“Lord, you will show us the path of life,” we pray in the psalm response this Sunday. When it comes to creating offspring to carry on that life, however, human beings through the ages have proven fairly adept without much of a road map. And if present fertility rates continue, the United Nations forecasts, world population will top 10 billion by century’s end.

At one point the world’s population was expected to stabilize at around 9 billion by mid-century. But population growth in Africa remains so high that the populace there could more than triple in this century, rising to 3.6 billion, the report said--a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.

The new report comes just ahead of a demographic milestone, with the world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. “Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody--it’s as simple as that,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research group in New York.

The projections were made by the U.N. population division, which has a track record of fairly accurate forecasts. Among the factors behind the upward revisions is that fertility is not declining as rapidly as expected in some poor countries and has shown a slight increase in many wealthier countries, including the United States, Great Britain, and Denmark.

Though population control was a major focus of development programs in the 1970s and 1980s, such programs have stagnated in many countries, caught up in battles over birth control, abortion, sex education, and the role of women in society.

The new report suggests that China, which has for decades enforced restrictive population policies, could soon enter the ranks of countries with declining populations, peaking at 1.4 billion in the next couple of decades, then falling to 941 million by 2100.

The United States is growing faster than many rich countries, largely because of high immigration and higher fertility among Hispanic immigrants. The new report projects that the United States population will rise from today’s 311 million to 478 million by 2100.

Source: An article by Justin Gillis and Celia W. Dugger for the New York Times