GLOBAL POPULATION AND POVERTY

Americans who wake up to National Public Radio heard in the opening news announcement that July 11 was World Population Day. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on international leaders to solve a complex equation on population and poverty, "we must stabilize our numbers, but, equally important, we must stabilize our use of resources and ensure sustainable development for all." Countries such as Pakistan, Vietnam and Kenya pledged greater efforts in controlling high population growth, a major constraint on their national economic and social development, according to a July 9 story by Xinhua and a July 12 story by the Associated Press.

In a July 4 story by The Business Recorder (Pakistan), President Pervez Musharraf reaffirmed Pakistan's commitment to the United Nations Population Fund's theme of "population and environment." Stirling Scruggs of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said, "The reason for the U.N. to give environment a spotlight in this year's Population Day theme is that environmental pollution has caused, among other things, global warming and reduction of water levels," in a July 8 story by Xinhua General News Service.

In conjunction with World Population Day, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released the 2001 Human Development Report, which ranks 162 countries based on income, education, life expectancy and health care. The report found that 1.2 billion people worldwide live in poverty, 800 million people are suffering from hunger and an estimated one in four people lack access to safe drinking water. The population link to the environment was also stressed. "Sixty-five developing countries, representing more than half the developing world's total population in 1995, (will) lose about 280 million tons of potential cereal production as a result of climate change," according to the study, as reported by Agence France Presse on July 10. The UN report was also criticized for recommending genetically engineered food as one method of eradicating poverty. [http://news.excite.com/news/ap/010709/11/int-mexico-world-development [http://allafrica.com/stories/200107110562.html

[NOTE: To view UNDP's 2001 Human Development Report, go to: link

SAVING WOMEN'S LIVES

Preventing unwanted births, maternal mortality and induced abortion depends heavily on the quality of family planning services worldwide and on funding levels for them, as illustrated by a July 7 Jakarta Post story. National Family Planning Board (BKKBN) Chairwoman Khofifah Indar Parawansa was quoted as revealing that Jakarta's current stock of 50.45 million contraceptives will run out at the end of the year. "One of the main issues faced by the family planning program today is contraceptives availability for the poor," Parawansa said. "Due to limited finances, support from the government has been reduced. For this reason, we have been struggling to explore more resources to improve the quality of our services."

The need for microbicides is rooted in the difficult position of women, who are not only more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases than men, but less able to insist that their partners use condoms, according to a July 3 New York Times story. Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, said the reason microbicides are not readily available is because the pharmaceutical industry is not eager to develop products unlikely to be "big moneymakers." Without the backing of big companies, the work of nudging microbicides toward the marketplace have fallen to government researchers and women's health advocates. link

Women in the United States need more than awareness that, according to the World Bank, gender-based violence accounts for more death and ill health among women ages 15 to 44 worldwide than cancer, traffic injuries and malaria combined, according to the rights group Equality Now. A July 4 article in The Chicago Tribune quoted the group as saying women also need to know that they can take action. "U.S. women [need] to recognize that human-rights violations are universal. The experiences of women in Pakistan, South Africa and Belgium are similar to experiences in the U.S. in violence against women."

ENVIRONMENT

The July edition of The National Geographic featured a story on urban sprawl in America and the effects of pollution produced by densely populated communities on the environment. Also included in the feature is a fascinating map that details the growth of urban sprawl from 1993 to the present. link

[NOTE: To view The National Geographic's map on worldwide population density, go to: http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/mapmachine/index.html?id=110&size=large &left=-180&bottom=-117.21&right=180&top=117.21

AIDS AND POVERTY

The dramatic price reductions that major drug manufacturers have announced for their anti-retroviral drugs for parts of the developing world-from $10,000 to $400-500 per year-are key to help treat the world's poorest, but are not enough, according to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He said his unmet call of $7-9 billion a year to help treat HIV/AIDS worldwide has not been answered. As Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of World Food Program explained in a July 13 Associated Press story, "The most difficult situations to find funding are where there are people who are hungry because they are poor. They don't live in a natural disaster area, they're not in a war zone, they are not refugees, they're just poor." link

In Africa, the region hardest hit by HIV/AIDS, "Western public aid...fell by a third between 1994 and 1999, while foreign investment in the continent remained at under five percent of all investment in developing countries worldwide," reported the United Nations' Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), according to a July 2 story by Agence France Presse. More partnerships are needed to help make up for the lack of public funds, such as the one between the World Bank and the Ugandan government that plans to spend $47.5 million over the next five years to purchase medicines, condoms and to build clinics. Still, a health economist for the World Bank classified the amount of aid to Kenya as "insufficient" to aid the poorest and hardest-hit countries, a July 11 Associated Press story reported.

IMMIGRATION

Germany announced proposals to define a "more modern" immigration policy that will allow at least 50,000 skilled foreign workers from outside the European Union to enter the country every year, countering rapid population decline and growing skills shortages, according to July 5 New York Times and July 12 Financial Times stories. [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/05/world/05GERM.html [http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=010705000733&quer y=Immigration+plan+hailed+by+Schroder

DEMOGRAPHICS

HelpAge International, a leading global action group on aging, warned that Asian societies and governments, especially those of developing countries, have to take immediate action to prepare for a dramatic shift in their population structure, as the 60-years-and-over segment is growing rapidly. This trend in Asia was covered in a July 11 story by The Nation (Thailand) that reported that within 30 years, those over 60 would comprise one-fifth of the population in many Asian countries. A July 1 News Straits Times (Malaysia) reported that in Malaysia, because of longer life expectancies, women face the likelihood that they will spend years living without a spouse and in poverty in old age, without social security, according to the Department of Applied Statistics.

OPINIONS AND EDITORIALS

Georgie Anne Geyer, in her July 1 commentary in The Washington Times, criticized the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS for having "weak" discussions on stopping the pandemic. "AIDS is hardly an enemy that we should choose to live with when it is one that so clearly can be defeated," she said.

A July 4 Philadelphia Inquirer commentary by Trudy Rubin praised UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for his "dedication to overcoming the growing inequalities that plague the age of globalization" and "putting his money where his mouth is." His $100,000 award for the Liberty Medal will go to fight HIV-AIDS. [http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/07/04/opinion/comrubin04.htm

The Washington Times criticized World Population Day in a July 11 editorial, "The Population Dud," by noting that "anxious" activists will attempt to defuse the population bomb by "blathering all over it." She claims that the population bomb has not exploded into "catastrophic plagues and global famines as predicted. Rather, demographic trends demonstrate that there is little chance it will do so in the near (or distant) future."

[NOTE: To view The Washington Times' July 11 editorial, go to: http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010711-92659822.htm. For more information on population trends, go to: http://www.planetwire.org/wrap/files.fcgi/272_From_Pyramids_to_Pillars_-_the _New_Demographic_Reality.htm

The above analysis was written by Ketayoun Darvich-Kodjouri and Kathy Bonk at the Communications Consortium Media Center, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005, 202/326-8700.

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