World Population Conference to Open

The world population is expected to grow from 6 billion to about 10 billion by 2080, but the human race is still expected to have enough to eat, an Australian demographer said in Beijing. “But there may be more subtle things about the environment, about the atmosphere that would be much more difficult to control,” said John Caldwell, president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. Caldwell, who was speaking on the eve of the opening of the 23rd General Population Conference, added that although the world population has doubled in the last five decades, growth has slowed down.