The Foreign Service Journal, April 2012

A P R I L 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 his planet is getting seriously over- crowded. You can see it when you visit teeming megacities such as Mexico City, Bangkok, Shanghai, Cairo and Lagos, where millions live in tin shanties with- out power, water, sanitation and jobs. And all over the world, fromWashington to Hong Kong, billions of commuters stew in gridlocked traf- fic each day. When I studied in Paris in the 1960s, I could wander into Notre Dame Cathedral any hour of day or night to contem- plate its beauty. Last time I went, I had to wait in a line of tourists four abreast and a hundred yards long. In the 1980s, you could dive into the Andaman Sea off the Thai coast and view spectacular coral reefs with colored fish darting in the sunlight. Today, those reefs are dead, coated in silt fromoverfishing, tourism, or coastal degradation and global warming. When I was a kid, the planet held about two billion people. This October, the planet’s population officially crossed a new threshold — seven billion people. And at the current rate of growth—about 80 million people each year—another three billion humans will join us on our merry trip through the uni- verse by the year 2050. The most recent United Nations Population Report, issued inMay 2011, predicted that we can still reverse the trend. But time is running out. Two Competing Visions If the planet decides to do something serious to achieve a low growth rate, such as putting one to two billion dollars a year into additional aid for family planning, the planetary pop- ulation could actually peak at 7.5 billion and then fall to 6.2 billion by 2100. But if, instead, political leaders cut the current level of sup- port for international family planning, and religious move- ments further gut or block foreign aid for family planning, the human population could climb as high as 15 billion by the end of this century. Most of the population growth will occur in the very poor- est countries on earth — countries that cannot feed and edu- cate their people today. To give an idea of what that situation would look like, con- sider the following projections. Nigeria’s 2010 population of 158 million would reach one billion people at the end of the century. The Democratic Republic of the Congo would quin- tuple in population from 63 million to 314 million. And Bangladesh, the size of Wisconsin, would grow to 314 million people. Bear in mind that these are countries that already fail to provide basic health, education, water, food, roads and secu- rity for many of their citizens. As has long been understood by U.S. and world leaders, when billions of people fall into poverty, despair, disease and conflict, these problems soon cross borders and affect even the stable, wealthy nations of the S EVEN B ILLION AND G ROWING T HERE IS STILL TIME TO TURN BACK THE POPULATION SURGE . B UT IT COULD ALSO BUILD UP INTO A TRUE DISASTER . B Y B EN B ARBER Ben Barber writes about the developing world for McClatchy Newspapers, and has also contributed to Newsday , the Lon- don Observer , the Christian Science Monitor , Foreign Af- fairs , the Washington Times , USA Today and Salon.com. From 2003 to 2010, he was a senior writer at the U.S. Agency for International Development. His photojournalism book, Ground Truth: Work, Play and Conflict in The Third World , is to be published later this year by de.MO Design.org. T