Human population growth is slowing down. While slowing, however, significant growth continues, meaning that more people will be sharing such finite resources as freshwater and cropland. But the braking of this growth has been significant enough that many analysts of natural resources are more optimistic about their future availability than they were in the early 1990s. People in the Balance updates key data on population growth and the state of critical natural resources as the millennium turns. This compares with 505 million people in these circumstances in the year 2000.
Water shortage is likely to grow especially acute in the Middle East and in much of Africa.
An estimated 420 million people live today in countries that have less than .07 hectare of cultivated land per person. This benchmark is considered the bare minimum capable of supplying a vegetarian diet for one person, under ideal conditions without use of artificial chemical inputs or loss of soil and soil nutrients. That number of people living in such critically land-scarce countries is projected to increase to between 557 million and 1.04 billion in 2025. Global fish production climbed modestly in 1997, mostly from the expansion of aquaculture in China. Most fisheries worldwide remain fully exploited or in decline, however, and the amount of fish caught per fisher is declining steadily.