Involuntary answers: mortality and fertility

Demographic responses to oats and rye in Sart appear to differentiate between voluntary and involuntary effects. Mortality and the fertility of the poor follow the price of oats.

Our most surprising finding is that the prices of oats and rye were associated with mortality in opposite ways. An increase in the price of oats (with a lag of one year) was followed by a rise in mortality; while mortality went down when the price of rye went up. These relationships appear to result from the dual nature of the family economy in an agricultural society embedded in an industrializing region. As we noted peasants are both consumers and producers. To the extent that high prices

Table 15.2 Effects of grain prices on relative risks of demographic events by sex and period, in Sart, Belgium

‘ Models also include occupation of head of household and year.

^b Married women with at least one child. Models also include occupation of head of household and survival of preceding child. Price variables are differences from trend lagged by one year.

^c Unmarried persons aged 18—34. Models also include occupation of head of household and relationship to head of household. Price variables are differences from trend.

Note: Bold figures are significant at the 10% level. indicate a harvest failure and insufficient resources, they imply hard times and reduced nutrition. In an international market economy, however, high prices can also result from external conditions that are unrelated to the local harvest, such as the potato blight. When price increases are caused by conditions somewhere else, peasants benefit as producers. Thus, the positive correlation between mortality and oats prices reflects the hardship caused by a shortage of the peasants' food of last resort. The negative correlation between mortality and the price of rye implies that high prices in urban markets were a profitable opportunity

It is also instructive to see who suffered when prices went up (see Table 15.2). In Sart between 1820 and 1846, the groups most vulnerable to short-term variations in the price of oats were married adults of both sexes and old men. The positive effects of an increase in rye prices appear in all age groups except old women and male infants.

The relationship between oats prices and mortality disappeared after 1850 with only one exception: married women. This falls in the period of greatest industrial expansion in eastern Belgium. Improvements in the transportation system created a homogeneous national market, characterized by less volatile prices. At a local level, this is also the period in which out-migration began to reduce the total population of Sart.

We also find a complex association between short-term fluctuations in fertility and grain prices (Alter and Oris 1999b). When all women are considered, fertility appears to be positively associated with oats prices and negatively associated with rye prices. However, when we separate women in households headed by a day-labourer, we see the opposite pattern. These poor women were less likely to give birth in years following a rise in oats prices. As noted above, the mortality of married women was also very sensitive to oats prices. In addition, we found that prices had a stronger effect on the mortality of the wives of day-labourers than on other married women (Alter, Oris, and Servais 1999). Thus, it seems likely that food shortages had a disproportionate effect on the poorest women, who were most dependent on oats, the cheapest grain. These effects are greatly attenuated after 1847, but the fertility of labourers' wives still shows a tendency to decrease when the price of oats rose.

While it is difficult to determine why fertility was sensitive to grain prices, this pattern suggests that variations in fertility were primarily involuntary rather than voluntary. Our evidence does not distinguish between physiological effects (such as reduced fecundity due to malnutrition) and behavioural effects (such as less frequent coitus during a crisis), but it does imply that short-term variations in fertility were due to extreme poverty, not to family planning (Alter and Oris 1999b, for the detailed demonstration).

Since the effects of prices on mortality almost disappeared in the East Ardennes after 1850, it is not surprising to find no effect of the cost of living in the more advanced Land of Herve during the period 1846—1900 (see Table 15.3). We also looked for differences among socio-economic groups, but the results were negative: after the mid-nineteenth century there was no demographic response to prices in Hervian society. This contrasts with studies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which show that some sub-populations, especially weavers, were very vulnerable to hardship and dependent on markets (Haesenne-Peremans 1981: 169; Gutmann 1988: 173).

From 1846 to 1900 there is one exception to this rule. The mortality of married Hervian women rose when the price index increased, and this effect was more pronounced than the one observed in Sart. In fact, while the socio-economic status of the household head, the size and the composition of the household, the relationship to the head, etc. reveal differential mortality among unmarried adults and married men, married women were indifferent to everything but prices (for a detailed analysis of adults' differential mortality in the Land of Herve, see Neven 2000: 504—8). This group includes fertile women, and fertility was also significantly affected by economic changes. The probability of the next birth declined and birth intervals were longer when the cost of living increased. Mothers were exhausted by repeated pregnancies on top of their domestic tasks and other contributions to the household economy, especially in dairy production.⁶ Furthermore, mothers have been known to reduce their own portions in times of scarcity. Clearly, married women in the Land of Herve, as well as in Sart, were still vulnerable in the second half of the nineteenth century; they were the last group whose life depended on prices!

Table 15.3 Demographic responses to price fluctuations in the Land of Herve, 1846—1900. Estimated relative risks for a 10% deviation from the trend

^a Difference between logarithm of annual series and logarithm of trend.

^b Model includes age of mother and occupation of head of household.

^c Model includes occupation of head of household and time period.

^d Model includes occupation of head of household, parents' presence or time of death, persons in household by age, siblings in household, time period, sex ratio in community, and cohort ratio in community.

Note: Bold figures are significant at the 10% level.

The lengthening of birth intervals may also explain the surprising decrease in mortality for the youngest children when the cost of living increased. We have shown elsewhere that Hervians less than two years old were much more likely to die when they had a sibling born less than 24 months before them (Neven 2000: 388). By reducing fertility, an increase in the cost of living increased the spacing between births and reduced infant mortality. This is another demonstration that biological factors, largely associated with the fertility history of the mother, were more important for an infant's survival than socio-economic factors (see Oris, Derosas, and Breschi, 2004, for a detailed discussion).

The price of butter, our indicator of short-term changes in income, is the smoothest series among the four used in our analyses. We do not find clear associations

between butter prices and Hervian mortality or fertility. Changes in butter prices did not affect the mortality pattern, especially when prices were included in general models with family variables, such as household composition or relation to the household head (Neven 2000: 506).

4.3.