Population Decrease Equals Development

Werner Fornos, president of the Washington-based Population Institute, is outraged that a world summit on sustainable development is refusing to focus on one of the key causes of environmental destruction: population growth.

“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.

Fornos said the 71-page draft plan of action, currently under discussion, 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”.

The issue is being downplayed because the United States and some Latin American and Arab nations continue to equate “family planning” with “abortion”.

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 summit agenda is any direct reference to issues relating to population growth, which Fornos told TerraViva “is an absolute outrage”.

Jeffrey Sachs, professor of sustainable development at New York's Columbia University and special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, says that slowing rapid population growth is one of the great hopes for heading off ecological disaster.

“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 that “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 the 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) says 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,” WWF points out.

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 income, 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.”