A study published in the Lancet shows that in half the countries of the world there has been a remarkable decline in the number of children women are having, which means that in over half the countries of the world, particularly in economically developed countries (Europe, the US, South Korea and Australia) there are insufficient children to maintain population size. In many societies there are more grandparents than grandchildren.

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. Last year the fertility rate had all but halved to 2.4 children per woman. There is a huge variation between nations: in Niger, the birth rate is 7.1, while in Cyprus women are having one child, on average. In the UK, the rate is 1.7, similar to most Western European countries.

As for China, since 1950, the Chinese population has increased from around half a billion inhabitants to 1.4 billion, and is also facing lower fertility rates (only 1.5 in 2017). It has recently moved away from its famous one child policy. For
every 100 Chinese girls born there were 117 boys which “implies substantial sex-selective abortion and even the possibility of female infanticide”. This means even more children need to be born to have a stable population.

Whenever a country’s average fertility rate drops below approximately 2.1 populations will eventually start to shrink. This does not mean the number of people living in these countries is falling, at least not yet, as the size of a population is a mix of the fertility rate, death rate and migration. Half the world’s nations are still producing enough children to grow, but as more countries advance economically, more will have lower fertility rates.

The fall in fertility rate is not down to sperm counts or any of the things that normally come to mind when thinking of fertility. Instead it is being put down to three key factors:

Fewer deaths in childhood, meaning women have fewer babies
Greater access to contraception
More women in education and work

The answer? Without migration, countries will face ageing and shrinking populations, which might not be so bad as long as society can adjust to it. For instance, the idea of retiring at 68, the current maximum in the UK, will be unsustainable and will have to change. Another possibility is encouraging women to have more children, although this has not been historically very successful (Italy, for instance). On the plus side a smaller population would benefit the environment.

(Based on a World Health Organisation report called “Global Burden of Diseases” that has been running since the 1990s)

Were you a harmless, nameless tree, just standing there,
Motionless and proud, your boughs spread wide,
The product of a hundred fruitful summers,
Surviving the convulsions of Caribbean hurricanes,
Cold fronts and brisk north winds,
You might neither notice nor much care about
The arrival, perching quietly, of yet another bird.
Thousands stop from year to year,
Resting on their pilgrimage
To Antigua or St. Kitts and back.
You welcome them.  They chatter. It passes time.
 
But be alert! One single bird could be your nemesis,
Sitting, resting, eating lunch – –
A juicy fig from some distantly related tree.
The bird pecks. It flies.  You give it no more thought.
But resting in a crevice between your trunk and bough
It might have left behind a single seed,
Worried fiercely from the dark, ripe fig,
Falling ignored and overlooked.
Beware! This solitary seed in good conditions sprouts
And little tendrils grow, vertical and true,
Descend beside your trunk and seek the soil below.
 
Well, no problem.  All are welcome here.
These are the tropics, just hang out, relaxed.
Trees have a long perspective and are cool.
This is not the first parasite you’ve met – –
Vegetable, animal, lichen, fungus.
All in all they bring some mutual benefits
In the relentless struggle for survival.
Lulled into a sense of false security,
You’re pre-occupied with problems common to your kin – –
Nutrients, moisture, humidity, all aspects of dendrology,
Not to mention the weather and condition of your bark.
You fail to see the lurking danger till it’s right upon you.
 
Suddenly you do become aware!
The roots of your tenant tree have dropped and rooted in the soil,
Thickened and become a tough and healthy wood,
Like pinions or cross-braces screwed into the earth.
Where the aerial roots cross, they fuse and merge,
Creating a hard, thick lattice of stout roots.
It cribs, confines you like a prison.
On windy days you barely move or sway.
You struggle like a ship against a hawser,
Trying to break the bonds that hold you from the sky.
Yes, this crafty Strangler Fig is now in competition
For the nutrients, light, and water you have taken for granted.
 
You panic, struggle, but to no effect.
You stand there, bound, a prisoner in chains,
Making small, if any gains.
Your visitor’s no vampire, sucking at your blood,
But battens on you, using up your vigor and your strength,
In fruitless struggle, using little effort of its own.
You cease protesting, give in, weaken, rot away.
Where once you stood, a proud and flourishing tree,
There is in time a poor and rotting hulk,
Gently decaying in the Florida half-light,
Attracting the attention of beetles, grubs and other mites,
The vultures and hyenas of the vegetable world.
 
In your place, your very own spot,
Now stands a sinister, shapeless mass of crisscross roots,
Huge and spreading, center-less, without a form,
Impenetrable, jungle-like and dense.
The irony is that this triumphant Strangler Fig,
By its very nature a thousand rather shallow roots,
Is itself vulnerable, in dire and imminent danger.
Whereas you, its host, withstood the weather for a century,
A serious hurricane might well uproot it, blow it down.
Its roots are insubstantial faced with wind and rain;
They loosen in the meager soil, become unstable and give way.
Thus all will be to no avail; the Strangler strangled where it lies,
Bloated and overgrown, a victim of its own success.
Would it had stayed modest, or remained that single seed,
Worried fiercely from a dark, ripe fig,
Falling ignored and overlooked, not so reckless and ambitious.
Too late! It cannot be revived or disentangled now.
Maybe there is some crude justice in the natural world.
 
Robert Hanrott                   
 
The Strangler Fig is also called the Banyan tree.  In India it is called the kalpavriksha, or the wish-fulfilling tree, representing eternal life, because of its host of ever-expanding branches.

Official figures from India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) show that more than 240,000 children were reported missing between 2012 and 2017. While some run away, the majority are taken by human traffickers,

Victims are either kidnapped or lured away from their parents with promises of jobs and education. These children are trafficked to Delhi and other metropolitan cities, where they are placed as domestic help or child labour, or even prostitution.

But it can still be hard to get these children back to their families even after they are rescued. Years may have passed since they were kidnapped, so they often don’t remember details that could help reunite them, such as their address. The sheer number of records also makes it near impossible to search the database manually. It is possible to search what is known as the TrackChild records using names, physical characteristics and the date when the children went missing. But the size of the database and the patchiness of the records make this a daunting task.

However, photos of missing children are held on the TrackChild database, and these photos are now being shared with the Delhi police, who procured commercial facial recognition software and are now creating a system that will allow officers to upload photos of rescued children to see if they have been reported as missing. Subject to feasibility the ministry will integrate facial recognition software directly into the TrackChild portal to allow records to be automatically matched. Trying to connect them using parameters like height or age takes a lot of time, but with facial recognition it’s instant. Over the course of four days, the software compared photos of around 65,000 missing children against roughly 40,000 living in care homes. It matched 2930, who hopefully will be returned to their parents.

That so many children go missing and that all this worthy effort has to go into finding them tells a story about Indian society. On the other hand, at least modern technology is being used by the (very smart) Indian techies to find the children. One up to modern technology.

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States. We should give thanks for the clever system of checks and balances that the Founders, and those who came after them, devised under the Constitution, and which, hopefully, will protect every man, woman and child from the lurch towards what looks like autocratic and unconstitutional political behaviour that is roiling this (and other) country. In particular, we give thanks to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who has defended the independence of the judiciary, which protects our freedoms. Let us hope that the system is robust enough to let us successfully get through this current outburst of partisanship and resume normal service – quickly.

I wish I could be as positive about the robustness of the British system which, with Brexit, is currently in the middle of the most threatening crisis since (fill in your own date – I choose the Norman Conquest!). There the system is under threat, supposedly concealed (but not very well) from an extreme right-wing group who are hoping to seize power and undo all the social good (health, pensions, unemployment pay, assistance to the poor and homeless etc) built up over many years, and to install an oligarchy based on the personal wealth of a few. May Big Business cease its pathetic silence, do something at last and point out that Brexit will impoverish the country. To avoid this disaster would be an Epicurean outcome.