Kampala — The State of Uganda Population Report 2008 was released this week. The report showed that Uganda's population had grown by 1.2 million to 29.6m last year.

It also showed that on average, Ugandan women give birth to 6.7 children and as result the country's population will hit 38 million within the next decade.

Of course, this report caused some alarm and the do-gooders in Kampala belted out their time-worn call for a cut in our population growth figures.

In the history of the world, Uganda's situation is not unique.

In the late 18th century, British economist, Thomas Malthus pointed out that the population was growing faster than the rate of food production.

He said this was not a sustainable situation but held comfort in the fact that famine, disease and war would soon restore a natural balance.

The population explosion Malthus was grumbling about had been triggered off by an agrarian revolution, where populations around Europe shifted from the less efficient hunter-gather communities to settled communities practicing organised agriculture.

This shift too came as a result of population pressures.

The more the population grew, the less land on which each band of hunter-gatherers could roam without social disturbance or conflict.

The agrarian revolution boosted food production and encouraged a relatively sedentary life, useful conditions for a population boom.

Malthus need not have fretted very much because with the onset of the industrial revolution, population growth rates around Europe plummeted to the negative growth rates that currently prevail in many parts of the continent.

The industrial revolution was crucial to this decline because it moved the poor off the land into factories, introduced structured education and saw a dramatic improvement in health, water and sanitation services.

Universal education not only makes it easier to communicate but more crucially delays pregnancy.

This progression of events has been duplicated in North America, Japan and other parts of Asia.

What all this suggests is that a better standard of living will lead to a fall in population growth.

Many studies have shown that there is a strong relationship between the levels of poverty and population growth rates.

More affluent societies have low growth rates while poorer countries are more prolific in their reproductive endeavours.

At a very basic level, fertility rates are dictated by the amount of sex one has. I would not be surprised to find that Africans on average have more sex than the populations of Western economies.

Often times, our anti-population growth advocates let us down with their remedies which revolve around birth control methods.

True, but how do they explain the fall in growth rates in Europe long before ad

Poverty is concentrated in the rural areas, and because about eight in 10 Ugandans live in the rural areas, this skews the average national poverty statistics.

So, if we are serious about curbing population growth, there has to be greater cooperation than currently exists between all departments in government.

The anti-population growth advocates need to get involved in agricultural, education, health, industrial and finance policy and ensure they are focused on poverty eradication.

I suspect that as it stands now, our population strategy is not internally-generated or based on any hard held conviction.

So, we can expect poverty and by extension population growth figures to continue to be higher among the poor - read the rural areas, for the foreseeable future.