In yesterday’s posting, reference was made to the World Bank’s list of “fragile states.”  As part of its Low-Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS) initiative, the World Bank targets “fragile states,” defined as “countries facing particularly severe development challenges such as weak institutional capacity, poor governance, political instability, and frequently on-going violence or the legacy effects of past severe conflict.”

While the World Bank’s definition of “fragile states” does not encompass “demographic pressures,” almost all of the 33 states presently on the list have, as The Economist recently pointed out, high fertility rates.

Ten of the nations on the list of “fragile states” have TFRs above 6.0 (Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Timor).  Eight more have TFRs between 5.0 and 5.9 (the Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Cote d-Ivoire, Eritrea, The Gambi, Guinea,  Nigeria, and Togo). Only five have TFRs below 4.0 (Cambodia, Myanmar, Tonga, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe).

Kenya is not presently on the World Bank’s list of fragile states, but given the recent political violence it soon may be.  Jim Hoaglund, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece (“An Establishment Teeters, in Kenya and Beyond”) that has application to many of the states currently on the “fragile states” list.  He wrote:

Other people’s violence is not a deep concern for most of us, particularly if it occurs in remote Africa or overpopulated Asia.  But the outbreak of tribal killings and widespread rioting in Kenya hits me where I live.

Kenya’s plight “hits” Hoaglund because he once resided there as a foreign correspondent.  He laments that Kenya is but one of many countries that he has worked in that have succumbed to violence and disintegration. Many of them are poor countries, often former colonies, which have yet to make the “demographic transition” to slower population growth and greater prosperity. He writes that,

…developments in Kenya may herald the onset of a new, much unhappier era—one that will be marked by the total breakdown of the post-colonial structures that attempted to recognize African, Arab and Asian nationalism while protecting Western economic and interests.  If the Kenyans cannot make this formula work, it is hard to see how other, less prosperous nations can.

Many factors will determine whether “fragile states” escape Hoaglund’s “new, much unhappier era,” but one of the most important factors is whether family planning services are made more widely available to couples in these countries who desire them. That’s not the job of the World Bank; that’s the job of the U.S. and other “donor” countries that have reduced, in real terms, their commitment to international family planning assistance over the past decade.

Most of us, as Hoaglund’s column suggests, are removed from the turmoil and troubles that afflict Kenya and other “fragile states.” We need perhaps, like Hoaglund, to focus more on the “fragile lives” that suffer when we fail to help.

The feature story (“Somewhere over the Rainbow”) in this week’s The Economist (January 26th-February 1), asks the question:  Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind?  The answer, according to The Economist is “the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realize.”

It is, no doubt, worthwhile to recognize global successes, even as we ponder with some uneasiness future prospects.  Success, like failure, can be a great teacher.

When The Economist sat back and looked at the global successes of the past decade, here’s what it concluded:

All these things are the results of patient work over many years. But perhaps the biggest change affecting people's lives has little to do, at least directly, with development policy or public spending. People in poor countries are now able to exert more control over their own fertility, and hence over the size of their families.

A generation ago the biggest worry about poor countries was over-population. Books such as “The Population Bomb” (1968) and “The Limits to Growth” (1972) predicted Malthusian crises in countries where women were having five children or more. Since then the fertility rate (the average number of children a woman can expect during her lifetime) in low- and middle-income countries has crashed. In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970. Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years).

Later on the article notes that:

….demographic changes help to create a virtuous circle of growth. When fertility rises then falls, you get a bulge of people at and just after the inflection point. The baby boomers were one such bulge. Between 1960 and 1990 Europe and America had relatively few old people (because mortality rates had earlier been high), relatively few children (because fertility had fallen) and a disproportionately big number of economically active adults.

These 30 boom years were (to borrow the French phrase) “les trente glorieuses”. Developing countries are seeing a similar confluence now.

But not all countries have undergone a successful demographic transition.  Somewhere behind the rainbow, as the article itself points out, there are still countries mired in trouble: 

An extraordinary concentration of misfortunes is to be found in a group of countries which the World Bank labels “fragile”. This is a slightly larger category than the so-called failed states, such as Somalia, where the central government has ceased to exist. It includes countries where the government has partial control of territory (Sudan), where it cannot deliver basic services (Zimbabwe) and places with high levels of political conflict (Nigeria).

Fragile states contain roughly half the developing world's childhood deaths. About a third of their people are undernourished and more than that do not have access to drinking water. They usually have extremely high fertility rates: most of the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are fragile. In one way or another, they are much more likely to be affected by wars, refugees and every sort of political crisis.

The lesson that might be gleaned from global successes and failures is that empowering couples to control their own fertility is a recipe for success, or at least a fundamental ingredient.  The article, however, appears in the end to credit globalization and good government as the keys to success. 

Bad government and lack of growth often, though far from always, go together. Whatever the problems of globalisation, they are dwarfed by the penalties of being untouched by it.

Perhaps.  But make family planning services more widely available to the couples who want them might also help.

Tomorrow, we will take a closer look at the World Bank and its index of “fragile states.”

A survey released earlier this week by the International Rescue Committee reported that the rate at which people are dying in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly known as Zaire) is virtually unchanged. Five years ago, a brutal civil war ended in the Congo, but despite the end of the carnage the death toll still staggers the imagination.  Forty-five thousand people a month are dying.

The New York Times this week reported on the survey:

Almost all the deaths come from hunger and disease, signs that the country is still grappling with the aftermath of a war that gutted its infrastructure, forced millions to flee and flattened its economy.

In all, more than 5.4 million people have died in Congo since the war began in 1998, according to the most recent survey’s estimate, the latest in a series completed by the International Rescue Committee, an American aid organization. Nearly half of the dead were children younger than 5 years old.

Perhaps most alarming, while the death rate has slightly decreased in eastern Congo, the last festering node of conflict, it has actually increased in some parts of central Congo, though the area has not seen combat in several years.

While strife in Darfur and Kenya continue to grab headlines around the world, the Congo’s humanitarian crisis goes largely unnoticed.  In 2006, the Democratic Republic of the Congo won international praise for holding its first nationwide democratic elections since independence was declared in 1961, but Congo remains a country more governed by demography than democracy.  

Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace ranked Congo in seventh place on their list of failed states in 2007.  Congo scored very high (9.4 on a scale of 1 to 10) for “demographic pressures.”  Here’s what their report had to say:

Although demographic pressures began to improve slightly from the previous year, this indicator still received a score of 9.4 in the Failed States Index (FSI) 2007 because of the country’s large youth bulge (47% of the population was under 15), high population growth rate of 3%, and high infant mortality rate of 88 per 1,000 births.

The International Rescue Committee’s report released earlier this week, indicated that the country’s mortality rate is 57 percent higher than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.  Violence accounts for less than one-half of one percent.  Children are among the hardest hit by death and disease.  Children: 

….are especially susceptible to diseases like malaria, measles, dysentery and typhoid, which can kill when medicine is not available. In one village in North Kivu Province, a hot spot of continued fighting, three women of the 20 households surveyed had lost two children each in the 16 months covered by the survey period, Dr. Brennan said.

The Congo is a country rich in natural resources, but its democratically-elected government is struggling under enormous demographic pressures. Despite the high mortality rates, Congo’s total fertility rate (TFR) remains among the highest in the world.  The average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime in the Congo is 6.7, a TRF well above the average for sub-Saharan Africa (5.5). Congo’s population, currently estimated at 62.6 million, is expected to climb to 186.8 million by 2050. But what kind of world are these children being born into?  Thirty-four percent of children under the age of five are underweight. The New York Times story reports:

The Congolese government spends just $15 per person each year on health care, according to the World Health Organization, less than half of what is recommended to provide the most basic but lifesaving care, like immunizations, malaria-fighting mosquito nets and hydration salts.

Population pressures and poor health delivery systems are not the only thing holding the Congo back from its vast potential.  Corruption, for example, is rampant. It also suffers from a long legacy of ethnic warfare among its 254 ethno-linguistic minority groups. But lack of access to family planning and reproductive health services is a major problem. Only 31 percent of women (ages 15-49) use contraceptives, only 4 percent use modern methods of contraception.  Congolese women wishing to limit the number of children they have or to space their children farther apart are being denied the right to control their fertility.  As a result maternal and child health suffers…and so does the country.

Bangladesh can teach us a lot about population.  Forty years ago, when it was known as East Pakistan, it had a total fertility rate (TFR) of seven children per women and it was rushing headlong toward a crisis of Malthusian dimensions. Starvation was rampant. Today, its TFR is three, significantly lower than the TFR (4.1) in Pakistan, its erstwhile partner.

By many measures, Bangladesh is a success story.  For the past two decades, Bangladesh has been feeding itself and, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Muhammad Yunus and others, it is a hotbed of entrepreneurship and small scale innovation.

Still, its success is tenuous.  For one thing, despite the sharp decline in fertility rates, Bangladesh is still growing.   At present, it has 149 million people living in area about the size of Iowa.  By 2025—just 18 years from now—its population is projected to reach 190 million, and by 2050 it’s expected to grow to 231 million.

So what’s the future look like for Bangladesh. Robert D. Kaplan, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, gives us a glimpse in this month’s (January/February) edition of the Atlantic.  His article Waterworld suggests that Bangladesh’s struggle is far from over. In reporting on his recent trip to Bangladesh, here are a few of his observations:

Yet from one end of Bangladesh to the other, I saw plenty of drama, encapsulated in this singular fact: remoteness and fragility of terrain never once corresponded with a paucity of humanity...

Soil is a commodity so precious in Bangladesh that people dredge riverbeds during the dry season to get more of it.  When houses are dismantled, the ground on which they stand is transported through slurry pipes to the new locations.  In every respect, people were squeezing the last bit of use out of the land....

With 150 million people packed together at sea level, Bangladesh is vulnerable to the slightest climatic variation, never mind the changes caused by global warming.  The partial melting of Greenland ice over the course of the 21st Century could inundate a substantial amount of Bangladesh with salt water.  A 20-centimeter rise in the Bay of Bengal by 2030 could be devastating to more than 10 million people….Salinity—the face of global warming in Bangladesh—threatens trees and crops and contaminates wells.  And the less fresh water that comes down from India, the greater the hydrologic vacuum that sucks salt water northward into the country side.

But climate is not the only threat on the horizon.  As more Bangladeshis migrate to the cities, a more radical brand of Islam is taking root. 

As rural Bangladeshis flee a countryside ravaged by salinity in the south and drought in the northwest, they are migrating to the cities at a rate of 3 to 4 percent a year. Swept inot the vast anonymity of sprawling slum encampments, they lose their local and extended-family links, becoming more susceptible to a form of Islam, with a sharper ideological edge….

[A] low-calorie version of Islam is giving way to a stark and assertive Wahhabist strain.  A poor country that can’s say no to money, with an unregulated, shattered coast of islands and inlets, Bangladesh has become a perfect setup for al-Qaeda affiliates….Madrasas now outnumber secondary schools….

Bangladesh may be climate change’s worse scenario, but it is, as Kaplan notes, not alone:

The Earth has always been unstable.  Flooding and erosion, cyclones, and tsunamis are the norm rather than the exception.  But never have the planet’s most environmentally frail areas been so crowded.  The slowdown in the growth rate of the world’s population has not changed the fact that the number of people living in the countries most vulnerable to natural disasters continues to increase.  The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 was merely a curtain-raiser.  Over the coming decades, Mother Nature is likely to kill or make the homeless a staggering number of people.

The global population challenge, as Kaplan article’s makes clear, is far from over.  Despite the drop in global fertility rates, population growth rates in many parts of the world still pose a significant challenge to those valiantly wrestling with poverty, health, the environment, and political instability.  The Bangladeshis, as Kaplan’s article suggests, are making heroic efforts, but their success is far from guaranteed.

What makes Robert D. Kaplan’s observations particularly poignant is that he is not known as an environmental advocate or a Malthusian alarmist.  A teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy, he is a foreign policy and defense analyst who is highly regarded in many political circles.  Everyone interested in the world’s future should read Waterworld.

In the run-up to the recent national elections, Kenya was hailed as a model of stability. With a booming economy and a parliamentary democracy, Kenya was regarded as a relative beacon of hope in a highly troubled region.  But in the week following the election, mayhem broke out after it appeared that Kenya’s ruling party had rigged the results. Hundreds were killed in the violence and concerns mounted that Kenya could descend into chaos.

In the past few days, the violence appears to have ebbed and hopes grow that new elections or a political settlement can dampen the unrest, but what went so terribly wrong?  Was it just election fraud?  Or are there other factors?

Earlier this year Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace ranked Kenya at 31 on their Failed States Index, much more stable than Kenya’s neighbors: Sudan (1), Somalia (3), Uganda (15), Ethiopia (18).  Kenya has a somewhat functioning democracy and its institutions are much stronger than those of its neighbors, but like its neighbors, Kenya suffers from extreme demographic pressures. On a scale of 1 to 10, the Failed States Index ranked Kenya at 8.4 for demographic pressures--less than its neighbors, but still quite high by global standards.

Kenya, for one thing, is still one of the fastest growing nations in the world.  Its total fertility rate (TFR)—the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime—is 4.9. That’s nearly twice the world average (2.7) and just below the average for Africa (5.0). The TFR for Kenya poorest fifth is 6.5.  Kenya’s population, currently 36.9 million, is expected to jump to 51.3 million in just 17 years, and to 65 million by 2050. 

Kenya’s leadership is quite old by world standards.  President Mwai Kibaki, the country’s current leader, is 77, but the median age in Kenya is just 18 years. There are 12.2 million young people between the ages of 10 and 24, and many of them, despite recent economic growth are unemployed. 

And Kenya, like its neighbors, is a country still fractured by ethnic divisions.  Kenya has six main ethnic groups that comprise 84 percent of the population, and none of them come close to constituting a majority. The largest and ruling ethnic block, the Kikuyu, comprises only 22 percent of the population.

Kenya, of course, is not alone in suffering population pressures, a prominent ‘youth bulge,’ and sharp ethnic divisions.  Kenya, in fact, is part of an arc of demographic instability that extends from Central and East Africa, through the Middle East, and down into South Asia.  The “arc” includes such noted trouble spots as the Congo, Rwanda, the Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, but virtually all the countries that fall within that geographic “arc” are potential trouble spots.  And, given their projected population growth rates, these countries comprise an ever growing percentage of the world’s population.  The “arc” is getting steadily larger.

One of the reasons that fertility rates and population growth rates remain so high in these areas is that contraceptive services are still not universally available and in some areas virtually non-existent. The unmet need for family planning in Kenya is estimated at 23.9 percent.  In Pakistan, it’s 31.8 percent.  In war-torn Somalia, where the TFR is 6.8, only one percent of women use modern methods of contraception.

The recent mayhem in Kenya is disturbing, and hopefully it will soon be quelled, but it’s not really surprising. More than half of the country is still living below the poverty line, and with millions of unemployed youth the potential for renewed violence will always be present in Kenya…as it will in more than a dozen other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.  Demographic pressures are not the only cause of unrest in countries like Kenya, but we ignore those pressures at our peril…and their’s.

An editorial in yesterday's Georgia's Athen's Banner-Herald questioned how Georgia, now the fifth-fastest growing state, will be able to deal with the growing water and transportation needs of the state.  According to the Census Bureau, Georgia's population grew by 202,670 people during the year ending June 30, 2007, a 2.2 percent increase.  The editorial said that the growth rate raises:

....very real questions as to whether the state can, or even should, sustain the kind of population growth in which more than two Sanford Stadium-sized crowds come into the state during the course of 12 months.

The first question, brought home by the continuing drought, is whether this state can count on having enough water - a resource that is fundamental to residential development and much of industrial and commercial development - available in years to come. The drought has suggested, in metropolitan Atlanta as well as in this part of Northeast Georgia, that public water suppliers may be approaching the practical limits of their ability to provide a reliable supply of that basic resource.

When they convene next week in Atlanta, state lawmakers will consider a statewide water management plan. But even with such a plan in place, local governments will, in the future, still have to confront the question of whether their local water supplies can support the kind of business and industrial development that is needed to sustain a growing population.

Water management was not the only concern raised by the editorial:

Another question with a direct bearing on whether the state can sustain the kind of population growth it has experienced during the past several years is how its officials propose to deal with transportation issues. Specifically, the question is whether the state will continue to believe that it can pave its way out of congestion, or whether it might be time to make meaningful investments in public transit alternatives such as buses and trains.

The editors concluded that:

....as the perfect storm of population growth, traffic gridlock and water-supply issues has gathered across much of Georgia, it has become apparent that this state simply must get smarter about handling its development, or it will risk not having any development to handle.

Georgia, of course, is not the only fast growing state facing such challenges.  There is a news report ("More Blistering Heat Likely in 2008") this week from Arizona, which is now the second fastest growing state, indicates that drought and record temperatures are likely to persist in 2008. 

This past year was the second-hottest ever in the Valley’s recorded weather history, which dates back to the 1890s. According to the National Weather Service, 2007’s average temperature was 76.4 degrees — 2.2 degrees above normal and just a shade less than the 77 posted in 1989....Phoenix’s top 10 warmest years, six have come in this decade, and weather experts believe nobody should be surprised if 2008 continues that trend....The Valley’s rainfall in 2007 fell short of the norm yet again. The official gauge at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport took in 5.05 inches, just 60 percent of normal. This is the ninth straight year, and 11th in 12, when the precipitation fell short of average.

The report also quoted Climatologist Randy Cerveny, as saying that population growth, not just climate, is also contributing to the rising temperatures in the greater Phoenix area:

What’s causing the rising temperatures isn’t just that we live in a desert, but that we live in a booming desert megalopolis measuring almost 60 miles from Johnson Ranch to Sun City West. Cerveny said all that asphalt, concrete and stucco absorbs heat during the day, creating an effect known as the urban heat island.

“Consequently, the city is a lot hotter, on the order of about 5 to 8 degrees warmer than the outlying deserts,” Cerveny said. “So, we end up with much warmer temperatures than we did a hundred years ago, say, when this was all desert.”