WSSD: Opponents
of 'Family Planning' Keep Population off Agenda
by Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 21 (IPS) - Senior U.N. officials and non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) say the upcoming sustainable development
summit in Johannesburg will fail to stress one of the key
causes of environmental destruction: population growth.
The issue is being downplayed because
the United States and some Latin American and Arab nations
continue to equate ”family planning” with ”abortion”,
the critics say.
Last month, the U.S. government yielded
to pressure from its conservative supporters and cut off about
34 million dollars in contributions to the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA) accusing the agency of funding programmes
that promote abortion in China. The UNFPA vehemently denied
the charge.
”Conspicuously missing from the
(WSSD) summit agenda is any direct reference to issues relating
to population growth,” Werner Fornos, president of the
Washington-based Population Institute, told IPS Wednesday.
”If this high-level meeting fails
to demand urgent action to ensure that couples have access
to voluntary family planning and reproductive health - and
if it fails to demand that women are empowered to be full
partners in development - there is little likelihood that
it will have any relevance whatsoever in the continuing struggle
to achieve sustainable development,” he added.
Critics say the 71-page draft plan of
action to be adopted at the meeting from Aug. 26 to Sep. 4
deliberately avoids the divisive issue of population growth.
Instead, it focuses on five areas: water,
energy, health care, agriculture and biodiversity - collectively
known by the acronym, WEHAB.
The plan of action only commits the 189
U.N. member states to ensure ”equal access of women
to health care services, giving particular attention to maternal
and emergency obstetric care”.
Slowing rapid population growth is one
of the great hopes for heading off ecological disaster, says
Jeffrey Sachs, professor of sustainable development at New
York's Columbia University and special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan.
”It took thousands of generations
for our species to arrive at the billionth human being in
about 1830, but just 170 years more to add an additional five
billion,” he said.
Pointing out that right-wing groups in
the United States are ”undercutting” policies
that could promote sustainable development, Sachs said, ”the
attacks on family planning programmes not only threaten 30
years of U.S. efforts but aim to torpedo the invaluable work
of the United Nations, as well, by crippling the U.N. Population
Fund”.
According to UNFPA, the current world
population of 6.2 billion is growing at an annual rate of
slightly more than 1.2 percent or about 77 million people
yearly.
The world's future population growth
will be dominated by six countries: India, China, Pakistan,
Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia, all of them developing
nations.
The Washington-based World Wide Fund
for Nature (WWF) said last month that human beings are presently
living way beyond the earth's means.
”If everyone on the planet used
as much energy and wasted as many other resources in their
daily lives as the average European or North American, we
would need an extra two earths right now to satisfy our demands,”
said the WWF.
In an op-ed piece in the London Financial
Times last week, Sachs said that governments meeting in Johannesburg
must take seriously the challenges of sustainable development
- not only for the one-sixth of humanity living with high
incomes but for the more than five billion individuals living
in the developing world.
Governments ”would acknowledge
the real risks that population growth and economic activity
have generated - ranging from man-made climate change to the
depletion of fisheries to the degradation of fragile ecosystems
around the world,” added Sachs.
Fornos said that frequently the world
is viewed ”through a peculiar prism where environmental
degradation and pollution escalate to dangerous proportions
on a planet devoid of human life”.
”The reality is that the earth
is inhabited by 6.2 billion people today, and there almost
certainly will be at least another one billion and possibly
two or three billion more before our human numbers level off.”
Fornos quoted Harvard University
biologist Edward O. Wilson, who wrote recently that the world
is a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption.
”We are now in a race between forces destroying the
living environment and those that can be harnessed to save
it,” said Wilson. (END/2002)
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