The Road from Rio to Cairo: Toward a Common Agenda

Abstract

The constituents of women population and the environment proved to be explosive when representatives from the 3 groups came together during preparations for the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) which took place in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. In its aftermath feminists population planning advocates and environmental activists were concerned about the direction of their respective movements and the future of cooperative ventures. The key parties desire reconciliation as time is approaching for meetings sponsored by the UN: the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 and the next international womens conference in Beijing China in 1995. Representatives of a wide array of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) confronted the government delegations during the final governmental preparatory committee meeting in New York just prior to UNCED. The draft of the meetings official document known as Agenda 21 made a compelling case for the population-environment link. The US delegation sent by the Bush Administration insisted on deleting from Agenda 21 any references to changes in behavior aimed at reducing consumption in the industrialized world. The Vaticans goal was to deemphasize the population issue in the global environmental debate and to eliminate any mention of family planning (FP). In Rio at UNCED many prominent government delegates addressed population stabilization for sustainable development. Population planning and environmental activists insisted that rapid population growth is a critical international issue and that FP can be perceived as a social and individual good. Many feminists would prefer that the world debate about population focus less on fertility-related phenomenon and more on how population size and growth affect a particular community and lifestyle. The National Wildlife Federation observed that environmentalists must devote more attention to the consumption issue in the industrialized world.