Above: Kingston (CJ Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Jamaica’s population is not likely to exceed 3 million people, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica.

The country currently has a population of around 2.71 million people, a number not likely to significantly increase, given factors like current fertility rates, high external migration and declining mortality.

Speaking this week, PIOJ official Toni-Shae Freckleton said that, despite fears of the country’s population “growing out of control,” that was “simply not the case.”

Jamaica’s population is aging, she said, with a decline in fertility rates and a drop in the segment of the population between 0 and 14.

“The last Housing and Population Census indicates that this particular age group is shrinking,” she said in a government release.
Overall, fertility rates in Jamaica have fallen from an average of six children per woman in the 1960s to 2.4 per woman in the most recent reproductive health survey in 2008.
“When this is superimposed on replacement level fertility, which is an average of 2.1 children per woman, we have seen, over time, the vast improvements that Jamaica has made in the area of fertility and we are fast approaching replacement level fertility,” she said. “Once we get to that point, this is where we are seeing the possibility of a declining population if it goes unchecked.”