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.