UN Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA)
|
| UN Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) |
|
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The electronic preparation of this document has been done by the
Population Information Network(POPIN) of the United Nations Population
Division in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme
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AS WRITTEN
STATEMENT BY THE INDEPENDENT COMMISSION FOR POPULATION AND QUALITY OF LIFE
at the
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Cairo, 7 September 1994
Introduction
The ultimate goal of Population and Development is to accord an improved
quality of life to the people of the world. Not only to count people but
to ensure that people count in Development; that both their material and
non-material security must be the first priority of Development. The
Independent Commission has held Public Hearings across all the major
regions of the globe to ask the people their views on quality of life,
and this has been the message that they have strongly conveyed to us.
And here I quote exactly words spelt out in our South Asia Public
Hearing: "Let the direction and pace be the people's choice. Let them be
empowered, by a sharp increase in their access to education,
communication, health care and technology".
In face of this we must ask: Can we go on with more of the same?
The answer from this conference is no. By seeing Population-and-
Development as one interrelated process, the Cairo Conference addresses
the most important transition of all: the transition from an economy
that ignores and marginalises millions of human beings, to an economy
which takes as its prime role the achievement of a better quality of
life for people. Integrated Population Policies
This has profound and concrete implications for population policies.
The time is over for the old type of policies.
The time is over for what a group of medical doctors in South Asia
called the "chain of coercion";
The time is over for the imposition of numerical targets on people;
For the employment of technologies about which people, and specially
women, are not informed;
The time is over for governments to exercise coercion on their fellow
citizens; For international agencies to ignore the frontiers both of
sovereignty and of culture and human dignity.. Instead, the time has
come to institute innovative public policies which address Population
and Development questions. These policies must meet the following
criteria: People to whom population programs are addressed should be
seen as the essential decision-makers of the choices they have to make,
and should never be seen as clients or recipients;
In each society, population policies must take into account many
factors, cultural elements, history, and the ways in which people relate
to one another, to the world, and to nature. Most of all, they have to
be guided by the basic values present in each society; Specific public
policies, such as health and education - and above all education of
women are decisive on the population trends. They should never be
reversed by short term economic programs - it is not defense budget that
should remain untouched, but health and education budgets;
As population policies are central to political decision-making, they
must be the responsibility of the State; as they are part and parcel of
an integrated approach to the fabrics of society they must always be
defined and implemented with the active participation of the civil
society; The intervention of external agencies in population policies is
only acceptable when these initiatives are integrated and subordinated
to population policies, as defined nationally or locally.
Specific Strategies Against Poverty
Indeed, not "more of the same". In the relationship between Population
and Development, extreme poverty appears as the number one problem. The
Bucharest Conference, aware of the link between poverty and fertility,
forced "Development" to take the main responsibility for the
stabilization of population. At that time, there was a widespread
assumption that poverty could be absorbed by the processes of
development.
Twenty years later, it is common knowledge that, in countries with a
high percentage of poor in their population, conventional development
strategies cannot absorb poverty.
Today, 1 in every 4 persons on this planet lives in destitution. If, in
today's economy, we are unable to accommodate the poor, what can we do
during the next 30 years, at the end of which time we will have 3
billion more? If in this generation, we are not able to cope with
poverty and to invent new forms of management of wealth and resources,
in 30 years one in two of the world's people will be poor.
Let me add yet another statistic. Today, one in 5 people in the world
fall into the narrow age group of 15 to 24 years. These young people
require our most urgent attention. Not only are they facing terrible
levels of unemployment, not only do they constitute much of the world's
floating population, but they are also the parents of the future.
If we fail them, we create the largest generation of impoverished people
in our history, people who must raise, in poverty, the children of the
future. Here is thus a focal point for our attacks on poverty.
The consequences of this for population policies are radical. No
conventional "population PROGRAMME" can work effectively under such
conditions of sub-human destitution. Nor can people be the object of
massive "population programs". In fact, under these circumstances this
sort of PROGRAMME would become almost irrelevant. Mass population
programs are thus no answer to such misery.]
Specific strategies against poverty are not only a necessity in an
ethical sense, but are also a must politically. Hunger, limited access
to drinking water, to sanitation and health services, and the
deterioration of hygiene and of housing, constitute the lot for a
growing proportion of people living in most of the regions of the
world, notably in the mega-cities. It is not just the fact of appalling
misery and deprivation for fellow humans which we recognize here, but
the continuing threat to the economic and political evolution of those
societies.
Many of the specific strategies against poverty have already been
spelled out and some of their elements have been tried in various
places: the political and institutional recognition of the role of the
informal sector, land redistribution, or credit for small-scale
enterprises. What we need now is the imagination to elaborate further
those strategies; we need the political commitment to make them
effective, we need the elimination of bureaucratic restraints to allow
such initiatives to work. Let us be clear about these strategies. They
must be decided and implemented as an urgent, economically viable and
humanly caring response to extreme poverty.
Collective Survival
It is today acknowledged that damage to the environment and the threat
to human life on this planet through the depletion of the resources and
the accumulation of wastes, is the result of the joint effect of growth
in population and consumption.
Therefore, we are far from the sustainable development so many speakers
referred to. To change the patterns of consumption and production is a
condition for a sustainable development. lt. is a condition for
collective survival Moreover, it is unacceptable to act against
population growth alone, without acting at the same time, against the
growth of consumption.
We are not speaking here only of moral questions addressed to the
consciences of individuals to restrict their consumption, and to change
their life-styles. What we refer to is a change in the very patterns of
consumption, in the way in which supply and demand are constituted in
contemporary society. What is being suggested here is a need for a
"reversal of the logic" of our economic system.
The whole equation of production and consumption, inherited from the
industrial revolution and transposed to unpredicted levels of material
performance by the revolution in information technology, needs to be re-
examined.
Economics needs to be re-directed in its goals, and diversified in its
modes of operation. . Either economics deals with woman human beings as
the central concern or else there is no solution, at the world level,
for the combined challenges of between Population, Development, and
Environment.
We are now convinced that a major political initiative to face this
global challenge has to take place among the community of nations and
the emerging global civil society. A new intellectual framework, new
institutional arrangements, new practical tools, new types of leadership
are needed to give shape to a more humane future.
No State alone, no multilateral organization alone, can come to grips
with these huge problems. All live forces, in each society and on the
international scene, must be mobilized. At the international level,
civic society must take up the responsibility.
The Nobel Prize Rigoberta Menchu said at our Latin-American Public
Hearing:
"Our people are anxious whether there is indeed a future". "Nuestra
gente es ansiosa de futuro".
May the community of nations help to build such future.