Demographic Transition How does a country like Haiti end up being a country like the United States?

What factors allow for demographic transition? Increased sanitation Better healthcare More reliable food supplies …all allow people to live longer lives (increase life expectancy) and reduce infant mortality rates All of these allow for decrease in death and birth rates

Demographic Transition Pre-industrial stage: high death and birth rates. Disease, poor medical care, scarce food, high mortality rates, importance of children as workers Transitional stage: occurs because of industrialization, declining death rates due to increased food production and medical care. Birth rates are high because people have not yet grown used to the new economic and social conditions. Population growth surges Industrial stage: widespread industrialization allows for employment, especially for women, children are less important because they do not provide the family with food, birth control is more available, birth rates fall becoming closer to the level of death rates, reducing the population size Post-industrial: low birth and death rates – stable, population may decline slightly, less threat of runaway population growth.

Does demographic transition happen everywhere? No! Population dynamics may be different for developing nations that adopt the Western world’s industrial model rather than devising their own. Transition may fail in cultures that place greater value on childbirth or grant women fewer freedoms. Some scientists warn that there are not enough resources in the world to enable all countries to attain the standard of living now enjoyed by the developed countries. For every country to enjoy the quality of life that the US enjoys, we would need the natural resources of three more planet Earths.

Population policies and family- planning programs are helping around the world Even though industrialization may not be occurring in every country, funding and policies that encourage family planning have been effective in lowering population growth rates in all types of nations. Ex. China’s One Child Policy. Thailand’s gov’t sponsored programs devoted to family planning education and increased contraceptive availability, India has programs that set targets and provide incentives, education, contraception, and reproductive health care

United Nations Population Fund In 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo set goals for 21 years –Universal access to reproductive health services –Universal primary education –Reduce infant mortality rate –Reduce maternal mortality –Increase life expectancy In 1999, a session was held for progress –Reduce illiteracy for women and girls –Enroll girls and boys in primary school –Assure that health care and family planning facilities offer a range of services –Provide skilled birth attendants at births –More people have access for contraceptives –Guarantee that 90% of people have access to information and services about HIV

Poverty is strongly related with population growth Wealthier societies tend to have lower population growth rates whereas poorer societies tend to have higher population growth rates. These rates are a result of the higher birth and infant mortality rates shown by poorer nations. In poorer countries, fewer couples tend to use contraception

Distribution of poverty Because the poorer nations have a higher growth rate, it is estimated that 98% of the next billion people born will be born in the poor, less developed regions This a problem socially as the countries are less able to provide for these people Problem environmentally because of degradation as agriculture destroys land, and over hunting leads to endangered species.

Affluence and Environmental Impact Patterns of affluence and consumption are spread unevenly across the world. The environmental impact of an individual or of a population can be expressed as an ecological footprint – the greater the impact, the larger the footprint Population problem does not lie entirely with the developing world – increase in consumption, number of households Increased consumption worse than increased population?

The wealth gap can lead to conflict In1999, the richest 1/5 of the world’s people possessed 82x the income of the poorest 1/5. The richest 20% used 86% of the world’s resources 14% of global resources – energy, food, water, other essentials – left for the remaining 80% of the world to share Because of unequal distribution, one of the major tensions throughout the world is between the haves and the have-nots.

Impact of HIV/AIDS

More than 1 in 5 people in Southern African nations are HIV +, 1 in 4 students at the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa Between 2000 and 2020, 68 million premature deaths in the 48 countries most affected Not only is AIDS killing millions of people, it is leaving behind millions of orphans (40 million African children by 2010). Of the 40 million people around the world infected with HIV in 2002, 28.5 million live in Sub-Saharan Africa