Leisinger, Schmitt, and Pandya-Lorch offer here a sober analysis of a complex and alarming situation. They assess the progress the world has made in controlling population growth and point to the areas where future difficulties will lie. They describe the effects of rapid population growth on social and economic conditions and on natural resources, and they consider what population growth will mean for the food security of poor people and poor countries. In addition, the authors make clear how the roles of women and children in traditional societies affect birth rates.

Six Billion and Counting shows that neither the population pessimists, who predict a catastrophic exhaustion of natural resources, nor the population optimists, who foresee technological solutions for all of the problems raised by population growth, offer the most useful approach to this problem. Instead, Leisinger and his coauthors argue that new technologies mitigating the harmful effects of rapid population growth can give the world valuable time to take the complex and multifaceted steps needed to reduce population growth rates to sustainable levels.

"Population growth has recently been overshadowed by other development issues competing for governments' and donors' attention. Six Billion and Counting clearly places this important problem back on the agenda."

-- Nafis Sadik, Senior Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General and Former Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund

"This book delivers a message of both alarm and hope: the Earth's resources are already under strain given the current global population and wasteful patterns of production and consumption, but tools are available to help us reach sustainable levels of population growth and resource use. Now is the time to use them."

-- Maurice Strong, Senior Adviser to the United Nations

"Even today, too many Sub-Saharan African countries are struggling to achieve food security for their people, and continuing high absolute population growth makes the achievement of this goal much harder. This book presents a thoughtful and well-reasoned analysis of the population-poverty nexus and its consequences for food security. Most important, it provides a valuable contribution toward the understanding that there are known effective and humane best practices in population and food policies and that remaining problems are due more to lack of political will than deficits in knowledge and technologies."

-- Robert S. McNamara, Former President, World Bank

"In a few decades, the world's population will be 9 or 10 billion and counting. These authors show that new technologies are not the only solution, but they are crucial if we are to use the resources we have more efficiently, and thus avoid hunger and human misery on a massive scale."

-- Norman E. Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Table of Contents, Foreword and Acknowledgements
(PDF 66K)

Chapter 1: Six Billion and Counting

(PDF 109K)

Chapter 8: The Battle for a Better Future

(PDF 81K)