‘Bachelor nations’ alarm world experts

The good news about the world population reaching 7 billion is that the average life expectancy has soared to 68, infant mortality has dropped to 46 per 1,000, and the average number of children in a family has plunged by more than half at 2.5.

The bad news: Carbon emissions are expected to rise and the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to grow with more people migrating to the cities from the rural areas, among other challenges.

This was the report released by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Wednesday, launching the five-day countdown to a “global population milestone” of 7 billion estimated to hit by October 31.

Elsewhere, experts warned that skewed gender ratios could fuel the emergence of volatile “bachelor nations” driven by an aggressive competition for brides.

The precise consequences of what French population expert Christophe Guilmoto called the “alarming demographic masculinization” of countries such as India and China as the result of sex-selective abortion remain unclear.

But many demographers believe that the resulting shortage of adult women over the next 50 years will have as deep and pervasive an impact as climate change.

Not a matter of space

At the report’s media launch in Manila, UNFPA representative Ugochi Daniels said the 7-billion figure was as much a “wake-up call” as a breakthrough.

“The issue about population is a critical one for our humanity and for the earth. But let us be clear: It is not a matter of space, [the] question is one of human equity and opportunity,” Daniels said in a speech.

“In any area in the Philippines you go to, from urban to rural, the questions of equitable access to resources and opportunities are the questions we must confront,” she said.

The Philippines continues to be among the countries with the largest population, ranking 12th with 94.9 million people. Nearly 50 percent of these people are cramped in cities as more leave the rural areas to find better opportunities and escape violence or natural disasters.

Globally, the average number of children every woman is expected to have in her childbearing years has dropped from six to 2.5. But Filipino women in the poorest quintile still have an average of six children, “two more than they desire,” according to the report.

It attributed this fact to the lack of access to reproductive health information and services.

Daniels stressed that educating and empowering girls and women would allow them to have fewer children, and that it was also important to “consistently involve” boys and men, the “critical partners” required in the empowerment of women for health and development.

RH info vital

Speaking with reporters later, Daniels said it was vital for young people to have access to information on reproductive health.

“Therefore, the government needs to put in place the policies required so that people can have access to this information,” she said.

The controversial reproductive health (RH) bill continues to languish in the Senate and the House.

Opposed mainly by the Catholic Church, the bill seeks to provide Filipino couples an informed choice on ways to plan their families, and provide sex education to schoolchildren at a certain age.

In her presentation Wednesday, Inquirer columnist and retired economics professor Solita Monsod identified reducing carbon emissions as among the challenges confronting the growing world.

“Population growth pressures the environment, [and when] the environment fights back, health, productivity and food security [are affected],” Monsod said.

She said that while more people were living longer, space and development as well as health services should also be improved.

Monsod also said that in the Philippines, people continued to be deprived of information on family planning because of traditions, gender inequality and misconceptions.

Skewed gender ratios

On the other hand, the statistics behind the warnings on skewed gender ratios are grimly compelling.

Nature provides an unbending biological standard for the sex ratio at birth of 104-106 males to every 100 females. Any significant divergence from that narrow range can only be explained by abnormal factors.

In India and Vietnam, the figure is around 112 boys for every 100 girls. In China it is almost 120 to 100, and in some places higher than 130.

And the trend is spreading—to regions like the South Caucasus, where Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia all post birth ratios of more than 115 to 100, and further west to Serbia and Bosnia.

Global awareness of the problem was raised back in 1990 with an article by the Nobel-Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen that carried the now famous title: “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.”

Demographers say that figure is now more than 160 million—women selected out of existence by the convergence of traditional preferences for sons, declining fertility, and, most crucially, the prevalence of cheap prenatal sex-determination technology.

Marriage squeeze

As many as half a million female fetuses are estimated to be aborted each year in India, according to a study by the British medical journal, The Lancet.

“Earlier villagers had to go to the city to get a sonogram (ultrasound),” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the nonprofit Population Foundation of India. “Today sonographers are going into the villages to cater to people who want sons.”  Even if the sex ratio at birth returns to normal in India and China within 10 years, men in both countries will still face a “marriage squeeze” for decades to come, Guilmoto said.

“Not only would these men have to marry significantly older, but this growing marriage imbalance would also lead to a rapid rise in male bachelorhood… [It is] an important change in countries where almost everyone used to get married,” he said.

How that change might manifest itself is hotly debated, although nearly everyone agrees there is no foreseeable upside.

Some forecast an increase in polyandry (in which a woman has two or more husbands at a time) and sex tourism, while others predict cataclysmic scenarios with the rise of male-surplus societies where sexual predation, violence and conflict are the norms.

Threat of gender imbalance

A particularly alarmist note was sounded years ago by political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer, who wrote that Asian countries with too many men posed a security threat to the West.

“High-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war,” they said.

Mara Hvistendahl, a correspondent for Science magazine and author of the recently published “Unnatural Selection,” said fears of full-scale wars were unfounded, and pointed out that India remained a thriving democracy despite its shockingly high gender imbalance.

But Hvistendahl did agree with the underlying premise.

“Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live in,” she stressed.

“Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent,” she said, adding that leaders in both China and India had spoken of the threat gender imbalance was posing to social stability.

There is “no silver bullet,” admitted Guilmoto. He said the first priority was to make sure the problem was properly publicized, and not just in the developing world.

“In some countries in eastern Europe, people are absolutely not aware of what is going on,” he warned. With an AFP report