Mar. 10, 01:00 EDT
Barbara Crossette
NEW YORK TIMESUNITED NATIONS — For decades, experts assumed that the largest developing nations, the home of hundreds of millions in big families, would push the global population to a precarious 10 billion people by the end of this century.
Now, there are indications that women in rural villages and the teeming cities of Brazil, Egypt, India and Mexico are proving those predictions wrong. This week, demographers from around the world will meet at the United Nations to reassess the outlook and possibly lower the estimate by about 1 billion people this century. In India alone, by 2100 there may be 600 million fewer people than predicted.
The decline in birthrates in these nations defies almost all conventional wisdom. Planners once said — and some still argue — that birthrates would not slow until poverty and illiteracy gave way to higher living standards and better education opportunities. It now seems that women are not waiting. Furthermore, a few demographers are venturing to say that neither government policies nor foreign aid in family planning were critical factors.
Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. population division, said: "A woman in a village making a decision to have one or two or at most three children is a small decision in itself. But when these get compounded by millions and millions and millions of women in India and Brazil and Egypt, it has global consequences.''
Chamie said it had been assumed that fertility rates in developing countries — the number of births, on average, per woman — would fall at best only to what is known as replacement level. That number is 2.1. In big countries, even that pace would add a huge number to an already large population base before the trend eventually moderates.
Demographers may now be willing to say that fertility rates in big developing countries may drop below the replacement level, and sooner than most would have thought possible.
That would follow the trend already established in industrial countries, where the population slowdown has caused concerns about shrinking labour forces and aging populations.
Just as women are pushing for a larger role in economic life around the world, they are also apparently becoming more assertive within families. "We're breaking both the fertility floor and the glass ceiling," Chamie said.
In India, Gita Sen, professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, said there were important cultural factors at work.
"Fertility in India is declining and it is declining faster than many people had expected," she said. One reason is "that with increasing awareness on the part of women, they are being able to control their own fertility much better."
"It seems to start in one village and then spread to other places around that area," she said.
"Attitudes are changing, and people are watching what their neighbours are doing."
With declining infant mortality, mothers become more confident their babies will survive, she added, and so they can have fewer children. She and other experts say urbanization also eases some familial controls on women, and makes contraceptive pills or devices easier to find.
In Brazil, women have reduced fertility levels without a national family planning policy, writes Ana Maria Goldani of UCLA in a paper prepared for the conference. Brazil's fertility rate has tumbled, to 2.27 from 6.15 in the last half century, and it continues to fall for reasons that Goldani says are only now being analyzed.
Gelson Fonseca, Brazil's U.N. ambassador, said television was important. Brazilians see small and apparently happy families in TV shows and think about emulating them.
John Caldwell of the Australian National University urges caution in heralding a general decline in population. In a paper prepared for this week's meeting, he writes of a "loss of fervour" in the developing world for further fertility decline.
