World Population Day has come and gone and among other things it has brought forth a rash of soul searching about the 'big picture' of population growth, climate change, unrestrained consumption and resource depletion.

We are now incessantly being told that more people means less for everyone, less for cattle herders in Africa, less land for farmers throughout the developing world, less energy and food for poor nations, and more conflict and uncertainty.

There are now 6.9 billion of us and more on the way. By 2050 there may well be more than 9 billion people in the world.

To ensure that environmental harm is kept to a minimum we need to reduce individual consumption rates. Or so we are told. It is as if someone has reignited the old Malthusian debate of the 1970s and 80's.

More people are bad, something has to be done about it, and population control is the way to go. Interestingly, Malthusians have also assumed a new guise.

Family planning and birth control in the developing world has become the catch-cry of a new generation of security experts, particularly in the US. A new security agenda has emerged in which the field of Security Demographics has become the war-wagon of neo-Malthusians who stridently claim that the Western model of small families, birth control, low fertility and middle aged-elderly populations is the only way to deliver stable government and social and economic security.

Population growth and rapidly increasing urbanisation in the developing world are seen as creating large numbers of poor, unemployed and discontented young males - all prone to radicalism and ready recruits for terrorist networks.

Implicit in this is the view, strongly put by US demographic think tanks like Population Action International, the Population Institute and the Worldwatch Institute, is that there are 'favourable' and 'unfavourable' age structures and that nations in the early and middle stages of the demographic transition are significantly more vulnerable to civil conflict than are those with low fertility and relatively mature aged populations.

So there we have it. High fertility, rapid population growth and a youth bulge are all indicators of insecurity and conflict whereas ageing nations are more likely to be peaceful and democratic.

In reality the link is based on squeaky logic which simply states that because population growth and civil unrest and terrorism happen to coincide they must, therefore, be linked. But the answer put forward is population control, restricted fertility and emulation of the Western model.

All this reminds me of what Keith Buchanan said almost 40 years ago when he referred to the efforts of 'The White North' to impose population solutions on the rest of the world by arguing that rapid population growth was a cancer that would erode a nation's chance of development and security, and that birth control and family planning was the solution to all the ills facing world society.

The traditional Malthusian argument that population would always outstrip food production was I thought laid to rest some decades ago. But come back Paul Erlich and the population doom-mongers.'People pollution' is back on the agenda, the 'population bomb' now has another connotation, and like 40 years ago the response smacks of neo-colonialism, particularly when it is tied to threats or aid.

Population growth is the problem, because it creates vast numbers of hungry, footloose and dangerous 'Third Worlders'. We know best, and the answer is to impose the Western experience, and if you want investment and aid you had better adopt a family planning strategy. There is a great irony here.

On the one hand developed nations are strongly committed to the belief that all women have the right (at least in their own countries) to determine their own fertility performance. On the other, they are often the first to insist that family planning and birth control programs should be actively promoted and formalised throughout the developing world. Surely it is a basic human right that choices about fertility and child bearing are voluntary and not imposed by governments or international agencies?

As Frank Furedi has recently argued, we now have a new security agenda where the emphasis has shifted from the geopolitical domain to the demographic and environmental domains.

In all of this there is also more than a hint of environmental determinism, which links increasing population, environmental degradation, climate change and declining natural resources and sees them all as major threats to world security.

In such an environment it seems that nearly everyone is prepared to jump on the bandwagon of insecurity and 'the war on terror'.