Javid Husain It is ironical that the western countries, whose scholars just a few decades ago were sketching doomsday scenarios with the worlds population outgrowing the production of food and other critical resources, should now be worrying about the negative consequences of stagnant or declining populations. Thanks to innovations, improvements in farming techniques such as the green revolution and widespread adoption of family planning, the fears of mass starvation and other shortages did not come to pass. These trends are likely to continue in the coming decades. According to the United Nations Population Divisions projections, the global population will stabilise at 9.15 billion by 2050 as against 6.83 billion at present. During the same period, the global income is expected to increase at a higher rate than the population. With the concern about the overall size of the world population behind us, the preoccupation of the government leaders, planners and scholars in the next few decades will be increasingly about the composition and the distribution of the world population. A noted US scholar Jack A Goldstone in his article entitled The New Population Bomb, published in the Foreign Affairs journal of January-February, 2010, points out: Twenty-first-century international security will depend less on how many people inhabit the world than on how the global population is composed and distributed: where populations are declining and where they are growing, which countries are relatively older and which are more youthful, and how demog-raphics will influence population movements across regions. Needless to say, the-se factors will also have important implications for the economic growth and prosperity of nations. According to current trends, four historic shifts will take place over the next four decades. Firstly, the relative demographic weight of the wor-lds developed countries will drop by 25 percent because of low birth rates, resulting in lower economic growth rates and shifting economic power to developing countries. Secondly, the developed cou-ntries labour forces will substantially age and decline, adve-rsely affecting their economic growth and dynamism and increasing the demand for immigrant workers. According to some projections, the portion of the global GDP produced by Europe, the United States and Canada will decline from 47 percent in 2003 to about 30 percent in 2050. Thirdly, most of the expected world population growth will be increasingly concentrated in todays poorest, youngest and most heavily Muslim countries which will provide a growing number of immigrant workers for the developed countries. In 2009, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey had a combined population of 960 million. By 2050, their population will increase to 1.5 billion. This development would call for the improvement of relations between Muslim and western societies, if international crises and wars are to be avoided. Fourthly, the shift of the world population from rural to urban areas will continue. By 2050, 70 percent of the world population will be in cities as against 30 percent in 1950 and just over 50 percent in 2010. This shift from the rural to urban areas will have destabilising effects in developing countries in the form of civil unrest, if necessary remedial measures are not adopted by their governments. The foregoing conclusions have important lessons for Pakistans population planners. The first and the foremost lesson is that we should stop treating our people as liabilities, as our population planners have been prone to do in the past, and should start treating them as assets. Thanks to the national population planning programme, Pakistans population growth rate, which used to be as high as 3 percent until 1980s, has declined to 2.6 percent during the period of 1981-98 and further to 1.87 percent by the year 2005. If one takes into account the declining trend in the population growth rate, it is likely that Pakistans actual population in 2050 would perhaps stabilise at the level of 250 million as against the current size of 166 million. Considering the experience of the countries now facing the phenomena of declining and aging of popula-tions, we would be well advised to shift the focus now to the education and healthcare of our growing population to enhance the productivity of our people. In the modern knowledge-driven world, one cannot even think of economic progress in the absence of an educated population. Unfortunately, our governments have assigned very low priorities to health and education in the past despite their declarations to the contrary. Since independence our national expenditure on education has fallen far short of the international norm of 4 percent of GNP. During the last financial year, it was as low as 1.4 percent of GNP. The condition of the health sector in which the national expenditure last year was only 0.5 percent of GNP is even worse. There is an urgent need for reversing this dismal situation and assigning the highest priority to education, particularly in science and technology, and health sectors in terms of allocation of resources in our national plans. This would enable us not only to achieve high economic growth rates, but also to meet the rapidly growing demand for immigrant workers from the developed countries. The presence of well educated Pakistani workers in developed countries in large numbers would increase home remittances, which are expected to be aro-und $9 billion during the current financial year. Further, they would help us in influencing the policies of their countries of residence to our advantage. There has been a gradual shift of the population from the rural to urban areas in Pakistan alth-ough the majority of our people still live in rural areas. In line with the international trend, the process of the urbanisation of the population is likely to gather speed as the weight of the industrial sector increases in the economy and more and more people move out of villages to cities in search of employment. The existing urban infrastructure is woefully inadequate to meet the requirements of the people already living in cities resulting in the emergence of slums and the breakdown of civic amenities. The situation will grow worse, if our governments at the federal and provincial levels do not adopt nec-essary measures to rectify the situation by allocating sufficient resources to the building up of the physical infrastructure of cities both big and small. Our inability to meet the cha-llenges of rapid urbanisation adequately will make us prone to widespread labour strife, periodic violence, terrorism and even revolutions as happened in Europe in the nineteenth century. In fact, the existence of islands of riches in the sea of extreme poverty currently in Pakistan constitutes a highly combustible mixture which is ready to explode with catastrophic consequences for the ruling elite and the country as a whole. Let us hope that our leaders, administrators, businessmen, scholars and opinion makers, realising the gravity of the situation, will wake up from their deep slumber and take necessary corrective measures to change the course of the ship of the state. The writer is a retired ambassador. Email: javid.husain@gmail.com