Eds John Bongaarts, Rodolfo A Bulatao; Panel on Population Projections, Committee on Population, National Research Council

National Academy Press, $29.95, pp 258 

ISBN 0 309 06990 4

Available to read free online at www.nap.edu/books/ 0309069904/html/

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This is a study in political correctness. It takes a comfortable global view and forecasts that humanity, having passed the six billion point two years ago, is now heading for nine billion by 2050a year which many readers can expect to see. A report issued this month by the United Nations Population Fund predicted that the world's population would reach 9.3 billion by 2050 (BMJ 2001;323:1088). Other recent studies show the world's population growing more slowly and reaching nine billion only in 2070. It was only two billion when I was born. Nearly as much growth will take place in the next 50 years as took place in the last 50. Whereas the populations of industrial countries are now outnumbered four to one, they will be outnumbered seven to one by 2050. More than half the population growth will be accounted for by "population momentum." This is the inevitable growth in a young population that would take place if every family were to have two children (strictly 2.1) from now on. It can only be reduced if families of less than two children become the norm in rapidly growing populations.

If the global view is hardly reassuring, the local view is too terrifying for this book to contemplate. It fails to consider the plight of agricultural communities that outgrow the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems and have no new land to migrate to, and have economies that fail to provide sufficient exports, which they can exchange for food and other essentialsthat is, they are demographically trapped. I once asked Jack Caldwell, Africa's most eminent demographer, how much of Africa he thinks is trapped. He replied that he thinks most of it is. Africa has been a net food importer for 20 years. Its population was set to quadruple before AIDS, and even now it is set nearly to triple. The end result of entrapment is starvation and population driven violence.

Not only does this book fail to confront entrapment, but demography and development economics don't do so either. All must therefore be considered intellectually corruptsubject to the Hardinian taboo (named after the US ecologist Garrett Hardin) that prevents us humanswith the exception of China with its one child familiesfrom confronting our population problems.

This book is a reminder, not so much to read between the lines, as to look over the edge of the population precipice and to steel ourselves for what is going to happen. For more about this, readers are going to have to ask their search engines to look for disentrapment on the web.

Beyond Six Billion looks so impressivea shiny hardback sponsored by the four US National Academies, and written by the most eminent politically correct "yes men" that it was possible to gather round a table, all of whom presumably know what the real situation is. They appear to have got it right globally, but they have ignored the problem locally. They have persuaded the reader that all is well, when in fact all is far from well.

Maurice King, honorary research fellow,. 

the University of Leeds