone wants to play for the Buena Vista Social Club!

According to the Population Media Center, Woody Allen gave this speech to graduates in 1979, which was subsequently republished in the New York Times. I haven't been able to locate the original source. But it provides some helpful guidelines for thinking about population  issues:

More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism.

It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man. (Modern man is here defined as any person born after Nietzsche’s edict that “God is dead,” but before the hit recording “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”) This “predicament” can be stated one of two ways, though certain linguistic philosophers prefer to reduce it to a mathematical equation where it can be easily solved and even carried around in the wallet.

Put in its simplest form, the problem is: How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world given my waist and shirt size?...

Overpopulation will exacerbate problems to the breaking point. Figures tell us there are already more people on earth than we need to move even the heaviest piano. If we do not call a halt to breeding, by the year 2000 there will be no room to serve dinner unless one is willing to set the table on the heads of strangers. Then they must not move for an hour while we eat. Of course energy will be in short supply and each car owner will be allowed only enough gasoline to back up a few inches...

Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o’clock.