Population, family planning, and the future of Africa.

• Author: Sai, Frederick T.

In most African countries, over half the population is under the age of 15. Even if all of those countries were to shift to having just two children, beginning tonight, their total populations would continue to grow for another two decades. Nevertheless, there is hopeful evidence of progress.

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Africa's colonial legacy--exploitation, artificial borders, too many small and unviable countries after independence--is the chief source of a catalog of misfortunes that is by now familiar: civil and regional conflict, famine and hunger, land degradation, corruption and ill health. Economically, sub-Saharan Africa lags pitifully behind all other developing regions. Its GDP per-capita growth rate during the 1990s was actually negative. In 2002, the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, with 688 million people, managed a collective gross domestic product of $319 billion--a per-capita average of well under $2 per day. With 11 percent of the world's population, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 2 percent of world trade.

Food production has fallen since independence. Although a net food exporter before 1960, Africa has become more dependent on food imports and food aid over the last three decades. From 1974 through 1990, food imports in sub-Saharan Africa rose by 185 percent and food aid by 295 percent. In 1995, food imports accounted for 17 percent of total food needs.

The human condition in Africa remains as daunting as ever. Of the 34 countries on the UN list of Low Human Development indicators, all but four are in Africa. This inevitably means that illiteracy rates are high, infrastructure is inadequate, and health services are rudimentary. The debt burden has certainly been a major constraint: in 2002 Africa's total debt stood at $204 billion, 64 percent of GDP.

Some progress has been made in reducing political instability and civil unrest, but much more needs to be done to sustain economic growth, durable peace, and equitable income distribution. At this writing (July 2004), hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea have ended, but the peace is uneasy. Civil wars in Angola and Sierra Leone have also ended.

In Sudan a peace agreement is pending, but widespread violence in Darfur continues. The outside armies that were fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have withdrawn, but instability and ethnic conflict persist. Resettlement and reconstruction are still slow in such countries as Burundi, Rwanda, Liberia, and Somalia. The flows of refugees from these conflicts have caused major disruption to neighboring countries.

Two Steps Forward ...

These are all difficult problems, but one factor--rapid population growth--has certainly made a lot of them more difficult to solve. It has often been said that the one thing Africa has is plenty of land and that consequently population growth is not a bad thing. It is true that Africa's population density, 249 people per 1,000 hectares, is low compared with the world average of 443. But this simplistic view does not take into account that the natural carrying capacity of much of the land in Africa is low and subject to the vagaries of a capricious climate. It also conveniently ignores the fact that it is the rapidity of population growth which causes so much stress and suffering. Growth rates of over 2.5 percent per year are far higher than those experienced in the past by the now-developed world, and by most other developing regions today. These are occurring largely because death rates have fallen due to immunization and improvements in health care.

But fertility has remained high. In recent decades, urbanization and the breakdown of traditional values have led to more frequent childbearing outside socially accepted norms. African women have suffered most, and the high rate...