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DEVELOPMENT: Family Planning Subtracted From MDG Equation

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2005 (IPS) - When the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were conceived by the United Nations about five years ago, the world body failed to single out the importance of a crucial socioeconomic factor in battling poverty and hunger: population growth.

When the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were conceived by the United Nations about five years ago, the world body failed to single out the importance of a crucial socioeconomic factor in battling poverty and hunger: population growth.

“Population fell off the radar screen,” says an Asian diplomat, although he conceded that maternal mortality and gender equality, two of the eight millennium goals, do have a bearing on people and reproductive rights.

“The omission of a direct reference to population and family planning in the U.N. Millennium Development Goals was not an oversight, but rather a deliberate calculation,” Werner Fornos, president of the Washington-based Population Institute, told IPS.

He said the reasons were both religious and political – “an effort to placate voodoo evangelists and rightwing politicians in the United States”.

The conspicuous absence of these “vital interventions” is the result of a compromise to win the support of the George W. Bush administration in Washington and the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in the Vatican, Fornos said.

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; ensuring environmental sustainability; the reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; and a global partnership for development between the rich and the poor. The deadline to achieve these goals is 2015.

The United Nations is hosting a summit meeting of some 170 world leaders to review the progress made so far in implementing the MDGs. The summit takes place Wednesday through Friday.

“But none of these millennium goals will be achieved,” warned Fornos, “unless we accelerate efforts to reduce rapid population growth in the poorest countries of the world.”

Least developed countries (LDCs) will account for virtually the entire 2.6 billion increase as the earth’s human numbers soar from 6.5 billion today to 9.1 billion by mid-century, Fornos told IPS.

He also pointed out that population stabilisation should not only have been included in the MDGs, it should have been emphasised.

“Any rational individual would reach the conclusion that meaningfully reducing extreme poverty, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring primary education for all, eradicating hunger, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and promoting gender equality and empowerment of women cannot be achieved unless and until rapid population growth is adequately and urgently addressed in the world’s poorest countries,” he said.

In a new report released last week, the Population Division of the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs said the group of 50 LDCs – ranging from Angola and Afghanistan to Yemen and Zambia – account for 12 percent of the world population, or 759 million people.

“But this is expected to absorb a quarter of all population growth between 2005 and 2015,” it added.

The study, titled “Population Challenges and Development Goals”, points out that high fertility levels characterise the majority of the LDCs. “In addition, they exhibit high levels of extreme poverty, with 20 percent of their combined population living on less than one a dollar a day.”

In 10 of the 50 countries, extreme poverty levels are higher than 40 percent. At the global level, however, extreme poverty may be halved because of the advances being made by China and India, which together account for 2.4 billion of the world’s 6.5 billion people.

Speaking of the latest U.N. study, Under-Secretary-General Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), said that world leaders, who will be in New York for the U.N. summit, have yet another piece of expert evidence that investing in the rights and health of men, women and youth, will reap significant rewards in prosperity, peace and security.

“I am confident our leaders will show that they have heard the experts, and, most importantly, the cry of the world’s poor and vulnerable women, men and young people. I am confident that the largest gathering of world leaders in history will respond: We Hear You All,” Obaid told IPS.

She also said: “We should come away from the 2005 World Summit emboldened to take more urgent action to promote access to reproductive health and to fight HIV/AIDS to save millions of lives from AIDS and maternal death.”

The world’s leaders have the power to make decisions to achieve the development goals by 2015. And the issues of population, gender, and reproductive health are critical to the Summit’s larger development, security and human rights agenda, Obaid added.

Fornos of the Population Institute said that evidence that the MDGs should include a strong commitment to voluntary fertility reduction is contained within the U.N.-sponsored Millennium Ecosystems Assessment.

Compiled by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries, the report released earlier this year was the largest study ever undertaken to determine the consequences of human industriousness and indulgence on the planet’s natural bounty.

“The most unsettling finding of this assessment is that over the past 50 years, as world population doubled, human activity depleted 60 percent of the world’s grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers and lakes,” Fornos said.

Some 1.1 billion people throughout the world still cannot rely on clean drinking water and 3-4 million people die each year from waterborne diseases.

The consensus of the scientists contributing to the report is that over the next 50 years there will be increased demands for food, clean water and fuel, hastening the loss of forests, fish and fresh water reserves and leading to more frequent disease outbreaks.

The study shows that fully one-third of all existing animal and plant species are at risk of extinction. “Allowing these grave warnings to go unheeded would amount to unparalleled and inexcusable human folly, with the very real possibility of placing homo sapiens at the top of the 21st century’s endangered species list,” Fornos added.

Obaid said the most important aspect of gender empowerment is for women to be able to determine the size of their family: the timing of their pregnancy and the spacing of their children. “How can you talk of poverty if you don’t know your population dynamics – age, income, size of family, and institutions?”

“You need all these information to determine poverty and devise programmes to overcome them,” she added.

She also said that if “women are the face of HIV/AIDS, if women continue to die because they give birth, and if women are the poorest of the poor – then you can empower women only if you have succeeded in eradicating these.”

“We must increase financial, human and institutional resources for women’s empowerment, education and health, and gender equality. Nationally, countries need to make the necessary allocations in their budgets to turn their commitments and policies into concrete programmes and services,” Obaid said.

Internationally, reaching the agreed target of allocating 0.7 per cent of gross national income for official development assistance (ODA), and increased debt forgiveness will benefit the poorest countries, and enable them to move forward faster.