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Home >2002 Regional Conference > Opening Speech
IUSSP President's Speech during the Opening Ceremony
Your Royal Highness, Mr President of the Chulalongkorn university, Dear Colleagues, Ladies and gentlemen,
It is a very great pleasure for me to be here, as president of IUSSP, for the opening ceremony of the first IUSSP regional conference in this part of the World.
First of all, Your Royal Highness, on behalf of the Council of the union, I would like to express how deeply honored we and all our members feel by the attention your gracious majesty pays to us and to all the participants in this Conference by having accepted to preside over the inaugural ceremony. We are very grateful for such a recognition of the importance of population studies.
I also would like to thank very much the Chulalongkorn university for kindly hosting the Conference and to express my gratitude to the College of Population Studies for having worked so much to make it a success. As you already mentioned, Mr President, several IUSSP seminars have been hosted by Chulalongkorn university with noteworthy expertise, and, naturally, when looking for a nice place and a reliable partner to organize a South-East Asian conference we thought of the CPS, Bangkok, and we were very glad to get in agreement with this well known institution.
As you probably know, IUSSP gathers two thousand scientists from various disciplines and from many countries all around the world who are interested in population studies. Every four years, it organizes a general congress, at which are presented the most recent research findings in every population field at every geographical level. The last congress was held last year in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, and the one before was in Beijing in 1997; the next one will take place somewhere in France in 2005. In between, the scientific activities of the union currently rely on the international seminars and workshops organized on very specific topics by its Scientific Committees and Working Groups, to point out the most important issues which challenge demographic research. Several meetings like that are organized each year. For example, right now, the Committee on Anthropological Demography is organizing in Yaoundé, Cameroon, a seminar on Macro and micro social influences in health: changing morbidity and mortality, while, next week, the Emerging Health Threats Committee is going to held in Rostock, Germany, a seminar on the Determinants of Diverging Trends in Mortality. Less regularly, at an intermediate the union also organises, from time to time, regional conferences focussing on population issues in a particular part of the world. Thus, during the past decades, IUSSP organised a Regional Conference in Latin America (Vera-Cruz, 1992) and another one in Arab Countries (Cairo, 1995), while it took part in the organization of the third African Population Conference, in Durban, 1999.
Organizing a conference on "South-East Asia's Population in a changing Asian context" is of great interest in many senses. Let me emphasis two of them.
The first one is a substantive one.
Nowadays many South-Eastern Asian countries and populations are close to reach what we could call "the end of the demographic transition". According to this beautiful theory, founded on the European experience to better understand the determinants of the rapid population growth of the developing world and to make possible relatively plausible projections of the real extent, duration and consequences of this unprecedented event, every country, every population is supposed to reach, sooner or later, a final stage where fertility and mortality rates will equilibrate themselves. And the level at which they are supposed to equilibrate is much more in favor of the quality of life than the pre-transition one since it is supposed to occur at a very high level of life expectancy and with a huge lightening of the childbearing burden, since with such a life expectancy two children per woman is enough for each generation to replace it self.
However, it is not very difficult to imagine that the end of the demographic transition is not necessarily the end of population problems. Let me mention two of them.
First, the end of the demographic transition is not at all the end of its consequences. After the nightmare of rapid population growth comes the headache of ageing. And its difficulties will be all the stronger for having quickly reduced the fertility rates. While currently the topic is a real concern for European countries where population have been involved for a long time in the process of demographic ageing, it will become an even greater challenge for all the countries, and especially for those of South-East Asia, which recently experienced a dramatic fall of fertility. The speeding-up of the demographic transition has a huge consequence: the ageing effects of fertility decline will still not have run their course when those of increasing longevity will go into action. It is the reason why what the Europeans have currently to face is still almost nothing when comparing with what will soon happen in developing countries.
And the awakening to this situation will be all the more difficult because these countries will first get for the next years an age pyramid that is the most desirable to have for purposes of managing the economy. At the beginning, in effect, demographic ageing tends to reduce the proportion of children and young persons without having yet had the time to increase the number of elderly. This opens up a sort of demographic golden age where the proportion of the population that is of labour-force age reaches a maximum. In most developing countries that proportion will reach levels never experienced by northern countries. And it is not simply by chance that countries of the South that are more or less at this stage of their demographic transition are currently enjoying the best economic performances, especially in the Far East or South-East Asia. In all of these countries, fertility has been falling rapidly at least since the end of the 1960s and the proportion of the population that is of labour force age is at or near its zenith. But the golden age will be very brief. All of these countries will be hit hard by a very rapid ageing of their population, beginning in one or two decades. This is a good reason to focus on South-East Asia to-day. And I am especially grateful to the uNFPA to have funded in the framework of this conference a special half-day session on ageing.
But, furthermore, while the heralded end of the demographic transition (and its prospective stabilization of the world population at an essentially fairly reasonable level in the short term) has allowed us to finally consign to the dustbin of history the wilder doomsday scenarios that still abounded in the 1970s, we know even now that stabilization is just a snare and a delusion. Not only is the future still beset by pitfalls, it has never been so uncertain. Did we imagine that all the populations of the world would soon achieve that maximum life expectancy which is within humankind's biological grasp? The fact is, that the closer we get to it, the less we know about where that limit may lie, or even if it truly exists. Did we imagine that all populations would simply converge on fertility of around 2 children per woman, securing their own replacement and the final stabilization of the world population? What we are seeing today is a growing number of northern countries settled in a stage of low or even very low fertility where we cannot say whether it is a trend or a simple blip. In short, the end of the demographic transition also sounds the death knell of the theory of that name -- in other words, the end of the key paradigm which has underpinned our discipline for at least half a century. We are seriously short of theories to understand, explain, and predict the future, at least beyond the current decline in mortality and fertility where they remain high. Population scientists should clearly put a major focus on future developments. And to do so it is obviously crucial to not focus only on current European experiences but also on changes in populations like those of South-East Asia where demographic transition is now reaching its supposed end.
However, beyond these substantive reasons for organizing a South-East Asian Conference, there is an additional one, which could be relevant if our work is well appreciated by the audience. Facing to these huge past and future population questions, the number of demographers and other scientists interested in population studies has grown in these countries, often at the very top level. However, I have to confess to you that very few of them are members of the IUSSP. And, clearly the reason for that is not a matter of competition with other similar institutions since no regional association exists as it is the case for Europe, Northern America, Africa or Arab countries. Yet, it seems to me that the need for international scientific cooperation and debate is crucial to give the scientific work all its expansion, richness and completeness. If, at its modest level, this conference could encourage most of South-East Asian demographers and population experts either to join IUSSP or to found a new regional association or, better, to do both, it would certainly be one of its very useful outputs, and I obviously express the wish that it should be done!
In any case, I would like to express sincere thanks again to the College of Population Studies of Chulalongkorn university for its ability and its energy to organize the conference. I also would like to thank uNFPA for its generous contribution as well as the Wellcome Trust, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Asian MetaCentre, and the Thai Population Association, without the support of which, nothing would have been possible.
Your Royal Highness, Mr President, dear participants, I thank you very much for your kind attention and I hope a great success for the conference.
Jacques Vallin
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