By mid-century, we will be 9.15 billion

Forty-two years ago, the biologist Paul Ehrlich warned in The Population Bomb that mass starvation would strike in the 1970s and 1980s, with the world's population growth outpacing the production of food. Thanks to innovations and efforts such as the "green revolution" in farming (now gone sour, of course) and the widespread adoption of family planning, Ehrlich's worst fears passed over.

Now the United Nations Population Division projects that global population growth will nearly halt by 2050. By then, the world's population will have stabilized at 9.15 billion people, according to the "medium growth" variant of the UN's authoritative population database World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. (Today's global population is 6.83 billion.)

Unless a crisis like climate change makes its presence felt, global economic output is expected to increase by two to three percent per year, meaning that global income will increase far more than population over the next four decades. Well, average income. That will not still mean that the rich-poor gap will decrease, will it? Or even international parity/security.

With food production and distribution being a largely global issue, much of world peace will depend on how we manage this. Energy issues will also play a crucial role in deciding who dominates the global scene.

Experts feel that international security will depend less on how many people inhabit the world than on how the global population is composed and distributed. Disparity in incomes is already seeing unrest in many parts of the world where nations are getting split into smaller units. Will the world withdraw into shells or will the century see the coming together of the race?