Behind the scenes of rage and riot in Egypt lies a great deal of despair. It’s something that few in power, and even the intervention by the US overnight to urge all asides to talk, can help fix.
At something around 84 million Egypt is by far the most numerous Arab nation. The problem is that the population has just put on a growth spurt again. It is now growing at the rate of around 32 new Egyptian lives per 1,000. Within the next quarter century Egypt’s population will be well over 100 million.
In 1952, when Gamal Abdul Nasser seized power, the population was just 20 million.
Many of the new Egyptians are very poor indeed, earning as little as a dollar a day and dependent on government handouts of food, bread especially. The very poor don’t riot – but they are the underlying factor of Egypt’s perennial crisis.
The growing numbers of poor are the unwritten feature of the new instability in countries like Brazil, and Turkey even – though both countries have been deemed entrepreneurial successes by think tanks and international banks.
The rise and fall, shifting, migration and aging of populations is fascinating – but takes up surprisingly little space in the headlines and front page of world news. But it should.
The latest UN World Population Report, out last month, shows global population is growing slightly faster than previous UN predictions.
By 2050 there will be 9.6 billion humans on the planet – up by more than 300 million on previous forecasts.
Most of that growth will be in fragile developing countries – whereas the ‘developed’ or first world population will stick at the present population of 1.3 billion.
Population growth is not a problem in itself. It becomes a problem in the poorest and most fragile nations and communities. A great deal can be done, and is being done, to alleviate global poverty – as the Economist pointed out in a remarkably upbeat article to greet the UN report last month.
New technologies mustn’t be allowed to let the very poorest fall even further behind. The bottom billion poor must not become the bottom billions, plural.
Egypt cannot be expected to fix its bottom millions alone. It should be our responsibility, too.
