Do you want to know the real problem? Well it's kind of scary.

In recent years demographic experts have been revising their peak human population estimates downward. At one time, peak population was feared to be in the tens of billions. Then it was revised down to 12 billion. But fertility rates continued to drop, to the point where our population is now projected to peak around 9 billion sometime in the middle of this century. This decline is being driven by some well-recognized factors:

Providing medical care to pregnant women and children reduces the infant mortality rate. When the infant mortality rate is very low, parents are assured that their children will live to adulthood. They therefore voluntarily decide to have fewer children -- usually 2 or fewer. In other words they don't try to have as many children as possible to ensure that at least some make it to adulthood. Providing medical care to children actually reduces population growth.

Enhancing women's rights and increasing their education contributes to the slowing of population growth. Women seem to generally choose to have fewer children if they have the power to do so. The more power women have in a society, the fewer children they choose to have. A 1995 study by the Guttmacher Institute found that Latin American women with no education have large families of 6-7 children, whereas better educated women have family sizes of 2-3 children, analogous to those of women in the developed world.

Free or cheap, reliable birth control has revolutionized demographics. In developed countries birth control has led to fertility rates that are below replacement rates, and even in developing countries birth control has caused fertility rates to plummet.

Food security, development assistance and education also lead to lower fertility rates. Famine is a great engine of population growth, while food security acts as a governor on that engine. Famine and hunger causes disproportionate death rates among children, which encourages parents to have more children as an insurance strategy. Giving parents and children food security leads them to have fewer children in much the same way as increasing medical care.

The world has entered a demographic phase of plummeting fertility rates -- in many countries to below the magic "replacement" fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, which implies zero population growth or even "sub-replacement" fertility rates that imply a slow decline in overall human population. Much of Europe is worrying about and developing plans to deal with slowly declining populations. So in the opinion of mainstream demographers we now have an excellent opportunity to have a "soft landing" in population rather than the population explosion and crash that so many have been fearing for decades.

Or do we? Might the rejoicing over falling fertility be, if not a red herring, at least a trifle premature? This article makes a case for extreme skepticism on this issue. Yes, population growth is slowing, and all the factors cited above are contributing to that. However, there are a number of inconvenient truths that are not addressed in this rosy analysis. They change the picture dramatically when they are included.