Housing the Urban Poor in China

Last year UN-Habitat lauded China for reducing the percentage of its urban population living in slums from 37 to 28 in the previous ten years. This week's Economist takes the story further, suggesting that China is using a program of housing the poor in government-subsidized housing as a way of creating not only better housing in its cities, but also jobs.

By unofficial estimates, the average price of a flat in the capital has risen between five and ten-fold in the past decade. So Li Keqiang, who is likely to become China’s next prime minister, is trying to show his mettle by sorting out the problem. Under his direction, local governments have embarked on a campaign to build unprecedented quantities of social housing for the urban poor. Officials have been claiming a spectacular success, but persuading citizens to share their joy is proving another matter.The central government is not just trying to woo the poor. It also sees the project as a way of pepping up the economy at a time of global gloom. This year’s target represents a 70% increase in the construction of social housing compared with 2010 (see chart). In March the government announced a goal of completing 36m units by 2015. If three people on average live in one flat, this would be the equivalent of building new housing for the combined populations of Britain and Poland.

There are concerns, however. For one thing, the government is paying less than 25 percent of the construction costs, so there is skepticism that projects will be completed.

Critics also point out that the social-housing programme will mostly benefit urban residents, whose household-registration certificates, or hukou, identify them as city residents. Migrants from the countryside usually find it difficult to get hold of such certificates, even if they have lived in a city for many years. Most local governments prefer not to hand them out, because to do so would commit them to providing the holder with the full range of welfare benefits.

Global Progress Against Malaria

BBC News today covers a new report just published by the World Health Organization (WHO) showing that progress is being made in lowering the global death toll from malaria.

There has been a fall of just over 20% in the number of deaths from malaria worldwide in the past decade, the World Health Organization says.

In 2000, WHO estimated that 1,000,000 people died from malaria, but by 2009 it is estimated that this number dropped below 800,000. This is still high, of course, and Africa continues to be disproportionately affected, but it is moving in the right direction.

A new report said that one-third of the 108 countries where malaria was endemic were on course to eradicate the disease within 10 years.
Experts said if targets continued to be met, a further three million lives could be saved by 2015.
It has been eradicated from three countries since 2007 - Morocco, Turkmenistan and Armenia.
The Roll Back Malaria Partnership aims to eliminate malaria in another eight to 10 countries by the end of 2015, including the entire WHO European Region.

Note that malaria is not caused by just one parasite, so this complicates the fight against the disease.

There are four types of human malaria:

• Plasmodium falciparum

• Plasmodium vivax

• Plasmodium malariae

• Plasmodium ovale.

Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax are the most common.Plasmodium falciparum is the most deadly [and is most common in Africa, which is why death rates are so high there]In recent years, some human cases of malaria have also occurred withPlasmodium knowlesi – a monkey malaria that occurs in certain forested areas of South-East Asia.

Muddling Toward Seven Billion

The press is starting to generate buzz surrounding the birth of the person who will represent the seventh billion person alive at the same time on the planet. MSNBC, for example, picked up on the Associated Press story today, building on press releases that started coming out today from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This is, of course, serious stuff and the seventh billion provides a good opportunity to contemplate where the world is demographically:

In Western Europe, Japan and Russia, it will be an ironic milestone amid worries about low birthrates and aging populations. In China and India, the two most populous nations, it's an occasion to reassess policies that have already slowed once-rapid growth.
But in Burundi, Uganda and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the demographic news is mostly sobering as the region staggers under the double burden of the world's highest birthrates and deepest poverty. The regional population of nearly 900 million could reach 2 billion in 40 years at current rates, accounting for about half of the projected global population growth over that span.
"Most of that growth will be in Africa's cities, and in those cities it will almost all be in slums where living conditions are horrible," said John Bongaarts of the Population Council, a New York-based research organization.The executive director of the U.N. Population Fund, former Nigerian health minister Babatunde Osotimehin, describes the 7 billion milestone as a call to action — especially in the realm of enabling adolescent girls to stay in school and empowering women to control the number of children they have.
"It's an opportunity to bring the issues of population, women's rights and family planning back to center stage," he said in an interview. "There are 215 million women worldwide who need family planning and don't get it. If we can change that, and these women can take charge of their lives, we'll have a better world."

The UN Population Fund has somewhat arbitrarily set 31 October as the day when the milestone will be reached. In truth, we can only approximate the world's population size with models, and there are two counters out there right now at reputable websites and they don't actually agree on the number of people. The US Census Bureau's world population clock is a little "slower" than the one at the UN-sponsored website at 7 Billion People/ 7 Billion Actions. Check them out and keep track as we move toward seven billion...are we there yet?

The Latest Baby Bust

The Pew Research Center recently published a report summarizing birth data for the United States, showing that the number of births has declined steadily since the birth boom of 2007. These are the same data that I commented on a couple of months ago, but researchers at Pew have nicely repackaged them. The story is clear--the housing bubble brought a baby boom, and the housing bust and recession has done the opposite for births. NPR interviewed Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, and his comments are very much in line with my own thoughts.  


However, I will say that the graph on the Pew Research Center website related to this story is a little misleading, since the vertical axis is severely truncated. We are looking at a lot of variability around an average of more than 4 million births per year. If the axis went all the down to zero, the graph would seem far less dramatic. Furthermore, if you just chop out the boom years from 2003 through 2007, the 4.01 million births in 2009 simply continues the slow downward trend from 2002, when there were 4.02 million births. The boom brought about the building of more houses than the economy could afford, and we have to hope that it did not bring about the births of more children than were wanted.

More Good Reasons to Become Vegetarian

My wife and I are vegetarian for animal rights reasons, but I have noted before that if people ate less meat, the planet would generally be better off. A new study about to be published in Nature makes the important point that vegetarianism, or at least less meat-eating, may be the way by which we will figure out how to feed the growing population.

A newly published blueprint for doubling the global food supply includes a key suggestion about how everyone can contribute to this increasingly pressing ambition: eat less meat.
An international team of researchers has developed solutions to respond to what it calls one the greatest challenges of the 21st century — boosting food production while slashing the environmental impact of agriculture.
McGill University's Navin Ramankutty, one of the team leaders on the paper, said the research is the first of its kind to quantify both food production and ecological consequences in the same analysis.
He added that it's also the first study to examine these factors while considering the specific environmental characteristics of different regions of the planet.
Ramankutty said limiting meat consumption is one of several ways to increase food production.
He estimates that simply dedicating prime cropland to growing food for humans — rather than growing biofuels or feed for animals — could spike the global output by nearly 50 per cent.
The study says that three-quarters of the world's agricultural land is devoted to raising livestock, either for grazing or for growing feed.
Ramankutty added that beef is the most resource-intensive animal product of them all.
The research also calls for improved crop management to increase yields; an end to deforestation to make way for farmland; and a cutback on food waste, which amounts for as much as half of the planetary food production.

In truth, none of these ideas is really new, but it is important to keep getting the message out there. The more mud we throw on the wall, the more likely it is that some will stick.