Imagine the Italians die out and everyone looks the other way. First the births are becoming rarer, then the burials increase dramatically. At some point the last delivery rooms and daycare centers will also close. This horror vision does not require much imagination. It has long been a crude reality. In Genoa, the city with the oldest population in Europe, three times as many people die as babies are born today. There are 15 supermarkets for supplying pets for every two shops selling baby equipment from the Prénatal brand.
The Italian market leader for baby food has imagined what will happen if things continue like this: the last child will be born in Italy in 2050. It’s called Adamo.
In the short film “Adamo – a true story from the future”, the manufacturer Plasmon, founded in Milan in 1902, tells the story of how a young couple have children for the very last time in Italy. For eight minutes, he shows a country in which the decision to have a child has literally become an isolated case. A country where Adam grows up without playmates. It will not have been any different for his namesake. What began with Adam ends in Italy with Adam.
Experts advise the baby food manufacturer to push adult food
As exaggerated as the plot is, the dangers of the demographic trap that Italy fell into 50 years ago are real. Worse still, the country that once loved children is watching the “demographic suicide” that experts have been warning of for decades. Plasmon makes an exception, for understandable reasons. In 1983, the concerned company asked a statistician whether a reversal of the trend in Italy was possible. The expert said no and encouraged the manufacturer to push ahead with its diversification into the adult healthy food business.
Now the child decline has worsened so dramatically that 40 years later Plasmon goes public with a provocation. In 2022, fewer than 400,000 children were born in Italy for the first time. Births fell by a quarter in a decade. The population shrank from almost 61 million people to fewer than 59 million in seven years. In its latest report, the United Nations expects the number of Italians to fall to 36.9 million by 2060.
Exactly this development was already commented on by the French sociologist Henri Mendras 20 years ago. “No people can cope with such a trauma,” he wrote. And: The “Harakiri of Italian civilization” would shake the balance in Europe. The economic consequences of the birth crisis are oppressive: if there are 36 million people of working age today, in 30 years there will only be 27 million. Italy’s economic output will fall by 32 percent in 2070 due to demographic change alone, warns the Roman statistical office Istat.
It is logical that the debacle at the manufacturer of baby food made itself felt earlier. With the film, Plasmon introduced the “Adamo 2050” digital platform to support parenting in Italy. “The project is intended to bring companies and institutions together,” said Marketing Manager Francesco Meschieri.
The Minister for Family and Births, Eugenia Roccella, also attended the premiere in Milan. Her answer to the declining birth rate: “We are thinking about accompanying measures for mothers, a network of services, neighborhood help and a code of ethics for companies.” It is about concrete initiatives that could create a new cultural climate for families. In concrete terms, however, something else was more important to the government of Giorgia Meloni in its first budget law: new early pensions, inflation compensation for retirees, tax cuts for the self-employed. Such things.