Huge population growth and food insecurity count among the factors that fueled the revolution in Egypt and serve as a caution for other countries facing human and environmental overload, say analysts. Egypt — and Tunisia, Algeria and Yemen to a lesser extent — found itself in a perfect storm in which massive youth unemployment conjoined with hunger and resentment over poverty to threaten an authoritarian regime, they say. In just 25 years, Egypt's population has risen by nearly two-thirds, from 50 million in 1985 to around 83 million today, with an average age of 24. “The demographic change is very significant,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York. The rise placed heavier burdens on housing and food production in a country that is mostly desert and depends almost entirely on a river that is in worrying decline, he said. It also helped create a sea of angry, jobless young people when expatriate work in the Gulf dried up after the 2008 economic crisis. And it made the world's No. 1 wheat importer more exposed to dissent when global food prices surged to a record high in January. After events in Tunisia, the rise fanned protest which developed into a challenge that toppled Hosni Mubarak. “It's perfectly understandable how this spark went off, although it's not simple to predict when it's going to happen,” Sachs said in an interview. He added: “This is a global ecological phenomenon, of rising world populations, increasing climate unsustainability and pushing up against the barriers of food productivity in many places.” Youssef Courbage of France's National Institute for Demographic Studies said Egypt's tens of millions of births in the 1980s and 1990s had heightened many of its problems in 2011. “When a population grows too swiftly, resources per habitant fall proportionately,” Courbage said. This was especially so in the labor market, where “the revolt of youth” stemmed in part from the impossibility of finding a decent job, even with a university education. Demographic growth in Egypt was around 2.8 percent in the mid-1980s, falling gradually to around 1.8 percent last year, according to US and UN data. Risks of conflict and instability “are especially high” in Africa, South and Central Asia and the Middle East, the US National Intelligence Council said last September in a roundup of expert opinion called Global Governance 2025: At a Critical Juncture.
