5 billion people to almost 7 billion today

The issue will not arise directly to heads of State and Government met in Copenhagen to avoid climate disaster and try to find a compromise complex on quantified objectives for the reduction of gas emissions greenhouse. Because it is generally still a taboo. "But with more than 9 billion people towards the half of the 21st century, the planet it or not is too populated and must engage in a"new"Malthusian"

United Nations projections suggest thoughtfully on the capacity of the Earth to deal with such an influx of inhabitants. Not only, as the feared a century ago Thomas Malthus, in terms of agricultural production, but in terms of environment also, as the fear many scientific reports and the United Nations.

Of course, another demographic phenomenon that has already reached the old industrialized, some such as the France and the United Kingdom, as early as the 19th century, and tends to be accelerated, will also affect developing countries: the decline in the number of children per woman of childbearing age. Thus, by 2050, the fertility rate in the world, according to the forecasts of the United Nations, should fall by 2.5 currently to 2.02 children per woman or below 2.1 children, considered as the minimum replacement of generations.

In other words, the population is aging and even faster in the countries of the South that the North, as noted by Gilles Pison, demographer at the national Institute of demographic studies ("Issues - Les Echos", September 2009). A consequence also of declining fertility rates is that the population should stabilize after the turn of the 21st century for likely, then decline.

But the decline of fertility is in itself sufficient to correct the ills of the world Can we today hope that, as Malthus was mistaken for a lack of agricultural resources towards the end of the 18th century to the growth of the population, all signs of global apocalypse are wrong today Certainly not. Because if the dreaded population explosion has not produced, in fifty years the world population nevertheless increased from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion today. The increase is more striking if it was mil a year where, on an area in sum similar, the world had less than 260 million people. And demography remains the world's a bomb ticking. All that any forecast long term may be far from reality. The United Nations departure and the high assumption of 10 billion people in forty years, or the low of 7 billion.

Are we thus on the verge of a revolution in demographic thinking After years where the youth of a nation was regarded as one of its main resources, the world is doing back machine. Certainly, the return of Malthusianism is not, formally, the order of the day. In addition, the Chinese example of the coercive birth control is convicted, course, moral reasons, but also in purely demographic terms. The one-child policy has been as a result of contributing to an imbalance between the sexes (106.8 men per 100 women in 2005). What place this title China just behind India (107.5 men per 100 women).

But the United Nations questioned however more and more the adoption of a form of Malthusianism. "That is should be made to accelerate the decline of fertility in the less developed countries", thus wondered division population of the Department of the economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations in a note last March (1). And the experts of the United Nations emphasized that in 31 poorest nations, the fertility rate was in 2005 above 5 children per woman. Therefore, it had to reduce it as quickly as possible.

In a report last November, a few weeks of the Copenhagen Summit, the UN population Fund made a link between population growth and climate change. For Unfpa, each birth is responsible for new non-greenhouse gas emissions only for the new being, but for all its descendants.

Then what to do The United Nations thus argue for a family planning, but also for a greater equality between the sexes. But there is of course the other way, as also noted, the Executive Director of Unfpa, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, to find a new definition of progress and a new paradigm for development (2). Because it is to find new technologies that allow to not destroy the environment while facing the needs of 9 billion people, or more. In any case, the decline of fertility, if it helps to stabilize the world population, solve all problems of the planet.