POPULATION (Mini-articles) Index

Sperm counts of more than 1,300 fertile Parisian sperm donors fell steeply during a period of 20 years. Both quantity and motility of sperm from a healthy man of a given age in 1992 were significantly poorer than those of a fertile man in 1973 in studies carried out at the Central University Hospital of Bicetre near Paris.

This study is the first to link the decline in semen quality with the year of birth. While the volume of semen remained the same, concentration of sperm decreased by 2.1 per cent a year from 89 million per millilitre to 60 million. This study appears to confirm a trend established in about 60 studies since 1938 which analysed the sperm quality of a total of 15,000 men in different parts of the world. This French study, say some scientists, is important because at the outset the researchers were extremely sceptical about earlier assessments. Explanations for the dropping sperm count include pesticides to food additives or other chemicals in the environment.

A recent British study by Stewart Irvine at Edinburgh's MRC Unit charted a 40% fall in the average sperm concentration among 3,7000 donor sperm samples between 1940 and 1969. Counts on average fell from 128 million per millilitre to 75 million. However, many scientists still dispute the effect and much more careful research will be needed to validate it.

Partly from Dr Pierre Jouannet's paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, February 1995 and partly from Daily Telegraph, 14 Feb 1995

The population of East Asian developing countries migrating from the countryside to the cities will jump by more than 1.2 billion in the next 25 years from 500 million at present, necessitating huge additional expenditure on infrastructure, according to internal forecasts by World Bank economists.

The bill for the next 10 years alone could run to as much as $1,200 billion or even $1,500 billion. The developing countries concerned, which on the bank's definition, include all of east Asia except Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan will have to step up their investment in infrastructure to 6.5-7% of GDP from 5% at present.

From an article in the Financial Times, 2 Feb 95

Migration and migrant-smuggling into Europe, hitherto a relatively minor problem, is now proving to be a nightmare for ill-prepared and badly equipped immigration authorities and police. At least 500,000 illegal immigrants have clandestinely entered southern Europe from the Mediterranean in the past two years. Poverty, political persecution and wars in parts of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Algeria are increasing the pressure. There is also a very large and steady eastwards drift of young men from the former Communist countries of Hungary, Roumania, Bulgaria and others into East and then West Germany.

Professional gangs are now making large profits, and the penalties for smuggling people are far less than for drugs. Legislation, police methods and intelligence lag far behind what is needed to curb the smuggling networks' activities, while recent attempts to form a common deterrent organisation such as the Europol initiative have floundered in political squabbles between countries.

As might be expected, this is producing great strains in the European Union. A junior minister in the Home Office resigned his post last night over Europe's immigration policy. Charles Wardle claims that an opt-put gained by the UK in 1985 from the abolition of Europe's internal frontiers is worthless and would open floodgates to welfare state spongers from abroad. As a consequence, John Major promised last night to fight any EU attempt to dismantle Britain's immigration laws.

From an article in Independent on Sunday, 12 February 1995

Since 1974, all UN World Population Conferences have over-estimated the annual growth of world population, but in fact the rate of growth has been declining. We have now reached the stage when the average number of children per woman is falling fast in most of the world, particularly in those areas where most girls are at school at the time of their menstruation. The rate has come down sharply, with increasing prosperity, even in Catholic Latin America. The high rates of six or seven children now only exist in Africa and some parts of the Islamic world.

A World Bank study finds that in areas where there are no girls in secondary schools, the average women has seven children. If we continue with UN Population Conferences every ten years (1974, 1984, 1994), the Conference in 2024 will produce the opposite panic to today's. This is that we are breeding too few babies.

But we will be then have made the awful discovery that we are keeping alive too many of the world's old people because most citizens in rich countries will probably start to live through until their nineties. State pension finances in all welfare democracies are heading for bankrupt chaos. We have made medical care a universal right, free at the point of delivery for the old --who need much more medical care than for younger patients. We have abandoned the culture whereby granny lives with the family at just the wrong moment. Increasingly, medical practitioners will be told not to keep 'hopeless case' old people officiously alive.

From the The Economist, December 1994

One young women in five does not have children, compared with only one in ten in her mother's generation, the Family Policy Studies Centre says in a report this month. An increasing proportion of women are choosing to be childless and projections suggest that 20 per cent of women born in in 1960s, 70s and 80s will never have babies, the report says. The proportion of children in the population has fallen from a third to a fifth in 90 years, and projections suggest that by 2011 there will be more retired people than children.

The latest Government Social Trends report show that more women are having babies in their early 30s than in their early 20s. There were 87 births per 1,000 women aged 30 to 34 in 1993 compared with only 82 per 1,000 among 20 to 24 year-olds. It is the first reversal of a long-established pattern for the age of childbearing. The change could reflect an overall birthrate drop and the increasing wish of young women to delay a family while they establish a career.

From an article in the Daily Telegraph,10 April 1995)

UN figures suggest that world population is expected to grow to 6 billion by 1996/8, 7 billion by 2005 and 8 billion by 2015. For a simple description of the world as a whole, populations can be roughly classified into four main categories of percentage rates of growth on the evidence of the fertility of parents in the 1900-1994 period. These are as follows: (a) 0 to 0.79 per cent growth (UK and Ireland, Europe, Former Soviet Union); (b) 0.8 to 1.59 per cent growth (US, Canada, Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, China and Eastern Asia); (c) 1.6 to 2.39 per cent (Central America, South America, India and Southern Asia, South-eastern Asia); (d) 2.4 per cent + (Middle East, Western Asia, Africa).

Briefly stated, about two-thirds of the world's population live in poverty and misery and are peasants or ex-peasants (refugees or squatters in shanty towns), and half of these live close to the level of starvation. Land migrations of very large numbers of destitute people into different regions or countries are already occurring. There have been many cases of significant numbers of people attempting to migrate by sea. Whole regions and sometimes whole countries are becoming environmentally devasted and politically unstable. Stress levels are such that ethnic wars are increasing, and these are particularly devastating because they involve modern weapons supplied by individuals or governments within advanced nations. In toto, these continuous various ethnic wars amount to annual fatalities equivalent to those of the Second World War.

From NewGreens Notes, September 1994)