A January 2002 file photo showing a section of Portmore in St Catherine. The 2001 population census has shown that St Catherine recorded the biggest growth, due mainly to the thousands who have flocked to Portmore, where several housing schemes have been built since the early 1990s. Just under 160,000 people now live in Portmore.

IT'S now official.

Jamaica's population is approximately 2.6 million -- about nine per cent higher than a decade ago.

And St Catherine, where the Portmore housing schemes have drawn tens of thousands of people since the early 1990s, is the fastest growing parish in the island.

The preliminary results of the national census, which the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) launched a year ago, were released yesterday, showing a net increase in the population of 218,688.

"We are seeing a declining rate of growth," said STATIN's Valerie Nam, who directed the census that began on September 10 last year and lasted until the early part of this year.

Two decades ago the population was growing at an annual rate of 1.42 per cent, but in the decade between last year's and the previous census in 1991, it fell from 0.93 per cent, to 0.88 per cent a year.

Based on the latest census, females accounted for 1,277,908, or 50.8 per cent of the population, compared to 1,166,508 males.

While the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) accounted for more than 577,000 people or just over 22 per cent of the Jamaican population, it is the parish of St Catherine that has seen the most robust growth in the past decade -- increasing its population by an annual rate of 2.3 per cent, or, according to the STATIN report, "nearly three times the rate observed by the country as a whole".

In fact, over the period, St Catherine's population jumped by over a quarter -- 25.8 per cent. Most of those people flocked to communities in Portmore and Hellshire where several thousand homes have been built, triggered initially by a government-inspired project, over the past dozen years.

The Portmore/Hellshire region, STATIN noted, grew at an annual rate of 5.2 per cent, adding just under 64,000 people "to see a population of 159,974".

"The area has increased its share of the parish population from a quarter in 1991, to one-third in 2001," STATIN said.

The exact size of this densely populated area has been the source of speculation, fuelled in part by a desire of residents to gain municipality status for the area.

"Because we know there is all this (speculation), we look carefully at information from the (housing) developers," Nam explained. "We have always asked where are these (supposedly large numbers of) people living. So we look at the number of (housing) units."

Following St Catherine, the fastest-growing parishes between 1991 and 2001 were:

* Manchester -- 16.1 per cent;

* St James -- 13.3 per cent;

* and St Ann -- 11.2 per cent.

St Elizabeth, on the other hand, experienced the lowest rate of growth, adding less than 300 persons for an annual growth rate of 0.02 per cent.

The largest concentration of the population -- a little over two-fifths (43.5 per cent) -- the census reinforced, lives in the three contiguous south-eastern parishes of Kingston (3.7 per cent), St Andrew (21.3 per cent) and St Catherine (18.5 per cent). Additionally just over 52 per cent of the population lives in urban areas, a two percentage point hike on the time of the previous census.

"The urban population grew by 13.6 per cent between 1991 and 2001, much faster than the population in rural areas, which grew by a much lower 4.8 per cent over the decade," the STATIN document noted.

On other demographic trends of the national survey, Nam highlighted declining rates in the number of births (17.2 per cent) and migration (3.5 per cent) as well as a slight increase in deaths over the past four decades.

In terms of migration, which stood at annual levels of about 20,000, she said Jamaica was ranked 13th among countries that are sources of immigrants to the United States of America. "We are just going how everybody else is going," she remarked.

The preliminary census report shows that mortality or the rate of death had emerged in the late 1990s as an "important source of decrement". The report notes that between 1991 and 1995, deaths averaged 13,900, rising to an average of 15,800 for the period 1996 to 2000.

Nam suggested that factors influencing the mortality rate could include the worrying level of HIV/AIDS as well as traffic accidents.

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