Europe: Population concerns

Abstract

Democracy and demography come from the same root and both are about the rights of individuals. European parliamentarians at a conference in London on Jan 31 and Feb 1 recommended that much more attention be given to international family planning so that a basic human freedom could be extended to hundreds of millions of the worlds citizens. The UKs all-party Parliamentary group on population and development which hosted the conference has been active since 1979 and the gathering was attended by 38 parliamentarians from 20 European national parliaments and the European Parliament. The conference culminated in a European Agenda for Action on World Population. Recognizing that global population is growing by 25000/day the conference found convincing evidence that more and more people in developing countries did wan smaller families; provided action were taken in the 1990s there was a real opportunity to contain the worlds population at 10 billion or less for the next century. The agenda was drafted by the parliamentarians after reviews of the current situation by Dr. Nafis Sadik (UN undersecretary general and executive director UN Population Fund) Dr. Halfdan Mahler (secretary general International Planned Parenthood Federation) and Prof. Fred Sai (Ghana). Fertility is falling rapidly in many countries but there is a long way to go. The agenda deplores the fact that 1% or less of development assistance worldwide is spend on population policies and family planning activities and that this proportion had dropped form 2% in the early 1970s. In response the parliamentarians committed themselves to trying to persuade their governments to double their commitments by 1995 with a target of $4 billion/year by the year 2000. The relation between population and environmental problems was underscored by Joseph Wheeler who is director of the UN Conference on the Environment and Development that is to be held in Rio de Janeiro later this year and by Sir Crispin Tickell (warden Green College Oxford and former UK representative at the UN). the conference did not play down the disproportionate contribution the industrialized nations make to environmental damage but neither did it deny the importance of the threat of further population growth. A world with twice as many people would be pushing to the limit the capacity of the planet to sustain life and adjust to pollution--and a world with 3 time todays population might damage irreversibly huge areas of the world. The agenda endorsed a Global Commission on Population which would explore many aspects of population change in greater depth. This would be part of the preparation for the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development. (full text)