3. DEMOGRAPHIC DECREASE AND THE AGEING OF POPULATIONS

These disastrous policies stand in total contradiction to the actual demographic trends, as they are revealed in statistics and the analysis of available data. For 30 years, the rate of growth of the world's population has continued to decline at a regular and significant rate. At this point, following an impressive drop in their fertility, 51 countries in the world (out of 185) are no longer able to replace their population. To be precise, these 51 countries represent 44 percent of the population of the world. In other words, the total fertility rate (TFR) in these countries, that is to say, the number of children born of each woman, is lower than 2.1. This is the minimum level of fertility needed for the replacement of the population in a country which has optimum public health conditions.

This situation is found to be the same on almost every continent. There is below-replacement-level fertility in America (the United States, Canada, Cuba, and most of the Caribbean islands), in Asia (Georgia, Thailand, China, Japan and South Korea), in Oceania (Australia) and in almost all the forty countries of Europe. On this continent, the effect of aging on population leads to depopulation, with the number of deaths surpassing the number of births. This negative balance is occurring in 13 countries already, including Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Russia, Spain and Italy.

Beyond the question of ageing, the most problematic question is that of demographic decline, with all the adverse consequences that such a decline can bring about. In the near future, the number of countries whose fertility rate is below replacement level will multiply. In the same way, the number of countries whose mortality rate is higher than its birth rate will increase.

Such realities, which have been familiar to demographers for a long time, still seem hidden from the media, public opinion and those responsible for public policy decisions. They are passed over in silence at the international conferences, as was evident, for example, during the Cairo Conference in 1994, and during the Beijing Conference in 1995.