WEAKNESS IN NUMBERS

In March 2025, Professor Josias Lang-Ritter, a researcher at the University of Aalto in Finland, published his report on a seminal study in which he and his colleagues seriously disputed the way in which data on rural populations across the world were being worked out.

He and his colleagues had done their own calculations to estimate the numbers of people in about 300 rural communities in various parts of the world – and their figures were substantially different to those published by the UN and other international bodies.

I contacted Prof Lang-Ritter to find out more. He said the underrepresentation of rural communities on global population maps was most likely due to a combination of two factors: incomplete censuses in rural areas and the method used to distribute regional population counts from these censuses across communities marked on the maps, which were usually identified using information from satellite images.

The article did not come to any conclusion on the exact number of people missing in population censuses in rural areas; it did say, though, that some rural populations were between 53 and 84 percent higher than those published in official statistics.

This work also raises questions about the accuracy of the figure published for the population of our planet. If today's statisticians and demographers cannot even judge with a serious degree of accuracy the size of the world's population, so it's no surprise that we have no trustworthy source of even the most basic data needed to understand the main problems and challenges facing people in poor rural communities – health, food, water, migration to the cities, and so on.

And certainly, we have no idea of how many people are starving out of sight. I have found over the years that, in many parts of the world, certain concepts that we have always understood and grown up with in the First World, such as numbers and their meaning, have limited use in some other cultures.

In agriculture, for example, when advisors from overseas ask local people to measure a particular plot of land, perhaps in square metres, and ask how many seeds they have planted, in order to be able to judge whether there has been an improvement in production over the years, the farmers simply do not follow the instruction.

They might have different ways of counting: they could, for example, put a hand on the ground, spread their fingers, and count that way.

This has nothing to do with intelligence; it has to do with concepts that might not be common in other societies. If a concept is missing, the local language might not have the vocabulary needed to explain it.

In some communities the very concept of answering a questionnaire is simply outside of their mental framework!

Finally, another challenge facing those of us fighting global poverty is remoteness. In most poor countries there are many areas that simply cannot be reached, because the roads are not passable during the rainy season, for example.

If local agricultural advisors cannot reach the villages when it is their job to do so, it is even less likely that enumerators employed for censuses will reach them.