The European Union will become older, poorer and increasingly vulnerable to wide-scale immigration from its neighbours, according to a new European Defence Agency report.

The agency also highlights the problems of increasing unemployment and desertification in its 32-page "long-term vision" for European defence needs which will be presented to EU defence ministers meeting in Finland on Tuesday.

The document, described by one diplomat as "pretty bleak", is the result of a year's work identifying the main trends for EU member nations and their defence needs.

The overall picture is of an aging, less prosperous Europe surrounded by regions -- Africa, Middle East, Russia -- "which may be struggling to cope with the consequences of globalisation".

The average age of Europeans, who will only make up six percent of the global population, will rise to 45, while in Africa the average will be 22 years old.

The African population will pass 1.3 billion by 2025 (up 48 percent) with the Middle East seeing a similar percentage rise, according to the report.

Given increased desertificiation and high unemployment, especially in Africa, "the implications for despair, humanitarian disaster and migratory pressures are obvious", the report asserts.

Europe's fragility will be aggravated by its increasing dependence on imports of oil and gas, it added.

Its ally America, focussing all its attention on the rising giant of Asia, will tend to distance itself more and more from Europe, according to the EDA.

"Relatively poorer, older and more anxious about its security, Europe may also find itself increasingly alone in confronting the problems of a difficult neighbourhood."

Europe is also no longer very well armed to confront the mounting dangers it faces, the report adds.

As the falling birth rate increases competition in the job market, the pool of 16-30 year olds available to the armed forces will drop by 15 percent by 2025.

In order to avoid ballooning personnel costs -- already 50 percent of the military budget -- as competition for young employees increases, a reduction in the number of Europeans in uniform, currently around two million, seems inevitable.

Outsourcing, automation and reducing superfluous capacity are among the remedies considered by the EDA.

Neither is the prognosis encouraging for Europe's defence technological and industrial base, which the EDA deems to be already deficient.

"Europe ... must take to heart the facts that US is outspending Europe six to one in defence R and D, that it devotes some 35 percent of its defence expenditure to investment (from a budget more than twice as large as that of the Europeans combined) as against the European level of about 20 percent and that it is increasingly dominant in global export markets".

Among the sources for its report the EDA cited defence ministries, the Paris-based Institute of Security Studies, the EU's military commission, NATO and "numerous specialists".

The agency, under the Council of the European Union, was set up in 2004 to improve EU member states' defence and crisis management and to sustain the European security and defence policy.