The world welcomed its symbolic seven billionth baby yesterday amid a stark warning from UN chief Ban Ki-moon of the need to tackle inequality on a planet where almost a billion people go hungry.
“Our world is one of terrible contradictions,” Mr Ban told a press conference to mark the UN declaration that the world population has reached seven billion.
“Plenty of food, but one billion people go hungry. Lavish lifestyles for a few, but poverty for too many others,” he said, highlighting famine in east Africa, the Syria unrest and Wall Street protests.
The UN said that by its best estimates the seven billionth baby would be born on October 31, and countries around the world have been marking the demographic milestone. But any celebrations for parents, who were showered with gifts in some countries, was largely tempered by fears of the strain that burgeoning humanity is putting on the Earth.
“What kind of world has baby seven billion been born into? What kind of world do we want for our children in the future?” Mr Ban asked.
He said he would take his message that world leaders need to battle inequality to the Group of 20 summit in Cannes, France this week.
The Philippines was the first country to declare a seven billionth baby, a little girl named Danica May Camacho. Weighing 2.5 kilos, Danica was delivered just before midnight on Sunday under a blitz of media camera flashes at Manila’s Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital.
UN rights chief Navi Pillay said in a statement that the seven billionth birth comes at a time of great hope amid the Arab spring uprisings in the Middle East. He warned, however, that “she or he will also be born into a world where some people, given the chance, will trample on those rights and freedoms in the name of state security, or economic policy, or group chauvinism.
The UN named a Bosnian child, Adnan Mevic, as the Earth’s six billionth inhabitant on October 12, 1999, when then secretary general Kofi Annan was pictured in a Sarajevo hospital with the child in his arms.
The Mevic family is now living in poverty – which is one reason why no one baby was being singled out for the global spotlight this time.
Instead a number of births were being marked throughout the day.
In Bangladesh, authorities named another baby girl the world’s seven billionth child. Weighing 2.75 kilos and named Oishee, she arrived a minute after midnight at a hospital in the capital Dhaka.
In Cambodia, the honour fell to a baby girl who has yet to be named. Weighing three kilos, she was born in the southern province of Preah Sihanouk, her parents’ fifth child.
However, Indian Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the birth of the seven billionth child was “not a matter of joy but a great worry.”
India’s population, the world’s second biggest at 1.2 billion, is set to surpass China’s by 2025, according to the US census bureau.