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Soaring Population May Swamp Anti-Poverty Goals
UNITED NATIONS - The U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), already undermined by the global financial crisis, are expected to take another hit - this time from rising population growth.
The goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 could be jeopardised by soaring population growth, mostly in the developing world.
Mothers and children at a mobile clinic in Khemisset Province, Morocco. Photo credit:UN Photo/John Isaac) World population is expected to reach seven billion by 2011, a year earlier than expected, according to the latest figures released by the Population Research Bureau last week.
"The population will hit seven billion in the second half of 2011," predicts Jose Miguel Guzman, chief of the Population and Development Branch at the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).
Since 1975, he said, world population has been increasing by about a billion every 12 years.
"Given that the six billion mark was reached in 1999, the attainment of seven billion seems to be more or less on track," Guzman told IPS.
Of the growth between 1999 and 2011, he said, 95 percent is in the developing world.
Asked how the rise in population growth will impact on developing nations reaching their MDGs by 2015, Guzman said that many developing, and particularly the least developed countries (LDCs), will face a continuous increase in the demand for services, specifically in education and health.
That means there will be an increasing need for social investment just to catch up with population growth, giving fewer opportunities to increase the quality of services, which is needed to generate the changes requested to attain the MDGs, he added.
The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.
A summit meeting of 189 world leaders in September 2000 pledged to meet all of these goals by the year 2015.
But their implementation has been jeopardised by several factors, including a decline in development aid, and more recently, the global financial meltdown.
In a report detailing the implementation of the declaration adopted at the 1995 World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the global financial and economic crises, volatile food and energy prices, and climate change pose threats to advances made in social development in recent years.
While most developed economies are expected to be in deep recession in 2009, a vast majority of developing countries are experiencing a sharp reversal in the robust growth registered from 2002 to 2007.
"This situation threatens to reverse progress towards the internationally-agreed development goals, including the MDGs," Ban warned in the study released last month.
Tamara Kreinin, executive director of the United Nations Foundation's (UNF) Women and Population Programme, told IPS, "We can't be sure about the population growth, but what we do know is that there are 201 million women who would like access to education and services for voluntary family planning and do not have them."
She said these women tend to live in developing countries. "We also know that universal access to voluntary family planning would help us make huge progress toward reaching the MDG, particularly [goal] number five - which is least likely to be reached," she explained.
"We at UNF hope that our government and others will step up to the plate and provide full funding for comprehensive high quality services that offer women respectful, culturally sensitive education and services - rather than long lines or closed clinics," Kreinin added.
Karen Hardee, vice president of Population Action International (PAI), told IPS that rapid population growth can affect the achievement of the MDGs in a number of ways.
She said MDGs 1 and 7 (Eradicating Poverty and Hunger, and Ensuring Environmental Sustainability) could be most affected.
Without increases in agricultural productivity, rapid population growth means more people competing for limited agricultural land. This in turn implies less food per capita and increased food insecurity.
And rapid population growth, she pointed out, often leads to increasing rates of deforestation and increased carbon emissions.
On MDG 2 (Achieving Universal Primary Education), said that with rapid population growth comes a higher number of children at school age.
"If this growth outpaces governments' abilities to provide schools - which is the case in many developing countries - educational quality diminishes, fewer have access to education and opportunities for employment," Hardee said.
Additionally, when parents can only afford to send one child to school, priority is overwhelmingly given to boys, she noted.
Since educated girls and their children have better life outcomes, including delayed fertility, lack of access to education can help to perpetuate high population growth rates.
On MDGs 4 and 5 (Reducing Child Mortality and Improving Maternal Health), she said that universal access to reproductive health is a target under MDG5. However, access to reproductive health services in the developing world has been hampered by reduced funding, including by the United States.
Adjusted for inflation, U.S. bilateral funding for family planning and reproductive health programmes is 35 percent less in 2009 than in 1995 despite the increase of 300 million women of reproductive age.
Less funding for reproductive health services means more unintended pregnancies and increased maternal mortality, Hardee declared.
Meanwhile, Dr. Christine Kirunga Tashobya, principal medical officer in the Quality Assurance Department at the Ministry of Health in Kampala, told IPS that Uganda is one of the developing countries with a number of challenges in the area of population and reproductive Health.
She said Uganda has a population of about 30 million, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of about 300 dollars per capita and annual growth rate of six percent. The country's health outcome indicators are maternal mortality ratio, 435 per 100,000 live births, infant mortality rate, 76 per 1,000 live births, and child mortality rate at 137 per 1,000 live births.
The total fertility rate at 6.7 translates into a population growth rate of 3.2 percent.
Current estimates indicate that 31 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of a dollar a day.
While a number of efforts continue to be made by the government, international partners and non-governmental organizations, the magnitude of the challenge, coupled with the diffused nature of the inequities highlighted, require more efforts by all the stakeholders to ensure that services reach the whole population appropriately, she said.
A major factor that needs more effort is the functionality of the health system.
Currently there are efforts by the government and its partners but they still fall far short of what is required, said Tashobya, who was in New York to participate in a U.N. seminar last month.
21 Comments so far
Show AllTime for the UN to step in and really start pushing for global birth-control, and never mind the religious nuts. 'God' is not going to solve this problem, unless death by starvation is considered divine intervention. And the only way to give a new programme a change to succeed is by stopping giving aid to countries that don't want to join the programme whole-heartedly.
Unfortunately, the "religious nuts" who fight against population control are but one group of useful idiots that are enabled by and do the bidding for global corporations whose profits are enhanced by global poverty.
Lack of regulation allows the corporations to pull off one bubble scheme after another, with more people falling into poverty with each scheme.
Impoverished people work cheap and don't rock the boat.
Impoverished people often pay more than others for the same products and services because they do not have the means to make purchases in a competitive environment.
Unfortunately, the "religious nuts" who fight against population control are but one group of useful idiots that are enabled by and do the bidding for global corporations whose profits are enhanced by global poverty.
Lack of regulation allows the corporations to pull off one bubble scheme after another, with more people falling into poverty with each scheme.
Impoverished people work cheap and don't rock the boat.
Impoverished people often pay more than others for the same products and services because they do not have the means to make purchases in a competitive environment.
God in His infinite wisdom infallibly and with a stern hand on the cosmic tiller steers mankind towards His promised/predicted Armageddon. Should I start building an Ark for my family and our cats?
God said fire, not a flood, next time. But don't blame God for our problems; we are happily steering our own way to destruction, stuffing the pockets of the super-rich as we go, and believing God gave us the right to appropriate the world's resources to maintain our unsustainable and destructive way of life.
Unfortunately, we still don't really believe that we're going to reap just what we sow. For my fellow Boomers, here's a link to Peter, Paul, and Mary warning us years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeDAHIhZsSo
Refrain:
Well, Well, Well, Who's that callin'?
Well, Well, Well, Hold my hand.
Well, Well, Well, Night is a-fallin',
Spirit is a-movin' all over this land.
Lord told Noah, Build him an ark,
Build it out of hickory bark.
Old ark a-movin', and the water start to climb,
God send a fire, not a flood next time.
(Refrain)
God said fire comin' judgement day,
He said all mankind gonna pass away.
Brothers and sisters don't you know?
You're gonna reap just what you sow.
(Refrain)
World's not waitin' for the Lord's command,
Buildin' a fire that'll sweep the land.
Thunder out of heaven, comin' Gabriel's call;
And the sea's gonna boil and the sky's gonna fall.
And, Mr. Obama (with my tongue partly in cheek)aggressively promote male same-sex marriages which cannot produce children of their own.
"Soaring Population May Swamp Anti-Poverty Goals"
Don't worry, our war profiteers are on top of it.
The inconvenient truth of so many of the earth's problems is that we are past the tipping point on human population - there are way too many of us for the earth to support. Catholics, Mormons, Muslims and other backwards religious fools who are reproducing like rabbits and denying reproductive choice for others are committing crimes against the earth and contributing to our overall demise. Hard decisions should have been made long ago, and getting religion out of the equation for our future survival should have been the first.
Lust, greed, fear, religion, vanity and stupidity will continue to ensure that the world's population continues rising until nature gives us a good kicking in the guts. Pretty soon now I wouldn't be surprised.
The 'unfettered' growth of the human species is the greatest of follies of all human kind as for 1 reason, it has allowed an 'elite' class to separate from the masses who are fooled into believing that there will never be 'too many people' on 'god's earth' and another reason the 'sustainable growth'(mostly for those who lust for riches) is infinite, besides if there were only two rich people left on earth, what would be the chances of one or the other knocking off the other so he/her could claim 'I WON and I AM THE RICHEST PERSON'?
But nature always balances out and humans will join the dinosaurs and the do-do in its own extinction without even making it to settle on mars to expand some more.
'I WON and I AM THE RICHEST PERSON'?
Had a co-worker who retired two years ago who "insists" that the saying should be:
He who dies owing the most money wins the game.
Everybody KNOWS that rising population is a problem and will be a problem. But it's just ONE of the factors in the impending failure to reach the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals. The major factor is the failure of the developed countries to ramp up their international aid so as to reach 0.7% of their GNP by 2015. Most countries that committed to this amount are nowhere near meeting this target. Some of the goals such as "reducing extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS" are eminently achievable - if only the donor countries meet their commitments. To put so much blame on the financial crisis and overpopulation may help divert some attention from failure to meet these commitments.
Nice picture...but where is OUR Mobile Clinic Mister President?
The population time bomb is imploding right now in our finite world.
The non-negotiatable way of life of Fortress USA is threatened most of all by the rest of world growing so fast so as to consume everything before the citizens of the USA can do so.
Compared to any number of imaginable terrorist threats or fossil fuel wars that the USA can still manage, the population growth bomb is out of control and can destroy everything.
The scale of the human economy, in its current size, without any further growth, is destroying all hope of future sustainability.
At this stage I can only hope that as a race we are smart enough to kill ourselves off quickly in large numbers. If the runaway climate change fever and continued destruction of natural human life support systems, kills off most humans quickly enough, it might allow a gradual Gaia physiological recovery. Unfortunately if the disease of human species recovers faster than Gaia, and shows as little collective wisdom as currently noted, human beings will survive in large enough numbers far into the high fever stage, and the patient Gaia will die.
Then there will be no local intelligent life left around to care. At least the disease will have been contained to one planet.
I just finished reading "Beyond Growth" by Herman E. Daly, who is now for me the prophet of our times.
The final paragraphs say it all, but the rest of the book is really worth a careful read..
the idolatrous belief, whether we think in religious terms or not - that our derived creative power is autonomous and unlimited. Such idolatry cannot admin that the elimination of poverty requires recognition of limits, not faster growth - limits to grow in per capita resource use, limits to population growth, limits to the growth of inequality.
Refusal to recognize these creaturely limits results in growth beyond the carrying capacity of the earth, with its consequent destruction, followed by a reduction in cumulative number of lives ever to be lived in conditions of material sufficiency, as well as in the premature deaths of many people now living below sufficiency.
We must face the failures of the growth idolatry. We must stop crying out to the growing economy, "Deliver me, for thou art my god!". Instead, we must have the courage to ask with Isaiah, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?".
...
Perhaps someone can explain the Isaiah quote. Is the grasping greedy hand of humanity the symbol of its destruction?
Me thinks that the whole 'population explosion/bomb' stuff is just western propaganda used to justify continued western interference in the lives of the world's non-western people, allowing the rich to keep their captalist-corporatist lifestyles while telling the rest of humanity (and the poor of the west itself) to make cut-backs so that they can keep getting fat at the expense of the rest of us; it's also good for the capitalist growth industries of pharmaceuticals (chemical contraceptives/abortifacients), plastics and rubber (non-chemical contraceptives, e.g. condoms) and private health care/insurance, especially in America (abortions), not to mention the service sector (charities, aid agencies, NGO's, etc.) It also allows us to put more third-world children into schools where they can be indoctrinated into serving the needs of global capitalism/corporatism. You'll note, for example, that the emphasis is ALWAYS on reducing the populations of non-western people and almost NEVER on reducing the populations of the so-called parliamentary-liberal democracies of the west.
"Me thinks that the whole 'population explosion/bomb' stuff is just western propaganda used to justify continued western interference in the lives of the world's non-western people... You'll note, for example, that the emphasis is ALWAYS on reducing the populations of non-western people and almost NEVER on reducing the populations of the so-called parliamentary-liberal democracies of the west."
I've seen the views of a great many population activists and their argument is almost ALWAYS that the populations of countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, and various EU countries need to come down as much as any others.We can apply such actions as increased family planning services and information worldwide.
Prior to agriculture human numbers never exceeded about ten million. Now at nearly 7 billion, our numbers have grown since then by more than 130,000 percent. This notion that it's just fine for human numbers to grow obscenely out of proportion with any comparable species is not only responsible for the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, but is sheer speciesism and human supremacy, every bit as nonsensical and abhorrent as racism and white supremacy.
Of course that leads into the root cause (so to speak :-) of the huge growth of the human population. The switch to agriculture ten thousand years ago is the culprit, having allowed us to circumvent the natural, relatively painless regulation of population which keeps the numbers of almost all species in check. (Famine was not a problem in Africa, for example, prior to European contact and the destruction of the gatherer-hunter cultures which had existed previously and at much smaller numbers.) Now we've painted ourselves into a corner, trapped in this unsustainable monster called "civilization."
"Reproductive freedom" for humans (of course) is a luxury that all the other animals (not just wildlife but long-suffering "domestic" animals) can no longer afford to accommodate. When I was born, there were 2 billion humans on the planet. That number has now tripled, UNCHECKED, while we humans malignantly "cull" other animals as we humans create conflicts with them.
There is no unified, enforceable, worldwide policy to deal with human population growth. SIX BILLION humans can't help but poison Earth's physiology, because SIX BILLION human mouths devour so much of the planet's biomass (including 45 BILLION birds and mammals killed for "food" worldwide)that ecosystems are overburdened; SIX BILLION human anuses produce so much feces that unless all this waste can be recycled (somehow) through the soil, it accumulates in water tables or in offshore waters. SIX BILLION humans, driven by their own personal and familial self-interest, also desire the comfortable, easy, narcotic lifestyle of the West.
How about that TV program running on the Discovery Health channel: "18 Kids and Counting!"
Children are not necessities.
If the world's governments can't summon the "political capital" to somehow curb this explosive population growth, Mother Earth will bring the hammer down with a vengeance. The Black Plague will be looked upon fondly as something akin to a Spring afternoon in the park.
The time for breeding like rats has come to an end. This hangover is going to be a doozy.
If we assume that our earth is finite and that it is one big pie, doesn't it follow that there are only so many pieces into which it can be cut? A large meadow may be grassy, but a feedlot or barnyard is trampled and befouled. If we don't control the world's population and preserve what's left of our wildlife, what hope is left for the human race?
"Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth" may have worked in the distant past, but it certainly isn't good advice now.
This was a great article. You can actually do something, i.e. offer family planning to the women of the world, by joining 34 Million Friends of the United Nations Population Fund. www.34millionfriends.org We have raised a lovely $4 million and counting! On our web site you can see the crucially important Millennium Development Goal 5. And if you click on number 5 at www.un.org/millenniumgoals, you can read that "AN UNMET NEED FOR FAMILY PLANNING UNDERMINES THE ACHIEVEMENT OF SEVERAL OTHER GOALS. Jane Roberts, cofounder.