the highest recorded level in history. However, the increase rate continued to decline slowly but surely after this fifteen year peak, and fell to an average of 1.57% annually by the early nineties, according to the United Nations estimation in 1994. The United Nations projects that the world population increase ratio will continue to fall and reach to an annual average of 0.51% in the period 2045-2050. While it is certainly preferable that the world population increase rate should fall to 0.5%, the increase rate in developing countries, which account for 80% of the world's population, would need to fall to 0.6% annually by then. The current increase rates (1995 - 2000) are 2.7% in Africa, 2.0% in Central and Southern Asia, and 2.4% in Western Asia, so it would not be easy to reduce those rates to less than half in Africa, a quarter in Central and Southern Asia, and a third in Western Asia.
However, a more serious challenge may be presented by the tremendous annual increase in numbers (see Table and Figure). Although it is estimated that the annual increase rate will continue to decrease despite this decline, the annual increase in the world's population will reach a staggering figure of 80 to 90 million per annum for the 45 years from 1980-85 to 2020-25. The total increase in this 45 year period will be nearly four billion. It can safely be said that the 30 year period from 1995 to 2025 will be the most critical. The question is whether it is possible to provide food, housing, employment, health and medical services for such an enormous annual increase in the number of people.
The food problem will have an especially direct effect on our lives.
Human beings are not different from other creatures. We can exist only under biological low. Eventually, we human beings cannot conquer nature. Serious reflection about how to create symbiosis with nature from the standpoint of global perspective will be a starting point of solution. Challenge for future of mankind would be meaningless, unless mankind do not make efforts to understand for themselves what they are (Sagan).
