LONDON -- You look at the numbers and you think: "That's impossible." Uganda had about 7 million people at independence in 1962, and in only 45 years it has grown to 30 million. By 2050, there will be 130 million Ugandans, and it will be the 12th biggest country in the world, with more people than Russia or Japan. Its population will have increased 18-fold in less than 90 years.

Many people think that population growth is no longer a problem, and everybody somehow knows that it is politically incorrect to talk about it. Back in 1968, when Paul Ehrlich terrified everybody with his book "The Population Bomb," it was seen as the gravest long-term threat facing the human race, but now it scarcely gets a mention even in discussions on climate change -- as if the number of people producing and consuming on this planet had no relevance to how great the pressure on the environment is.

True, the population explosion has gone away in large parts of the world, in the sense that most developed countries now have birthrates well below replacement level (2.1 children per woman), and that the global average, including the developing countries of Asia and South America, is now down to 2.3 children. That's pretty impressive, given that it was 5.4 children per woman as recently as 1970.