Government officials who gathered here Wednesday lauded world population efforts in the five years since world leaders met in Cairo to agree on joint goals at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).

Even as governments continued to bicker over some aspects of a post-Cairo agenda – particularly on drafting language about abortion and adolescent sexuality in a document on progress since the ICPD – leaders insisted that the lessons of Cairo have been learned.

“Cairo was a very important milestone in attitudes toward population, in that we moved beyond a concentration on numbers and population control,” said Clare Short, British secretary of state for international development. Instead, she argued, the post-Cairo debate has concerned advancing women’s rights and addressing a broad range of health issues.

At the same time, said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the ICPD also underscored the need to keep family size low.

“All states now understand that, if they are to provide adequately for the future health and education of their citizens, they need to incorporate population policies into their development strategies,” he said at the Wednesday outset of a three-day review of the progress since the Cairo summit.

“In the underdeveloped world, we are seeing the renewal of the vicious cycle of unwanted children and poverty,” President Alberto Fujimori of Peru warned. “We must break that cycle.”

Yet, despite the unity of the more than 100 government officials meeting here on topics like the need to reduce fertility, to provide family planning services and to improve basic health, some issues remain contentious.

The moral debates looming beneath the surface of the population meeting resurfaced this week as a coalition of conservative Catholic and Muslim states, along with the Vatican, objected to language in an ICPD review document on sex education, the need for safe abortion and adolescent sexuality.

Despite days of haggling, a preparatory committee was unable to complete work on those issues, conceded Ambassador Anwarul Karim Chowdhury of Bangladesh, who chaired the preparatory sessions.

“We had been able to achieve consensus on most of the text,” including passages on such concerns as the need to reduce maternal mortality and AIDS, Chowdhury said. But he added that, “despite our intense efforts, a few paragraphs remain outstanding.”

A working group is expected to continue drafting language on the contentious topics until the meeting ends Friday. But few diplomats expect that any major agreement can be forged on such hot-button topics as abortion and sex education for youth by this week’s end.

In part, that is because the tone of the debate on those topics has become remarkably bitter.

Short described the Vatican’s participation in the group of conservative Catholic and Muslim states as an “unholy alliance.” On the other side, several right-wing Republican members of the US Congress admonished their own State Department Tuesday for pushing views on adolescent sexuality which they claimed did not reflect the views of the US public.

Yet diplomats are also eager to ensure that disagreements on sensitive political issues like abortion do not detract from the progress made since the 1994 Cairo summit, which drafted a 20-year Programme of Action agreed to by 179 countries.

Fujimori noted that Peru’s fertility rate has dropped from six children per woman 30 years ago to 3.4 at the time of the ICPD and just three children for every woman today.

Wang Zhongyu, Chinese state councillor, added that his country’s fertility rate has gone down to two children per woman, while average life expectancy has risen to 70.8 years.

“The success of China’s population and family planning programme has not only stabilised China’s population and promoted her socio-economic development, but also greatly contributed to the stabilisation of the world population,” Wang said.

Yet although Annan praised the fact that some 60 percent of couples now use family planning, resulting in sharp drops in infant mortality, he cautioned that much more work needs to be done.

“Too many women still cannot choose when or whether to become pregnant,” Annan said. “Too many women are victims of sexual violence, especially during conflict. Too many women resort to abortions that are not safe.”

Many of the ICPD plan’s targets – including universal access to affordable reproductive health services by 2015, reductions in infant, child and maternal mortality, and improved gender equality – still need to be met, officials added.

“Since Cairo, there’s been virtually no progress in the cutting of maternal mortality,” Short argued, noting that an estimated half a million women die in childbirth every year.

She argued that, in order to reduce maternal mortality, “there have to be basic health care systems throughout the developing world, and there must be skilled midwives, as well.”