Cut population with `green sex' Bellamy pleads

THE BIGGEST environmental issue worldwide for the remaining four years of the 20th century will be sex, according to the environmentalist, Dr David Bellamy.

In a statement marking the annual report of Population Concern, the London based charity of which he is president, he called for "green sex to curb the world's spiralling growth in population, now increasing by 85 million a year.

With another half a billion young people entering their reproductive years between now and the year 2000, Dr Bellamy said there was an urgent need for them to separate sex from reproduction and so help build a sustainable future.

Dr Bellamy warned that millions of hectares of natural habitats, forests, wetlands and grasslands were being consumed every year by "our voracious appetite for land and resources" to feed unsustainable population growth.

He also pointed to the decline of the world's fishing grounds saying the fact that 75 per cent of them were now over fished was due to "a collision of human needs and natural resource limits". A "natural threshold" had been crossed.

The report highlights how 70 per cent of the world's population increase is now taking place in cities, involving a massive movement of people from rural areas which represented "the largest migration in human history".

Rural poverty, high fertility and land degradation were driving 30 million of the world's poorest people into the cities annually, often to live in slums and squatter camps with polluted air and water, no jobs and no dignity.

Dealing with these problems would need an international commitment to improve education, health care, family planning and women's rights as "prerequisites for a healthy planet enjoyed by healthy people". Dr Bellamy said.