The world’s population has undergone a massive increase during the 20th century. In 1900 it stood at 1.6 billion. By the end of the century, it topped 6 billion, and is still increasing at a rate of 86 million people a year. According to the United Nations, world population will be at least 7.9 billion by 2020 and could reach 13 billion by 2050.
The world’s population is not evenly spread. Some regions, including Europe, eastern North America, India, China and Japan have a much higher density of people. Here there are many more industrial cities, or the land is intensively farmed.
Rapid population growth began in about 1800 with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Then most of the increase was in Europe and North America as better health care and food resources became available. In 1900 most of the world’s largest cities were in these continents.
In the past century, about 97 per cent of this growth has taken place in the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and Central and South America, sometimes referred to as “the South”. Here, people have traditionally had a lot of children because they fear that many will not survive to be adults. The average fertility rate in Sudan, for example, is 5.7 babies per family, compared to 1.8 in Canada. Better health care, even in poor countries, means that today fewer children die of hunger or disease and fewer women die in childbirth. As a result, the populations of countries in the South now have large proportions of young people. Half of India’s population, for example, is under 30 years old. These young people are having children of their own, so the birth rate remains high.
Countries like China, the most populous country in the world, have taken steps to arrest the growth of its massive population. The government has introduced a policy of one child per family.
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