A few years ago, I met Baratu Lee, a young mother living in a remote village in eastern Sierra Leone. She was – she thought – about 27 years old, and she already had 10 children. The first had been born when she was 12 or 13.
The infant mortality rate in Sierra Leone, at around 90 per thousand children, is among the highest in the world. Three of Baratu's children died before their first birthday. It is little wonder that women in the world's poorest countries continue to produce large families, knowing that too many of their children will die in infancy.
Even in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, with what should be a flourishing oil-based economy, the fertility rate is still close to six children per woman. At independence in 1960, Nigeria's population was around 45 million; by the end of the current century, according to United Nations estimates, it will have reached 800 million.
Paul Morland's fascinating book is full of figures like these, but the picture he paints is far more nuanced than the usual one favoured by the doom-mongers: yes, the global population is continuing to grow, but he chooses the word ‘tide' in his book title for a reason. Tides rise, but they also fall.
By the end of the century, he says, the global population growth picture is likely to be very different from what we see today. ‘Demography is a car that first trundles along slowly, then reaches tremendous speed and most recently has decelerated so significantly that in the course of this century it is very likely to have ground to a halt.' In Japan, for example, the latest government figures suggest that by 2040 the population will have shrunk from
126.7 million to 110 million, and that the workforce will have contracted by more than 20 per cent.
