This century has seen a population explosion. How to deal with it has caused fierce divisions of opinion, in which the Vatican has been fully engaged. This is the first of a series of articles which look at the present scene from different viewpoints. David Willey, a biographer of Pope John Paul II, is the BBC's Vatican correspondent. THIS summer I have been musing over two very visible effects of the heavy burden placed on our planet by too many people gobbling up too large a proportion of the Earth's finite natural resources. In Italy, sweltering under the hottest summer since records began ? now unquestionably attributed to global warming ? I watched the vanguard of a future army of Africa's excess young unemployed landing illegally in Italy. They had crossed from the south to the north of the Mediterranean in small boats, seeking jobs and new lives in a greying, but much wealthier, Europe. During this decade Africa's burgeoning population (currently estimated at 778 million) has overtaken that of demogra-phically stagnant Europe (729 million). As recently as 1950, Europeans outnumbered Africans two to one.

Economic refugees from Tunisia and Morocco joined displaced Albanians from Kosovo, and desperate and destitute Kurds from Turkey and Iraq, all trickling into a basically unwelcoming European Economic Eldorado. The Italians, official gatekeepers for the rest of the European Union, realise they cannot really do anything to halt this exodus ? short of ordering police to link arms along 2,000 kilometers of beaches and rocks, hardly a practical proposal.

The New Generations, the latest update from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on the state of world population, is a timely reminder that the clock ticks steadily onward towards the end of the century which has witnessed the most gigantic demographic explosion of all time. The Day of six billion will be symbolically observed by the UN on 16 June next year, designated World Population Day. 1

During the next decade, the UN agency reports, 700 million young people will enter the labour force in developing countries ? more than the entire workforce of the developed countries in 1990. The Geneva-based International Labour Organisation estimates that more than 1 billion new jobs will be needed to accommodate these new workers and to reduce total world unemployment.

This daunting challenge cannot be met without continued progress in lowering birth rates and expanding education programmes. In many developing countries the next ten years will be critical, the UN says.

It took until about 1800 for humanity to reach its first billion people. When I was born back in the early 1930s, there were just over 2 billion people on earth. During the summer of 1999 we shall be celebrating the birth of the sixth billionth member of the present human family. The most benign projection is that shortly before the middle of the next century we shall reach 9 billion, while world population should stabilise at slightly under 11 billion around the beginning of the twenty-third century.

Is there room for all of us, as Pope Paul VI so poetically put it, at the banquet of life?

Forecasts of population growth in the twenty-first century made in the early 1990s have already been revised downwards. But it remains true that if our present fertility rates (1990-1995) were to be maintained for the next century and a half, our overcrowded planet would by then be supporting nearly 300 billion persons, a prospect that none can relish. Even if all the couples in the world began from this day onwards to bear children at the replacement fertility level (just over two children per couple), demographers calculate that world population would still climb by 67 per cent between now and the middle of the next century.

The UNFPA document explains the statistical reason why the world population is still increasing at an annual rate of 80 million people ? the equivalent of a new Germany every 12 months. Despite the decrease in the global population growth rate from 2 per cent in 1960 at the height of the population explosion to 1.4 per cent today, the current lower rate of growth is calculated against a much larger base.

In every continent except Europe, the legacy of high fertility earlier this century is the largest ever generation of young people. At slightly over 1 billion, the world's current 15-24 age group is still rapidly expanding. At the same time the trend in fertility is now downwards and lifespans are gradually growing longer. Older people are becoming more numerous in both developed and developing countries. In most parts of Europe, in North America and Japan, the proportion of over 65s to total population is rising more rapidly than that of any other age group.

Rapid social and economic changes pose new challenges to society and the family in preparing young people for their role in society and in shaping attitudes towards the contribution of, and care for, the elderly, the UN report says.

It then goes on to praise the decision of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo under UN auspices in 1994 to claim the right to reproductive health, including the right to decide the size and spacing of the family, as a major achievement in the international struggle for human rights since the founding of the UN.

I was in Cairo in September 1994 and two memories of that conference stand out in my mind. The first was the successful attempt by the delegation of the Holy See to hijack the early part of the proceedings because of their desire to see all mention of abortion as a means of family planning eliminated from the final document. The second was the universal acceptance that the basic problems of over-population can be solved only by the education and empowerment of women. Experience in many developing countries shows educated women have fewer and healthier babies.

Are artificial contraception and sex education a universal human right? Emphatically yes, says the UN, armed with the demographers' evidence. Emphatically no, says the Vatican, brandishing Humanae Vitae. The Vatican's most recently stated view, in a document from the Pontifical Council for the Family issued in February this year, is that the population explosion is an inane invention of the media, that the UN is forcing developing countries to enforce Malthusian policies, and that non-governmental organisations such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation are supporting policies of en-forced sterilisation of women, and condoning coercive birth control measures.

Quoting another alarm bell, sounded last November by another UN department, the World Population Division, at UN headquarters, the Vatican pointed out in its February statement that fertility has already declined to less than replacement level ? i.e. less than 2.1 children per couple ? in 51 countries containing 44 per cent of the world's people. The decline in fertility first observed in Europe (Italy, for example, has during this decade recorded the lowest absolute birthrate in the world) is now spreading to the developing world and will affect two thirds of the world's population within another two decades.

THEREFORE, the Vatican says, those who spread the gospel of birth control are hoodwinking us. The Vatican document speaks darkly of lies, sinister manoeuvres and statistical fraud. Who's telling the truth, UNFPA or the World Population Division?

The answer is both of them. Demographers cannot divine the future. The best they can do is to propose high, medium and low scenarios of future population, so an element of uncertainty always surrounds their forecasts. Yet as I have already explained there is nothing inconsistent in the two facts the international press chose to highlight in their reports on The New Generations; namely, that the world population has doubled in the past 40 years, notwithstanding the fact that today's mothers are having only half the number of babies that their mothers did.

The Vatican blames the UN for continuing to propose Malthusian policies. But reading the demographic signs of the times is a complex business. According to the latest theory, a period of fertility decline will inevitably be followed by an automatic correction, as the fine print of another UN document points out:

Fertility levels that dropped substantially below replacement levels or stayed below replacement for a relatively long time are construed as aberrations or overshootings that will inevitably be reversed in the future.2

The Vatican has chosen not to stress other warning signals, other signs of the times, coming to us from responsible sources such as the Worldwatch Institute in Washington.

In this environmental watchdog body's 1998 report, its founder and president, Lester Brown, highlights the growing disequilibrium between the enormous economic growth of the world in the past half century and the pressures that a population of six billion imposes on the earth's natural systems and resources:

From 1950 to 1997, the use of lumber tripled, that of paper increased sixfold, the fish catch increased nearly fivefold, grain consumption nearly tripled, fossil fuel burning nearly quadrupled, and air and water pollutants multiplied several-fold. The unfortunate reality is that the economy continues to expand, but the ecosystem on which it depends does not, creating an increasingly stressed relationship.

While economic indicators such as investment, production, and trade are consistently positive, the key environmental indicators are increasingly negative. Forests are shrinking, water tables are falling, soils are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are collapsing, rangelands are deteriorating, rivers are running dry, temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying, and plant and animal species are disappearing.

Growth for the sake of growth, notes environmental writer Edward Abbey, is the ideology of the cancer cell. Just as a continuously growing cancer eventually destroys its life-support systems by destroying its host, a continuously expanding global economy is slowly destroying its host ? the Earth's ecosystem. The ideology of growth knows no geographic boundaries. It has permeated every corner of the planet. Political leaders in developing countries often denounce the high levels of consumption in industrial countries, but none have talked about eventual limits on their own consumption as they modernise. No national political leader of an industrial country, no matter how affluent, has announced plans to stabilise demands on the Earth's ecosystem once people's basic needs for food, shelter, and health care are satisfied.

Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health are put forward as priority future goals by the UN, reporting an overall increase in the use of artificial contraception from 10 per cent to 57 per cent over the past 30 years. But the Vatican is still boxed into a corner on contraception.

The Pope, addressing a group of American bishops last month, repeated his past warnings about serious harm caused to marital relationships by recourse to artificial contraception. Cardinal Juan Sandoval I?iguez, Archbishop of Guadalajara, (Mexico), warned of continued threats to the family through birth control and restrictive demographic policies.

By contrast UNFPA3, 30 years old next year, is congratulating itself on the rapidly increasing world use of contraceptives, particularly in developing countries. It urges, in concert with all signatories to the action plan of the Cairo population conference, that family planning should be universally available by the year 2015 or sooner.

Human rights coincide with planetary needs, concludes UNFPA's 1998 report on the state of the world's population. I rest my case.

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1. World population reached: 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1927 (123 years later), 3 billion in 1960 (33 years later), 4 billion in 1974 (14 years later), 5 billion in 1987 (13 years later), 6 billion in 1999 (12 years later).

2. United Nations Population Division. Experts' meeting on below-replacement fertility, New York.

3. UNFPA does not provide any support for abortion or abortion-related activities. While recognising unsafe abortion as a major public health concern, the ICPD action programme states that abortion is not to be considered a method of family planning. Accordingly, UNFPA seeks to prevent abortion by increasing access to family planning services, and to reduce maternal deaths through better management of complications of unsafe abortions.

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