POVERTY AND POPULATION GROW APACE
World population will zoom from 6.28 billion people this year to 9.2 billion by the year 2050, the UN Population Fund reported this month. According to other UN estimates, over 80% of those 9.2 billion people will be living in countries officially designated as poor.
Today, over 3 billion people exist on an income of less than $2 a day (1 billion of them scrape along on less than $1 a day). Not only the number but the proportion of people living in poverty will be much higher by 2050 because most of the population increase is taking place among the poor -- an age-old survival pattern. The Population Fund estimates that the poorest of the poor nations will triple their population from 600 million to 1.8 billion in the next 48 years, while most industrialized countries anticipate small population gains or reductions.
There are two ways to ameliorate this situation, short of an eventual worldwide uprising of the wretched of the earth:
• The world's rich nations must sharply increase their technical and financial aid to the poor nations, plus remove unequal trade barriers and other practices that keep such societies in deep debt and poverty. Despite repeated pledges, the industrialized capitalist world, led by Washington, has essentially turned its back on world poverty that derives entirely from its own international economic system. In proportion to its wealth, the U.S. is the least generous of all nations. Ambitious UN goals to alleviate poverty consistently fail, largely due to rich-nation indifference.
• Reducing the extreme increases in population in the developing world through investing in education and health care, including family planning. The UN agency maintains in its report, "The State of World Population 2002," that such programs both reduce population increases and elevate productivity and economic growth. However, according to Environmental News Service, "Spending on basic reproductive health and population programs in 2000 was $10.9 billion, $6.1 billion short of the $17 billion the international community agreed was needed to achieve universal access to reproductive health care by 2015."
The United States is an obstacle to the success of the population program because it refuses to help support family planning programs that include even the hint of abortion. In July, President Bush went further by withholding a previously pledged $34 million for the Population Fund. On Dec. 11, U.S. officials attending a 30-nation UN population conference in Bangkok demanded that delegates eliminate references to "reproductive rights" or "reproductive health services" from the 1994 UN-sponsored international agreement on population control. The U.S. had been one of 179 nations approving the agreement. Now, the White House insists that the terminology leaves open the possibility of the right to abortion.
UN experts argue that failure to adequately satisfy the need for a major expansion of family planning options will negatively impact the UN's recent Millennium Development Goals in terms of reducing hunger, poverty, mother and child mortality rates, the spread of HIV/AIDS and sustainable development, while also delaying gender equality.