World Population

The world population is expected to grow from 6 billion to about 10 billion by 2080, but the human race is still expected to have enough to eat, an Australian demographer said in Beijing. "But there may be more subtle things about the environment, about the atmosphere that would be much more difficult to control," said John Caldwell, president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.

The League of Women Voters is hosting a question-and-answer discussion of the world population Saturday at Marie Callender's Restaurant. Susie Morale, who is a member of the Population Coalition, the Environmental Action Committee and the Peace Corps Assn., will speak about issues ranging from human rights to orphaned children. "We will be discussing the problems of food supply and sustaining the systems it takes to make population viable," said Dorothy Baird, who helped organize the event.

Deng Xiaoping, China's "paramount leader" and a steely pragmatist who broke the spell of Maoist ideology and forged the world's most populous nation into an economic powerhouse, died here Wednesday night at age 92. The Communist Party leadership, conscious of upheavals that have often accompanied political change here, moved quickly to establish an orderly transition.

World population is growing more slowly than in recent years and with a concerted effort to defuse a "demographic time bomb" population could stabilize at 8 billion by 2025, an advocacy group said Friday. Werner Fornos, president of the Washington-based institute, said the world's population is growing by almost 90 million annually, more slowly than the 100 million growth of recent years. The world's population is nearing 5.9 billion, and will be over 6 billion by the year 2000.

The world's population, which has quadrupled over the past 80 years, may never double again, according to new forecasts by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Researchers calculated that there is a 66% chance that the world's population will not reach 11.5 billion--double today's population--within the next century, if ever. They determined that the world's population will probably increase from today's 5.8 billion to around 7.9 billion in 2020, 9.9 billion in 2050, and 10.

Umogome sits atop a volcano on the Rwanda-Zaire border, watching his family eat and play near a fallen tree and a bamboo grove. Two of his offspring sit quietly on the forest floor, though. Both have lost limbs, victims of Rwanda's civil war and its upheaval. Umogome, whose name means "serious" in Kinyarwanda, is a 38-year-old silverback gorilla, one of the world's oldest.

Expanding cities around the world have helped shrink the acreage used per person for food production by 30% since 1950, a report by a Washington study group said. The Worldwatch Institute said the land used for grain production has fallen to 0.30 acres per person last year from 0.57 acres in 1950. The 1995 figure was equivalent to about a quarter of a football field or a sixth of a soccer pitch, the institute said in a report titled Shrinking Fields.

More than half the world's projected 6.6 billion people in the year 2006 will be living in urban areas, underlining the prospect of crowded, violent and unhealthy cities, the United Nations Population Fund said in a report released in London. The biggest increase in urban population will be in developing countries, where the pressure on resources will be greatest, it added. "This urban future is inevitable and it should not be feared," the report said.

More than half the world's people will be living in urban areas in 10 years, underlining the prospect of ever more crowded, violent and unhealthy cities, the United Nations Population Fund said in a new report. Of a global population of 6.6 billion in 2006, 3.3 billion will inhabit towns and cities, and the biggest increase in urban populations will be in developing countries, where the pressure on resources will be greatest, the fund said.