Mothers rest alongside their newborns in Manila in Sept. 2020. The Philippines is experiencing a dizzying plunge in fertility, which has gone from 2.7 children per woman in 2017 to 1.9 in 2022.ELOISA LOPEZ/Reuters
There has been a great deal of commentary on falling fertility rates in developed countries – including Canada, which has seen its birth rate drop from 1.6 children per woman to 1.26 in less than a decade.
But not enough attention is being paid to an even more dramatic phenomenon: the collapse, in just the past few years, of fertility rates in developing countries.
Even those of us who have been predicting, in defiance of United Nations estimates, that the global population will peak mid-century and then begin to decline didn’t expect to see the numbers plunging like this. The accelerating collapse of birth rates in the developing world is nothing less than astonishing.
A country needs to maintain a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 children per woman to sustain its population. You may have heard that China, whose fertility rate is now down to one child per woman, is losing millions of people each year. But you may not have heard that the TFR in India, now the world’s most populous country, is also collapsing. It went from six children per woman in 1960 to three in 2000 to fewer than two today.
The country has delayed its census, so reliable data are hard to come by. But Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes India’s TFR could be as low as 1.6, the result of improving health care, education and access to contraception.
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A study of global fertility rates published in the May, 2024, edition of The Lancet predicts that by 2050 India’s TFR will be down to 1.29. By then, the country could be losing population.
The Philippines is experiencing a dizzying plunge in fertility, which fell in only five years from 2.7 children per woman in 2017 to 1.9 in 2022. That country could start losing population by 2040.
India, the Philippines and China are the three largest source countries of immigrants to Canada. But the sources are drying up.
Latin American fertility rates are falling incredibly quickly as well. Argentine economist and demographer Rafael Rofman said his country’s TFR has declined faster in the past six years than in the past six decades. “In 2024, there will be roughly 30 percent fewer 4-year-olds entering Argentine preschools than there were in 2020,” he told Americas Quarterly.
The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics predicts in a new study that the country’s population will begin to decline in 2041. Several other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean – including Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica and Cuba – have ultra-low fertility rates of between 1.1 and 1.3.
But the most amazing news comes from countries with large Muslim populations, which typically have much higher fertility rates than non-Muslim countries.
Indonesia, with the largest Muslim population in the world, is now at replacement rate. Turkey’s TFR has fallen to 1.5, which poses “an existential threat” to the country’s future, according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Regional powerhouse Iran has also fallen to that level.
And a study published last week by the Middle East Fertility Society reported that the TFR of most Arab countries fell by double-digit figures between 2011 and 2021. Jordan led the pack, at 24 per cent.
The report, which described the fall as “epidemiological,” urged regional leaders to confront “the factors and threats associated with the fertility decline.”
Too late. Once women obtain enough education and autonomy to decide for themselves how many children they will have, they invariably choose to have fewer, and nothing can change their minds.
Even in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest birth rates in the world, those rates are falling dramatically in some countries. Nigeria is set to become the world’s third-most populous country by mid-century, but the fertility rate there shrank from 5.8 to 4.6 – more than a whole baby – between 2016 and 2021.
In 2018, when Darrell Bricker and I studied Kenya for our book Empty Planet, the fertility rate was 3.9. In only six years it has fallen to 2.75, close to replacement rate, according to the Lancet study. Namibia is at 2.8, and South Africa is down to 2.1.
We can debate the environmental benefits, economic costs and geopolitical implications of global population decline. But one thing is beyond debate: It’s coming at us faster than anybody thought.