Demographic Bulge

Friday, 12 November 2010 03:46

Written by Neric Acosta

The sight of homeless human beings – infants, children, mothers, fathers – just like every one of us, sprawled on urban side streets and narrow alleys at night, makeshift carts or claptrap material serving as dwellings, jars the senses. Along the countless esteros and fetid creeks that meander through the metropolis, or under bridges and inside culverts, thousands of families build what passes as homes: scraps of wood or tin, discarded tarpaulins, old rubber tires and flimsy planks.

Metro Manila has a daytime population of 14 million, or 15% of the over 95 million inhabitants of the whole country, jostling for space in a highly-urbanized area roughly 2% of the archipelago’s land mass. Over half of this population is considered to belong to the sector of informal settlers, or derisively called “squatters” – no defined property rights over their places of shelter. Like the well-known favelas of Rio de Janiero, the squalid environs of teeming informal settlements all over the city increasingly define the urban Manila landscape.

This week’s headlines have brought us face to face with the harsh reality of a demographic bulge. “Philippine population growth rate the fastest in the region,” one daily averred. From the time President Noynoy Aquino took office on June 30 this year, an estimated 600,000 new Filipinos have been born, around 5,000 babies every day. Considering the predominantly young demographic – 65% below the age of 35 – the present population growth rate of 2.04%, higher than any of those in the region, is not expected to slow down for at least another generation.

The Population Commission states that one in every four women aged 15 to 24, especially in rural areas where access to schools is limited, is already child-bearing. Even if couples at this reproductive stage were to have only two children, the country’s population would continue to burgeon for another 50 years. If we add close to two million people every year – one, say, Davao City every year – that would mean more than 12 million more Filipinos by the time President Aquino finishes his term in 2016. If the Population Commission says there will be 95 million Filipinos by the end of the year, there will be 108 or 110 million by 2016, more than double the population when President Aquino’s mother came to power in 1986.

What does this all mean? Where do we see the country in the next 10, 20, 50 years? Some groups or organized religions like the Catholic Church which oppose any public programs on family planning or reproductive health, argue that population is not the problem, but widespread corruption and the inequitable distribution or use of resources. There is enough, they say, for an increasingly growing population, and the world is not wanting in the resources to feed everyone.

What such arguments overlook is the fact that even with more equity and less social disparities, there is such a thing as the earth’s “carrying capacity” and that the bounties of nature, while seemingly abundant, are finite. Any ecologist will tell us that when the ecosystems that provide us with life-support processes and services – clean air, clean water, forests, coastal resources, agricultural land – are strained or damaged, human life is itself imperiled and societies made unsustainable.

Surely a population of 100 million Filipinos, and another 10 million or more in the next decade, have far-reaching implications – on food security, education, health, employment, economic opportunity. Not to mention the deleterious impacts on the environment and the growing vulnerabilities of human communities that arise from climate change.

This behooves government and all sectors of society to take a hard, long look at what faces us as Filipinos and common inhabitants of one fragile planet – and peer into the future – so as to chart the kind of path that sustains all forms of life sustainably, and saves us, perchance, from ourselves.

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