The UN system welcomed the birth Tuesday of the six billionth person living on Earth – a baby boy born in the war-shattered city of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Fatima Nevic gave birth to her eight-pound son two minutes after midnight. Later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan awarded a gift of 50,000 dollars to the maternity ward at Sarajevo’s Kosevo Hospital noting that the birth was a sign that Bosnia-Hercegovina was recovering from its ruinous 1992-95 war.

“The birth today of the six billionth person on the planet – a beautiful baby boy – in a city returning to life, to a people rebuilding their homes, in a region restoring a culture of co- existence after a decade of war – should light a path of tolerance and understanding for all peoples,” Annan said.

Douglas Coffman, a UN spokesman, emphasised that the United Nations had no way of determining precisely the identity of the six billionth person, but had simply chosen the first child born after midnight in Sarajevo, where Annan already had scheduled a visit.

Still, the birth of the boy to Fatima and Jasminko Nevic afforded Annan the opportunity to bring up the fact that the world population had topped six billion without appearing to blame the developing world – where 95 percent of the population increase occurred, according to UN estimates.

“The challenge to feed and clothe and house this great mass of humanity over the next decades will be immense,” Annan argued. “The means are available. The question is whether we have the will.”

The secretary-general said that, of the 4.8 billion people currently living in the developing world, nearly three-fifths lack basic sanitation, almost a third lack access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing and a fifth still require access to modern health services.

At the United Nations, where a population clock had been marking the incremental increase in world population every minute, the number 6,000,000,000 appeared on the clock before a cheering, yet concerned, audience.

Nafis Sadik, the executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said that world population was increasing by 78 million people a year – equal to the combined populations of France, Greece and Sweden.

According to UN statistics, world population has doubled since 1960, when it hit three billion. Before that point, it had taken 154 years from 1804, when a population of one billion worldwide had been recorded, until another two billion people were added.

Now the world population could reach seven billion, or even as much as 11 billion, by the year 2050 – depending on which population policies are adopted worldwide, UNFPA said.

Under the most likely scenario, the world population fifty years from now would be 8.9 billion.

Currently, some 350 million around the world lacked access to “safe and effective” family planning methods, according to Sadik. In order to meet such needs, UNFPA estimated that countries must spend some 17 billion dollars a year.

The agency warned that population assistance from governments had fallen from a peak level of 9.5 billion dollars in 1995. Population aid from the industrialised nations was only 2.46 percent of all their official development assistance (ODA) funds in 1996, even as ODA levels themselves fell sharply.

Meanwhile, developing nations have risen to the challenge, with nations from the South – particularly China, India and Indonesia – funding roughly four-fifths of all population activities.

However, Sadik remained optimistic that developed nations would respond to the call for funding population activities.

“We are on track to achieve the goals” set at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo, she said recently. “We should not be hampered by lack of resources…I think we still have the opportunity to get the (needed) resources.”

At a special session of the UN General Assembly this summer, governments rededicated themselves to the task of finding the resources to stabilise world population growth, and industrialised nations especially pledged to do more to fund population activities.

Currently, according to the UNFPA, 94 percent of all population assistance funding comes from ten countries, with the United States and the Netherlands accounting for 55 percent of such expenditures. The remainder of the funding from industrialised states comes from Britain, Germany, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada and Australia.