Population: Double by 1986

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What part of the world has the fastest growing population? Not India and not Communist China. The population explosion is strongest in tropical South America—a 5,300,000-sq.-mi. area encompassing Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and the three Guianas, British, Dutch and French (see map). According to the Population Reference Bureau, an independent, nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., these nine countries are growing at an average rate of 3.2% each year, compared with about 2% for India and Red China. At cur rent rates, their 121 million population will double by 1986; in 100 years something like 3.8 billion people will be fighting for survival in the area's inhospitable mountain ranges, jungles and deserts.

High birth rates of 40 to 50 per 1,000 annually have long been a fact of Latin American life. Since World War II, modern medicine has reduced the death rate to less than 20 per 1,000 in most countries. Brazil, whose 78 million people are increasing by 3.6% each year, is growing the fastest; next comes Venezuela, with 8,100,000 and a growth rate of 3.3%. Tiny Ecuador, whose 4,700,000 people stand 43 to the square mile, already has the highest population density of any South American country, and is compounding the matter with a 3.2% growth rate. Only in mountainous Bolivia, where 2,400,000 Indians struggle to exist in the thin Andean air, do the deaths start approaching the births.

The human explosion poses staggering problems for the nine nations—and for the U.S. as their Alianza partner. Almost half of the region's population are under 15 years of age, children who must be educated and trained for jobs, which must then be found for them. In Brazil, despite all efforts to build more schools, only half the children are getting a grade school education, only 6% high school training. Concludes the Population Reference Bureau: "Until a new 'vital balance' is achieved—a low birth rate balancing a low death rate—economic progress and better living conditions for each citizen will be very difficult to attain, if not impossible."