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Cheering as the population reports are becoming today, for much of the past 50 years, demographers were bearers of mostly bad tidings. In census after census, they reported that humanity was not just settling the planet but smothering it. It was not until the century was nearly two-thirds over that scientists and governments finally bestirred themselves to do something about it. The first great brake on population growth came in the early 1960s, with the development of the birth-control pill, a magic pharmacological bullet that made contraception easier--not to mention tidier--than it had ever been before. In 1969 the United Nations got in on the population game, creating the U.N. Population Fund, a global organization dedicated to bringing family-planning techniques to women who would not otherwise have them. In the decades that followed, the U.N. increased its commitment, sponsoring numerous global symposiums to address the population problem further. The most significant was the 1994 Cairo conference, where attendees pledged $5.7 billion to reduce birthrates in the developing world and acknowledged that giving women more education and reproductive freedom was the key to accomplishing that goal. Even a global calamity like aids has yielded unexpected dividends, with international campaigns to promote condom use and abstinence helping to prevent not only disease transmission but also conception.
Such efforts have paid off in a big way. According to U.N. head counters, the average number of children produced per couple in the developing world--a figure that reached a whopping 4.9 earlier this century--has plunged to just 2.7. In many countries, including Spain, Slovenia, Greece and Germany, the fertility rate is well below 1.5, meaning parents are producing 25% fewer offspring than would be needed to replace themselves--in effect, throwing the census into reverse. A little more than 30 years ago, global population growth was 2.04% a year, the highest in human history. Today it's just 1.3%. "It was a remarkable century," says Joseph Chamie of the U.N. Population Division. "We quadrupled the population in 100 years, but that's not going to happen again."
Sunny as the global averages look, however, things get a lot darker when you break them down by region. Even the best family-planning programs do no good if there is neither the money nor governmental expertise to carry them out, and in less-developed countries--which currently account for a staggering 96% of the annual population increase--both are sorely lacking. In parts of the Middle East and Africa, the fertility rate exceeds seven babies per woman. In India, nearly 16 million births are registered each year, for a growth rate of 1.8%. While Europe's population was three times that of Africa in 1950, today the two continents have about the same count. At the current rate, Africa will triple Europe in another 50 years.