How to deal with this century's population explosion? The arguments about policy have sharpened now that the latest statistics show that the rate of increase is slowing down. The press officer of the Catholic aid agency CAFOD joins the debate. How few people are here, I found myself thinking on my first visit to Africa. In Kenya, Uganda and Sudan I travelled on deserted roads for hours without seeing a single human being. The vast unpopulated spaces I saw in Africa shattered my image of the continent. After regular reports in the British media about the population explosion in the Third World, I had expected to discover towns and villages teeming with people in overcrowded conditions.

I already had my reservations about Western-designed policies to reduce population growth in the developing world, but I still held to the apparently rational consensus that over-population is a significant cause of its poverty. After further visits to Africa, I challenge that assumption.

The latest report by the United Nations Population Fund, just issued, brought the news that the rate of population growth is in decline. The British media gave conflicting interpretations of it. At least one newspaper still had headlines which screamed of timebombs and the threat to the earth's resources.

Such fears are not new. From Malthus in the nineteenth century to modern-day Malthusians like the environmentalist author Paul Ehrlich, the thesis that populations grow fast while food production grows slowly have produced grim predictions of starvation and famine. But bleak scenarios of the devastating impact of population growth have not materialised. As the former environmentalist Richard North writes in his book, Life on a Modern Planet: Such famines as we see, it is widely agreed, are the result of war, not ecological collapse. The evidence that mass starvation is avoidable and will probably stay avoided gets more convincing, not less.

Nor can we just assume that the world's resources are finite and will run out. The green revolution has already shown how the capacity of the earth can be expanded. In the same week that the media warned of the strain put on the earth by the growing population, the Guardian reported that a source of frozen fuel had just been discovered which could power the planet for centuries.

So why is it that fears about too many people in the world have such a strong grip on our collective imagination? Above all, there is a desire not only to explain the massive poverty that grips large sections of the world but also to find some easy, preferably cheap, solutions. If population growth is a major factor in exacerbating poverty in the developing world, then population control can be a major contribution to eradicating it.

US Aid (the equivalent of Britain's Department for International Development) has this year given Kenya $13.5 million for family planning, compared to $4 million in humanitarian assistance. Yet access to contraception has not reduced and cannot reduce poverty in the developing world. The decisive factor in reducing the absolute level of poverty in developing countries has been international investment and development. Several of the so-called Asian tiger economies have emerged from poverty despite high populations. Africa, however, remains both largely impoverished and sparsely populated. Even discounting desert and semi-desert areas, Africa has only 48 people per square kilometre compared with 238 people per square kilometre in the United Kingdom.

Yet despite the evidence that countries with rising populations have often enjoyed growing prosperity, the association between growing numbers and growing poverty still clings to the Third World. Why? Racism is part of the answer. It may be the racism of fear rather than an aggressive form of racism but it is racism nonetheless.

When people in the United States or Britain say there are too many people in the world, they rarely mean too many Americans or Britons. Even though the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in the world, the United Nations does not try to impose population programmes on the Dutch, nor does the International Monetary Fund say it will refuse loans unless the Dutch Government commits itself to reducing population growth.

It is no coincidence that fears of over-population are so openly associated with illegal immigrants. For many people, including the author Robert Kaplan, the major threat to stability and security in the West comes from the ever-present threat of an explosion amongst the poor communities of the developing world, which will produce millions of asylum-seekers. Kaplan and others barely try to disguise their fear of Europeans being outnumbered by Africans. That fears about population are a Western preoccupation became clear to me on my early visits to Africa. I have not yet met one African who identifies the challenge they face as arising from too many people. Indeed, most African women I meet instantly offer their sympathy that I am still childless at 34. In underdeveloped parts of Africa, people are seen as the main resource and the only source of income. Poor people do not share the individual choices about career or lifestyle that the rich North enjoys, and instead draw strength from extended families which stay together, and define themselves by their family.

Long before famine hit southern Sudan and wiped out thousands of people, I met a doctor there who told me that his female patients complained most about infertility. He explained to me that most of the women were probably not infertile at all, but were desperate to get pregnant quickly before their husbands went off to fight in the war.

Widows who have survived the genocide in Rwanda express great sadness that losing their husbands has also meant losing their chance of having more children. From the tidal wave in Papua New Guinea to the AIDS pandemic in Africa, whole generations of children are being wiped out in the developing world. In this context, it is surely obscene that the only aid programmes guaranteed to be consistently fully funded are those which include population control. While AIDS victims in Africa can only dream about antibiotics and AZT, clinics in the most remote rural areas are stocked up with pills, coils and other contraceptives.

ACCORDING to figures from US Aid, two million women will have been sterilised in Kenya by 2020. In the Third World as a whole, 123 million women have been sterilised in the past 25 years ? accounting for 90 per cent of all sterilisations worldwide ? thanks to funding from international agencies.

Anyone who has visited refugee camps in Africa will doubtless share the feeling that one family living in these conditions is one family too many. But recent press reports that UN agencies are planning to supply these camps with manual vacuum aspiration equipment to allow abortions to be performed on site are shocking. These people have lost everything ? their homes, their dignity, their income, their hope for the future. What exactly are we saying to and about them by suggesting that before they get adequate food, housing or education, they must have easy access to abortion?

Smaller families are the product of urban and industrialised societies. Last month the media carried reports about a young professional couple in Britain who have decided to freeze an embryo to allow them to delay parenthood while pursuing their lucrative careers. Irrespective of our moral reaction to that sort of planning, it is clear that technological developments and increasing prosperity continually bring new lifestyle choices to families in developed societies. In one world people have the luxury of choosing to put off having children until it best suits them, whereas in the other world they want to have as many children as they can, as quickly as they can. Development and education change the behaviour of individuals.

The key to population control is not contraception but social and economic development and in particular the education of women. At the UN Population and Development Conference in Cairo in 1994, there was consensus that in societies where women are educated and empowered, they have fewer children and they have them later in life. The evidence is overwhelming. In this sense there is no greater birth controller in the Third World than the Catholic Church, because no agency is more active in educating women. In many countries, including southern Sudan and the former Zaire, it is the Church that runs the only schools still functioning. In southern Sudan I was witness to a scene where a Catholic nun remonstrated with the local tribal chief about preventing his daughters from going to school.

The expansion of the population over the past 200 years has coincided with an historic improvement in the quality of life for the majority of people. We are living longer, eating better and are more educated than ever before. Let's hope that in the new millennium we will tackle the underdevelopment that has deprived the poor people of Africa, Latin America and Asia of their share of these improvements.

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