Bears and Wolves at the Door

by Edward Hugh

The ongoing demographic transition is likely to have consequences far beyond the already obvious ones. Some of these are only to be expected, like growing pressure on raw material and energy resources as large developing countries (India, China) get richer (the upside of the transition), others are less obvious, declining populations and growing urbanization, for example, mean that previously populated parts of the planet will become virtually uninhabited.

This 'desertization' phenomenon appears to be happening in some very surprising places take Japan for example

Scarce acorns, silent guns and rural depopulation are bringing Japan's bears out of the woods.

The number of Japanese black bears caught feasting in fields of sweet corn, apples and other crops has jumped this year, with the animals increasingly undisturbed by hunters, whose ranks are dwindling as the population ages.

"There are plenty of bears out there who've never even heard a gunshot, so if they do see people, they think it's OK not to run away," said Hidetake Hayashi of the Shinshu Black Bear Research Group, which monitors bears in Nagano prefecture.

The number of hunters in Japan has fallen from almost half a million in the late 1970s to about 150,000 in 2005, according to Dainihon Ryoyukai, the Japan hunters' association, so people might appear less intimidating to their ursine neighbours.

In Gifu prefecture, rangers have shot 121 bears since the start of April, six times as many as in the previous 12 months, the Yomiuri daily reported.

Gifu University's Professor Toshio Tsubota, who heads the Japan Bear Network, a nationwide body involved in bear research, said a skimpy acorn crop this year was the most likely cause of the rise in number of sightings. The shortage of their favourite food has forced the bears to seek other sustenance before hibernating at the end of autumn.

A longer-term reason was rural depopulation, Tsubota added. As fewer villagers venture into the woods to chop down trees for firewood, the border zone between forest and village has eroded. "The villages have thinned out," the Shinshu group's Hayashi said. "Bears may now think it's all right for them to be there."



More predictable is what is happening in Russia and Central Europe where it is once more wolf at the door time


WOLVES, wild boar and brown bears are moving west in Europe as nature takes hold of rural regions abandoned by people seeking work in the cities. Wildlife migration is shadowing human migration and, according to population experts, is set to transform the way we look at the Continent. Wild boar are already ransacking dustbins on the outskirts of Berlin and bears are startling schoolgirls in Austria.

Great swaths of Europe are surrendering to nature as human birthrates plunge and unemployment draws people into the big industrial hubs.

Stefan Kronert, a researcher at the Berlin Institute of Population and Development, said: “There is a kind of suction towards the metropolitan centres. People are leaving behind the old mines and quarries, farmland that can no longer be profitably harvested, and they forage for work.”

Europe will lose 41 million people by 2030 if today’s birthrates continue to languish at the present level. About 22 of the 25 countries with the lowest birthrate in the world are in Europe. Poor but rapidly changing countries such as Romania and Bulgaria are undergoing a quiet social revolution. And in its wake comes the wildlife.

Wolves disappeared from eastern Germany around 1850. Suddenly they are back. They started moving westwards, probably from the Carpathian Mountains, over the Neisse River, which divides Poland from Germany. The animals moved into the overgrown acres of artillery ranges and exercise grounds abandoned by the Soviet forces in Saxony.

The wolves feed off deer and are flourishing; two packs have already formed and biologists say that a third is taking shape.

The human population of eastern Germany, by contrast, is dwindling. Almost one million have left for western Germany since unification. Villages are dying out. One community, Horno, has been reduced to two people. They are hanging on, resisting an electricity company’s attempts to bulldoze their home in the search for coal.

Frank Mörschel, of the German branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, said: “In the long run, we can count on wolves repopulating much of eastern Germany — as long as humans let it happen.”

Wolves are on the move throughout Europe and the reason is always the same: they sense a change in human behaviour. It became clear last year that Italian wolves were moving across the Alps to the French side. The mountainside sheep farmers in France were allowing their flocks to graze without protection. There was no choice; the young were leaving the villages and farming dynasties were dying out. The wolves saw their chance and crossed the border.

Across Europe, and across species, it is a similar story.

The Polish migrants arriving in Victoria bus station come mainly from eastern Poland, from tiny villages scattered along the Ukrainian frontier. They send money home to support their elderly relatives but ultimately the communities are doomed and are already shrinking. The wildlife, searching for food and minimal contact with humans, fills the vacated space.

In Slovenia, the brown bear population has risen to 700 — the second-largest after Romania — and they prowl the dense forest land of the Alpine republic. But the country is small and there are frequent confrontations with humans.

“The situation is so critical that in some villages kids need a bus to take them to a school only a kilometre or so away because they run into a bear virtually every day,” a senior official at the Slovene Agriculture Ministry said.

The bears are, almost certainly, more frightened than the pupils and so they have begun a migration into the Austrian province of Carinthia. There they have more space to roam and better chances to steal livestock. Most of the brown bears have come northwards from war-plagued Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s. Now instead of fleeing war they are fleeing rapidly modernising Slovenia for the most depressed region of Austria.

Wildcats and ospreys are reasserting themselves across eastern Germany. Domestic cats left by families who have moved westwards are even crossbreeding with wildcats.

However, Dr Kronert said: “Don’t count on a major return to nature in western Germany. Even if the birthrate is going down there too, it is still too densely populated. The key areas are not even necessarily those on the borders with Eastern Europe. Look at the Prignitz, half way between Hamburg and Berlin — people are leaving in droves and the region is becoming more and more like a nature reserve.”

The most extraordinary wildlife area in Eastern Europe is probably the Danube delta, primarily because it was inhabited for centuries only by religious exiles, fishermen and lepers. It was on the very margins of Europe. Today the delta, in Romania, boasts 280 bird species including pelicans, egrets, whooper swans and rare wintering birds such as the red-breasted goose. The mammals include raccoon, mink and polecats. Tortoises, vipers and other poisonous snakes also inhabit the delta, which adjoins the Black Sea. This could be the future of other, more recently depopulated, regions.

Farmers’ young sons are leaving and not returning, and their parents are selling up to subsidise their pensions. The new purchasers often find it more profitable under the Common Agricultural Policy to let the land run wild rather than farm it. Woodland is growing back.

And so, bit by bit, the fringe Europe of impoverished and redundant farmers is becoming a pastoral idyll.

Angela Merkel and Social Security

by Edward Hugh

Far be it from me to take sides in the emerging political debate in Germany, but the FT has an article this morning which is very pertinent to the topics we have been recently discussing over here at DM, namely prioritisation of resources between the competing and often conflicting demands of young and old.

The issue is pitched in the FT as being one of labour market reform, but the key point seems to be one of whether to divert resources away from the younger unemployed to the over 50s:

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union on Monday endorsed a proposal to increase unemployment benefits for older jobseekers, offering the most graphic illustration yet of a swing of the political pendulum away from structural reforms in Germany.

The proposal to link jobseekers’ benefits to the amount they contributed to the insurance scheme before losing their jobs is a U-turn from the unpopular labour market and social security reforms launched by Gerhard Schröder, Ms Merkel’s predecessor, in 2003.

As the FT notes this particular initiative from the CDU is unlikely to become government policy,but the mere fact it is being seriously advanced in and of itself raises a lot of issues, and in particular the issue, highlighted in this post here, about the extent to which the state as a provider of social insurance has a responsibility to its clients. But given that the transformation in the age pyramid means that this particular provider is now no longer able to meet its obligations, the big question is who should take the larger share of the inevitable 'haircut'?

The principal danger is that as our populations age our political systems gradually become more sensitive to the needs of the older part of the population, and that in yielding to the demands which understandably will come from this section of society, we cut the lifeline which can make even 'reformed' systems sustainable in the future. The outflow of young people from Germany which was highlighted in this post is but one indication of the looming problem. Politicians will remain deaf to this to the long run cost of all of us.

I would say the principal challenge facing mature democratic societies is the one of 'intergenerational' fairness, or how not to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs whilst honoring your commitments to those who have already paid to the best of your ability.

Pro-natalism that Works ... Evidence from Estonia?

Recently, many commenters here on DM has flagged the idea of pro-natalism (rather sloppy Wiki.Pedia article!) as a possible working solution for countries with low (lowest-low) fertility and more specifically lamented the absence of talk about this in the entries posted here at DM. This is consequently to make amends on this and to present some of the arguments pro and con pro-natalism as we have discussed them in the comments sections on various posts. Before we do this though let us look at a country in Eastern Europe with low fertility where pro-natalism actually seems to have worked at least given the initial evidence (hat tip to Stirling for pointing towards Estonia in the comments on a previous post). Lastly, before we dig into the description of Estonia it might usefull for you to acquaint yourself with the general demographic situation in Eastern Europe and more specifically EU-8 (the lynx economies). To that end, this post from my blog has some good initial references and description.

(From the WSJ; reproduced by Post.Gazette.com, actually an excellent article!)

Estonia's wake-up call came in 2001, when the United Nations' annual world-population report showed that Estonia was one of the fastest-shrinking nations on earth, at risk of losing nearly half its 1.4 million people by mid-century. Estonia's fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman bears -- had collapsed to 1.3 in the late 1990s, down from 2.2 under communism only a decade earlier.

In an attempt to stop that downward spiral, Estonia took a bold step: In 2004 it began paying women to have babies. Working women who take time off after giving birth get their entire monthly income for up to 15 months, up to a ceiling of $1,560. Non-wage-earners get $200 a month. The welfare perk -- known locally as the "mother's salary" -- was a sharp about-face for the radically free-market government.

"Step by step, (the declining birthrate) became a danger to the survival of the nation, so we had to do something," says Paul-Eerik Rummo, minister for population affairs and a member of the Reform Party in Estonia's ruling coalition.

Now, two years into the program, the government is seeing some of the first tentative results. Since the adoption of the new benefits, Estonia's fertility rate has improved to 1.5. That's still below the 2.1 children needed to stop the population from shrinking (one child to replace each parent, plus some room to allow for child mortality). And it will take years to see the full impact of the mother's salary. But the apparent early success has inspired the government to look at other ways of getting people to have more children -- everything from subsidies for nannies to linking pension payments to the number of children one has.

This actually seems very positive and here at DM where dooming and glooming about the effects of declining population is the traditional and should I say natural menu we should indeed be optimistic here ... well done Estonia! However, what about other countries then and generally what would the initial outlook be for implementing pro-natalism as a general measure? This brings us to the point about my entry ... the pros and cons of pro-natalism and more importantly the issues to watch out for.

(Note that I am cruising on an intuitive level here since I have no formal textbook list of this; I hope the comments can help formalize this discussion)

Pros of pro-natalism

A Direct Measure - To the extent that fertility is a one of the biggest and most decisive factors in the demographic transition occuring in developed and semi-developed countries pro-natalism represents a very clear and direct valve by which to leverage policies to amend and affect the demographic situation.

A Direct Transmission Mechanism - Following the point above pro-natalism also consequently has the potential to display a very direct and effective transmission effect from the enacted policies and to the real effects on the demographic situation. This is of course a relative point since none of this would happen from one year to another (more about that below).

Cons of pro-natalism

Pro-natalism Costs - Pro-natalist measures are essentially behavioural fiscal measures in terms of public budget policy and as such they have a negative effect on a country's budget. This is of course pretty simple but as Edward has never tired of mentioning it is a crucial point to remember. We could think of this in terms of windows of opportunities. In order for pro-natalist measures to have a real effect and crucially to be fiscally sustainable they have to be enacted at a time where the society is actually capable of supporting the costs. As such pro-natalism cannot be enacted as a last-minute solution. Think about some of the developed countries really facing a dire demographic situation (Italy, Japan, and Germany) and take a look at the fiscal situation ... suddenly pro-natalism becomes a chance gone begging I would argue.

Pro-natalism is Counterproductive - Now I am borderlining on circular-reasoning I know since this is exactly what we want; that is pro-natalism should in fact be counterproductive to the trend of the quantum and tempo effect of declining fertility. However, this is still a real issue here and as I have argued in the comments sections of previous posts pro-natalism directed at the quantum effect alone is not a viable solution, particular not in developed countries where the female workforce is highly educated. The cost of making them sacrifice emancipation and sustained labour force participation in order to carry more children will be unrealistically high in many cases. In terms of the tempo effect this would more sense as a point of departure since inciting women to have children earlier would also have a lagged effect on the quantum effect. Moreover, addressing the tempo effect also has implications for the biological optimuum age for carrying children (Edward can add substantially to this).

Pro-natalism needs to be sustained - This is more an issue to watch out for than an actual 'con' but it is clear that any pro-natalist measure needs to be sustained over a given period of time or in demographic terms over several cohorts. A mere blip on the radar will not do and in short pro-natalism needs, to some extent at least, to be institutionalized as a structural mechanism. Why is this important? This is important because the very issue we are trying to combat (low fertility) itself is a structural and institutionalized trend in the developed world as a result of increased female labour participation and birth postponement operationalized more accurately through the quatum and tempo effect of fertility.

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This was a first attempt to try to conceptualize the idea of pro-natalism here on DM and if there is one thing I wish you should take away from this it is that making pro-natalism to work is not a straightforward issue. In fact, as we dig deeper into the issues the waters get increasingly more murky and muddier. This is not to say though that we should not consider it and for the reasons mentioned above this remains one of the most potentially effective measures we have to reverse the demographic decline in many countries.