Some time around Oct. 12 the world's 6 billionth person will be born, probably in Africa or Asia, destined to be poor, illiterate and unhealthy.
The United Nations Population Fund reports that the number of humans has doubled since 1960, with the last billion added in just 12 years.The good news is that overall population growth has slowed from 100 million a year to 78 million a year, still enough to add a bit less than the population of Germany annually. The bad news is that the highest birthrates are in poor countries least capable of providing, jobs, housing, education and health services to their burgeoning populations.
Already, one-fifth of the world's population lives without safe drinking water and 50 percent lack access to sanitation. On top of that, the developing world needs to create 30 million jobs a year just to keep up with population growth.
Since mid-century, the world's labor force -- those between the ages of 15 and 65 -- has expanded from 1.2 billion people to nearly 3 billion. The International Labor Organization estimates that fully a third of them are unemployed or under-employed, working less than full time or earning less than a living wage.
Africa, where 40 percent of the people live in absolute poverty, has the world's fastest-growing population. It has more than doubled to 767 million since 1960, even though AIDS has cut life expectancy dramatically.
In Botswana, where one of every four adults has the virus, life expectancy dropped from 61 years in the 1980s to 47 today and is expected to plunge to 38 by 2010. Nevertheless, Botswana's fertility rate remains high, and the population is expected to nearly double by 2050.
Asia's population has reached 3.6 billion, with India joining China in having more than a billion inhabitants. Together they have 38 percent of the world's people.
The United States, with 277 million people, is the world's third-largest country. India, with one-third the land area, has almost four times as many people and will probably overtake China as the most populous nation by 2050. By
then the world's population will be nearing 9 billion.
Growth in North America and Europe has slowed or stopped altogether as more couples decide to have less than the two children needed to "replace" themselves. Europe's population, for example, grew by only 20 percent since 1960, while the U.S. population grew by 50 percent.
We will continue to outpace Europe because of immigration. The Census Bureau tells us that in any one year, immigrants account for more than a third of our growth and over the next 50 years they will account for two-thirds, largely because most of the new immigrants to the United States have higher birthrates.
John Bermingham, president of the Colorado Population Coalition, says: "We must become more and more accustomed to sprawl, congestion, wilderness losses, ethnic enclaves, families locked in an underclass for generations, lopsided school costs, battles over bilingualism, demeaning of citizenship and, perhaps most important of all, a continued lessening of the chance that an ordinary American will ever converse with any member of Congress."
The U.N. population report concurs that "one of the real choices we will face in the 21st century is how many species and ecosystems we are willing to eliminate in order to make more space for human activities."
The U.N. Environment Program says "full-scale emergencies" already exist as a result of water shortages, land degradation, tropical forest destruction, species extinction, overfishing and urban air pollution. It predicts that the world will begin to run out of freshwater in the next 25 years and "water wars" could spread across a wide belt of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Among UNEP's findings: About 80 percent of the world's original forest cover is gone. Thousands of species have been lost and a quarter of the Earth's mammals are at "significant risk of extinction."
Marine fisheries are "grossly overexploited."
Half the world's coral reefs are degraded. Urban air pollution has reached "crisis proportions" in some of Asia's mega-cities, and the health of millions has been impaired as a result.
Former German environment minister Klaus Topfer, who heads the U.N. agency, says this massive environmental damage "threatens our very life-support system."
Holger Jensen is international editor of the Denver Rocky Mountain News