CAMDEN – In case you hadn’t noticed, between Friday evening and Monday morning the Earth’s population increased by more than a half-million. Just what that means was the focus of the weekend’s 16th annual Camden Conference, “Two Worlds Under Pressure: The Growing Crises of Population and Movement.”

As the conference was set to open Friday, a screen above the stage at the Camden Opera House displayed a counter showing the estimated world population.

The conference was the third of a trilogy with related themes. Last year’s focus was the global struggle for water and energy, and the year before the conference examined globalization.

Keynote speaker Phyllis Oakley, a former assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration in the Clinton administration, said the flow of people from developing countries to developed nations such as the United States is rapidly becoming a foreign policy issue in Washington.

Forty years ago, she said, an international affairs conference probably would not have chosen population as its theme. But even with 70 million deaths in Africa from AIDS projected in coming years, she noted, the world’s population will continue to spiral.

The 6 billion mark was passed in 1999, and by 2050, world population is expected to reach 9.3 billion. The fastest-growing countries are in the developing world, which is expected to grow from 4.9 billion people to 8.1 billion in the next 50 years, according to Oakley.

In the developing world, the average birth rate per woman has dropped from six children in 1960 to 2.9 children this year, while life expectancies during the same period increased from 48 to 64 years.

“Family planning works,” Oakley said, and criticized the Bush administration for cutting funding to clinics around the world that provided abortions.

“I must ask what sense this makes,” she said, with millions of unwanted pregnancies and high infant mortality rates.

U.S. funding of those clinics, even under the Clinton administration, was never used directly to pay for abortions, but rather supported other population control measures, she said.

The key to addressing world population for the United States, Oakley said, is fighting poverty in the developing world.

“We in the U.S. have not given nearly enough attention to this issue of world poverty,” she said.

“What we do not only has a profound effect here, but a doubly profound effect around the world,” she said of U.S. foreign aid.

Three billion people live on less than $2 per day, Oakley said, and, because of that poverty, “the worldwide community encourages movement,” from poorer to richer nations.

“I think rich countries have a moral responsibility as well as an economic interest in seeing that these disparities not exist,” she said.

The Bush administration, Oakley said, wisely increased funding to aid poorer nations in its 2003-2004 budget.

She said 175 million people today live outside the country in which they were born.

The United States remains one of the only developed countries with few limits on immigration, and, as such, takes in more foreign-born people than all of the other industrialized nations combined, Oakley said.

In 2000, 11 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born; by the end of the decade, that figure will increase to 15 percent, she said.

Recent waves have included: 1 million Vietnamese in the 1970s; Russian Jews and Christians in the 1980s; Afghans and Iraqis in the early 1990s; and, more recently, immigrants from sub-Saharan African nations.

For two centuries, the United States has absorbed and assimilated immigrants, Oakley said.

“This is what we are,” she said.