Brazil will soon start to shrink

At the beginning of this millennium I was a contributor to a site created by radio personality Eliakim Araújo, and, on one occasion, I wrote that the world population was going to start declining.

That immediately prompted irate readers to inundate the site, known as “Straight From The Newsroom”, with furious missives claiming that the opposite was true, because they still believed in stories from the 70’s and the 80’s claiming that the planet was going through a “population explosion”.

It is true that during the last 100 years the planet’s population quadrupled, jumping from two billion to eight billion. But it became clear that there were signs in the early XXI century that this growth was dwindling and would soon be replaced by depopulation.

The population of a country will remain stable only if women give birth on average to 2.1 children with the 0.1 fraction being due to infant mortality. Not all children grow old enough to procreate.

At the beginning of the 21st century there already were several countries, especially in Europe and the Far East, with birth rates lower than this “replacement level”.

in Brazil, the average birth rate for women fell from 2.3 in 2000 to 1.57 in 2023.

The consequence is that, beginning in 2041, the Brazilian population, that right now stands at 212,812,000, will start to decline.

As for the rest of the planet, population growth occurs almost exclusively in Africa, where countries are less urbanized and people in rural areas still rely on their children for labour

But even there, the tendency is towards a lower birth rate. In Brazil it is no longer a tendency. It has become reality.