Mr State Minister of Education,
Distinguished Ministers,
Dr Sadik,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

The figures are well known to us, but their implications are of such gravity that we must never tire of repeating them. The world's population is set to grow from its current figure of some 5.5 billion to over 6 billion in the year 2000 and to an estimated 8.5 billion by 2025. The UNFPA population clock, which is constantly before me in my office in Paris, shows that the number of people on the planet is increasing by some 10,000 every hour, 250,000 every day, 100 million every year. And we know that ninety per cent of this increase will occur in the developing countries.

As matters stand today, one billion people are living in absolute poverty, 800 million go hungry every day, 1.75 billion are without safe drinking water, almost one billion cannot read or write, 100 million are completely homeless, 150 million children under the age of five (one in three) are undernourished, urbanization is growing at a phenomenal rate, renewable and non-renewable resources are being seriously depleted, biodiversity is shrinking alarmingly, and the distress signals emitted by the environment are becoming ever more urgent and ubiquitous. In the developing countries, numbers have in fact already begun to overwhelm local resources, while the wasteful lifestyle of the rich billion in the industrialized world is having the same effect on planetary resources, in particular on the ultimate common resource that is the earth's environment. What would be the impact of another 3 billion people on the environment by 2025, of an extra 5 billion by 2050 as UN projections suggest ? Even if life support systems proved unexpectedly resilient, if crop yields were improved immeasurably and if new technologies allowed us to produce more with less pollution, the result would spell disaster - in terms of famine, disease, environmental damage and, doubtless, intercommunal violence and extremism of all kinds.

It is not surprising that many of the world's prominent scientists, including several Nobel laureates, have recently appealed to government leaders of all nations for immediate action to halt the damage to global natural systems caused by over-consumption in the industrialized countries and spiralling populations linked to poverty in the developing world.

The World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, signed by some 1500 scientists from 68 countries, declares : "No more than one or two decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished". Choices made in the next ten years will determine to a large extent the future habitability of the planet Earth.

The situation, then, is critical, but it is in no way hopeless. On the contrary, there are very sound empirical grounds for believing that, given the will and the resources at both national and international level, runaway population growth can be checked and the number of humans on the planet can be stabilized before catastrophe strikes. The key to achieving this result - it is generally recognized - is education, which is essential to bringing about the changes in attitudes, values and behaviour that enable the interlinked problems of population and sustainable development to be effectively addressed.

My missions to many parts of the world have strongly underscored the message for me. I think, for example, of a lady I met in the Wardha district of India, celebrating the achievement of 100 % literacy, who described to me the effects of the new empowerment of women on reproductive patterns. The evidence, though, is much more than anecdotal. Experience in numerous countries has demonstrated that education is a crucial factor in lowering fertility rates, as well as reducing infant mortality and promoting economic growth. The examples of China and Sri Lanka come to mind immediately. Education has similarly been central to Thailand's dramatic success in reducing population increase. In a country where 90 per cent of women are literate, the average number of children per woman fell from 6.1 in 1965-70 to only 2.2 in 1987 and was matched by a sharp drop in infant mortality and substantial economic progress. In Brazil, illiterate women produce an average of 6.5 children, while women with secondary education only 2.5. Sub-Saharan Africa, where female literacy averages only 15 %, significantly has some of the highest rates of population growth. No one, of course, would seek to deny the complexity of population issues or the many factors involved in the reduction of fertility - including the socioeconomic context, the availability of family planning services and, in some cases, direct incentives to limit family size. However, it is clear from the World Fertility Surveys and many other studies that education, particularly of girls and women, is the key to reducing fertility, whatever the socioeconomic or cultural context.

The fundamental problem that has to be addressed if escalating population growth is to be mastered is that of improving access to basic education, of providing learning opportunities to the 100 million or so out-of-school children and the one billion illiterate adults, three-quarters of them women. We are of course all aware of the difficulties that many developing countries are having in "keeping up" with population growth in the educational sphere, much less "overtaking" it. Yet the theoretical capacities, expressed in terms of gross enrolment ratios, exist in many of these countries. The problem is that of making access effective, of reaching out to the unreached percentage of the population - in particular girls and women - that will make all the difference when it comes to curbing population growth. This will call in many cases for new approaches, for greater investment in non-formal education, for improvement in the quality and relevance of education so as to avoid the massive drop-out and wastage problems that plague so many developing countries. Improving the quantity and quality of educational provision is clearly an enormous challenge for countries currently having problems in running fast enough to stay still. Yet if the vicious circle of overpopulation, underdevelopment and excessive pressure on the resource base is to be broken, education is the point at which it will be achieved.

President Mubarak of Egypt has referred to education as "a priority for national security", and it is - I believe - in such urgent terms that the question must be posed. We cannot continue to adopt what has inelegantly but forcefully been called the "pile of bodies" approach to critical socio-political issues - awaiting till calamity occurs before reacting. If the threats inherent in excessive population growth, poverty and environmental degradation are to be averted, new social and economic commitments will be necessary, resting to some extent on the demilitarizing of national economies and a greater emphasis on pre-emptive peace-building by the international community in the aftermath of the Cold War. Basic education currently receives only a modest proportion of official development assistance. Allocations fall well short of the estimated $ 6 billion per annum needed to provide for the world's out-of-school children, the $ 2 billion required to educate illiterate women and the $ 9 billion necessary to tackle the population problem - and invite comparison with the immense amounts spent on armaments and wars, or even on peace-keeping functions as compared with peace-building operations. Yet the challenge of education for all is truly a global one, and if the worst-case scenarios for the world's future are not to be realised it must be accepted as a national and international priority by all.

In association with UNDP, the World Bank, UNICEF, UNFPA and other agencies, UNESCO is actively pursuing the task of promoting basic education worldwide as a follow-up to the World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien (Thailand) in 1990. Its most recent initiative in this context, supporting the attempt of nine of the world's largest countries to give fresh impetus to their efforts to achieve education for all, is of obvious relevance to the concerns of this Congress. Following a series of national meetings and events, a summit meeting of the countries concerned will take place in Delhi in November of this year. Other recent UNESCO-sponsored meetings relevant to the promotion of education for all - and population education in particular - include the World Congress for Education and Communication on Environment and Development (Toronto, October 1992), the International Forum on Education for Democracy (Tunis, November 1992), and the International Congress on Education for Human Rights and Democracy (Montreal, March 1993). The themes of population, development, environment, democracy -and human rights, together with others such as drugs and AIDS-prevention, are convergent components of the education for the quality of life that UNESCO is promoting within the framework of the Education for All initiative and in the follow-up to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. UNESCO's various activities in this sphere thus form a coherent strategy of action, whose results will feed into conferences such as the Cairo International Conference on Population -and Development in 1994.

Population, environment and development are, in the words of your working document, an "inseparable trinity". It is for this reason that I am proposing for the next biennium (1994-95) a new interdisciplinary and interagency project, "Environment and Population Education and Information for Human Development", to be implemented in cooperation with other agencies of the United Nations system, in particular UNFPA and UNEP, and nongovernmental organizations. Setting population education in the wider context of sustainable development offers many advantages. It enables population issues to be presented as immediately relevant to the lives and prospects of learners and to be easily linked to other vital issues of health, family life, gender equity and so forth. It provides scope for the introduction of graduated programmes at different levels of the education system, from the crucial primary level right up to the university level. It facilitates the adaptation of population education to different social contexts and helps to overcome religious and cultural hurdles to its introduction in the syllabus. Highlighting the vital connections between population and development can also serve to enhance the status o population education in the eyes of administrators and decision-makers, whose support is crucial to securing its integration in the curriculum and to ensuring that teachers are properly trained in the subject.

Teacher preparation is a crucial aspect of population education. Teachers, as we know are always the ultimate determinants of the quality of education. Their role is however, particularly vital in population education because of the complex, sensitive and value-laden nature of some of its content. There are an estimated 47 million teachers worldwide in the formal sector alone, over 30 million of them in the developing countries, and the challenge of preparing them for new and demanding tasks is enormous. In the developing countries particularly, cost-effective strategies need to be devised in the contex of more general efforts to upgrade professional pre-service and in-service training fo teachers. Special attention must also be given to -training instructors and field workers fo non-formal population education, employing innovative modalities as well as mor traditional methods. The universities should play a leadership role in training, research an extension activities so that population education can become fully institutionalized in th overall education system of a country.

The importance of teachers in the context of population education underlines the fac that the problem of uncontrolled population growth is part of the general problem of th knowledge gap and that its solution - as for most development problems - lies in what m be called inner capacity building. This implies more than the mere transfer of knowledge and know-how, although it encompasses this. It means awakening the unique potential, th endogenous capacities of individuals and peoples. It means helping people to generate th knowledge appropriate to their own cultural context, whether in relation to population o any other development issues. What we are talking about, then, is the fostering of those educational processes that are the key to human sustainable development, which is only sustainable in human terms insofar as it is expressive of the genius and identity of a culture

This Congress, organized jointly with UNFPA, provides us with an opportunity t contribute to the promotion of sustainable development by comparing experiences in th field of population education and by identifying priorities, strategies and actions developing, strengthening and institutionalizing population education in the 1990s an beyond. Almost twenty years have passed since the 1974 World Population Conference i Bucharest adopted its World Plan of Action, which was subsequently reaffirmed an enriched at the Mexico International Conference on Population in 1984 and reconfirmed b the Amsterdam International Forum on Population in the 21st Century in 1989. The main purpose of this Congress will be to review the evolution of population education worldwi over the past two decades and to adopt a Declaration on the role of population educatio in the promotion of human development, together with a document proposing a framewor for action. The results of the Congress will be submitted to the twenty-seventh session the UNESCO General Conference this autumn for endorsement. They will also be present to the Delhi Meeting of the Nine Largest Countries in November of this year and to t Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994. The outcome your Congress will also help to shape UNESCO's programme on education for sustainab human development, democracy and human rights and will be of great interest to vario committees and commissions established by UNESCO or under its auspices, including Independent Commission on Population and Quality of Life chaired by Mrs Maria Lourdes Pintasilgo, the International Commission on Education for the 21 st Century chair by Mr Jacques Delors, and the World Commission on Culture and Development chaired by Mr Javier Perez de Cuellar.

The importance of partnership for attaining the goals of sustainable development was one of the strongest messages to emerge from the Rio Summit. Co-operation and coordination at national and international level concerning all aspects of education for the quality of life are essential to the effectiveness of population education. Governments have a responsibility to reorient national priorities and increase the resources for education and related social sectors, but effective policy formulation and implementation will call for an alliance between the State, business, industry, the private sector and NGOs and close partnership with international organizations. The international community, for its part, will need to give education - including population education - much greater priority in its cooperation programmes and ensure maximum synergy between and within governmental and non-governmental bodies in working for programme development, promotion and implementation at the country level.

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

The partnership that has linked UNESCO to UNFPA over the past twenty years has, I believe, been very fruitful, and I am sure it will be further strengthened in the years to come as we attempt to tackle the problems with which this Congress is concerned. I should like to pay tribute here to Dr Nafis Sadik, who has provided such excellent leadership to UNFPA and who has been very supportive of UNESCO's programme in population education. With her, I believe that "The partnership of UNESCO, LTNFPA and countries worldwide in implementating population education programmes in school and other appropriate settings is of immense value for our common future".

This, Ladies and gentlemen, is what you are assembled to talk about - our common future, and the future of the generations to come. The question is whether we are to leave them a world worth inhabiting, or a crippling legacy of social and environmental debt. The time left for us to choose is limited, very limited. The population clock on my desk, like L'Horloge of the poet Baudelaire, seems to speak a warning and to issue a call to action: