Demographic trends unfolding in China will ultimately lead Africa to replace the world’s most populous country as a global center of low-cost manufacturing, according to Ford Motor Co.’s official futurist.

That’s just one impact of changing demographics that will force automakers and suppliers to reconsider their future product and production plans, Sheryl Connelly, global consumer trends and futuring manager for Ford, said at the 2013 CAR Management Briefing Seminars on Wednesday.

A decades-long one-child policy has meant that China will hit its peak worker population in 2014, Connelly said. After that point, the number of active workers will slowly erode, while the number of retirees and other dependents rise.

“China will have difficulty sustaining its place as a low-cost manufacturer. That designation will move to Africa,” Connelly said.

In her role with Ford, Connelly is responsible for forecasting potential scenarios to allow the automaker to prepare for both expected and unexpected events. She does not predict the future so much as plan for what could happen.

Some of the planning scenarios are far-fetched, such as how humans might respond if extra-terrestrial life forms landed on Earth.

Useful forecasts

But other forecasts are useful, Connelly says. For example, it was highly probable that Earthquake-prone Japan — which sits on several major fault lines — might suffer a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, as it did in March 2011.

Connelly said people in Japan were aware of and prepared for those eventualities, but global automakers seemed caught by surprise when the earthquake and tsunami shut down several key supply facilities.

Ford uses the forecasting scenarios to map out corporate strategies, and how it might respond to rising global populations and changing consumer needs, Connelly said.

“We have to kind of change our westernized view of how the future looks by the year 2050,” Connelly said. “The reason we’re so worried about this is because the markets that we sell to … they have declining fertilities,” Connelly said.