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Article: Battle of the bulge: population. (controlling population growth)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- September 3, 1994
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE sheer size of the numbers is enough, in the elegant words of Bill Clinton, to "kind of give you a headache." Today the world has 5.7 billion people. The current annual increase--86m, or nearly the population of Mexico--is the largest ever. Not until 1997 may the annual addition start to decline. Even so, the world will probably have at least 7.9 billion people by 2050 (the United Nations' "low variant" projection); it may well have 9.8 billion (the mid-range projection); it might even have 12 billion.
And that is only by 2050. Most people assume that human numbers will stabilise at some point: that births will balance deaths, as they more or less do in most rich ...