By the time it takes a person to read to the end of this sentence another 14 people have been added to the world’s population.  At this rate --- a net gain of about 100 million a year --- we are adding about one billion people in a decade. This is certainly an unprecedented rate of increase by historical standards. Humans took over a million years to reach one billion at around the middle of the 19th century.  The second billion was added in about 80 years, the third and fourth combined in 45 years, and the fifth and sixth in 25 years.  This rapid growth has for some time now given rise to the expression “population explosion.”  For the near future, according to projections, population should increase to the 10 billion mark in another 36 years and perhaps stabilize at around 13 billion toward the end of next century.  Achieving a plateau by then will obviously depend upon the wishful thinking occurrence of a variety of events happening at crucial times and at crucial places.  “Wishful thinking” is here used to describe the assumed expectation of a: fast-paced  and uninterrupted economic development for all nations of the planet;  meaningful global partnership in place guiding nations to pursue foreign policies in favor of the global rather than national interest;  sustainable global economy;  gender,  race, social class, ethnic, and religious bias-free global society and a population with a consciousness that would demand, support, and deepen all the above reorientation from current practices.  This is not to say that such a reorientation will not happen or should not be promoted but merely to challenge to action to make it happen because it ought to if one is future oriented and has an intergenerational sense of justice

In the meantime, about 95to 99 % of the projected increase will occur in the economically and politically less developed nations; the very nations least likely and able to provide, in many instances, even the basic needs (i.e. food, clothing, shelter, and rudimentary health care) of their citizens.  This observation allows us to be more analytical about the generality, even abstraction, of the term “population explosion.”  Clearly, in parts of the world (as is the case for the United States ) there is negative, zero, or fractional population growth, and in other parts alarmingly fast growth. The population of Italy and Greece , for example, is diminishing yet if Nigeria were to continue growing at its present 3.4 % annual growth for the next 140 years its population would be equal to that of the entire world today.  In calculating growth, a population would double in 69 years at an 1% growth rate per year. At 2% growth rate, then the formula is to divide 69 by 2 and so on for other rates of growth to determine the doubling time. Less growth combined with improvements in medical technologies, health care provision, and improved lifestyles which enable many to live longer means a skewing of the population toward older age groups (the so-called ‘graying” of the population).  In those nations all kinds of tax and other government- sponsored incentives are offered to get couples to have many or more children. More growth means a skewing toward younger age groups, an especially dire situation as those groups reach procreation time meaning that we are about to witness a next wave of population explosion that would make the present one pale by comparison since the base is larger.  In the former case the predominant policy issues for governments have to do with social security funds and benefits, health care and social activities for the elderly. In the latter nations the policy agenda revolves around providing food, care, schooling, employment and so on as well as urgent, aggressive and yet badly administered policies limiting the size of families.  

This analytical division occurs, without exception, along another division of the world’s nations; that between the economically and politically developed and underdeveloped nations. The latter division is also known as the Global North and South; practically all the developed nations are found north of the Equator. The North and the South clearly move on a divergent path yet they find themselves mutually vulnerable to events within and without their borders. For example, large populations also mean massive emigration from the countryside to the giant cities of the South and from the South to the North. The North, in turn, needs to safeguard its borders and to control or limit immigration.  Yet, at the same time, because there is not enough available domestic new labor to maintain the economic expansion in the North industry demands (more) open borders.  In France , for example, the popularly strong neo-fascist National Front party calls for the mass expulsion of all immigrants yet census and business data reveal a different image; in order to meet the labor needs of France in the next 10 years an estimated 2 million people need to be allowed to come in.  But here we are not just merely interested with immigration issues and not merely the economic aspects of immigration. Forced migration mostly as a result of too many people of the type experienced in the last few years also means tidal flows of eco refugees fighting over scarce resources, especially water, carrying and spreading diseases, and creating situations in which war itself becomes an extension of crime as the desperate to live revert more and more into anarchy and chaos.

In short then, we are not merely observing a population growth and become alarmed by it but we observe also a variety of issues that stem from and are interrelated to population growth.  And that a solution for population growth would ensure a solution for other problems and vice versa.