[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1995-E1996]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

WORLD POPULATION GROWTH

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HON. JAMES P. MORAN

of virginia

in the house of representatives

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to submit a recent
speech delivered by the President of the Population Institute, Mr.
Werner Fornos, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington,
Virginia on October 1, 2002. Mr. Fornos spoke to the rapidly growing
economic and environmental pressures created by our burgeoning world
population, especially in third world countries. These concerns
represent a pressing issue for congressional debate and I offer these
remarks to that end.

Remarks by Werner Fornos, President of the Population Institute, at the
Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, VA. October 1, 2002

World population stands today at more than 6.2 billion and
increases by more than 75 million each year. An incredible 97
per cent of this growth occurs in the developing world, by
definition the poorest countries of the world--those where
for far too many daily living is a struggle for mere
survival. These are the very countries least able to afford
such massive influxes of people, countries where demographic
pressures already place unbelievable burdens on schools,
hospitals, transportation and virtually all facets of the
economic and social infrastructure.
Yet our soaring human numbers are projected to exceed 9
billion by the year 2050. While the wealthiest countries on
our planet are estimated to account for only 52 million of
this increase, the developing world is expected to account
for 2.7 billion.
But world population does not need to continue to grow at
this dizzying pace.
First though, I must tell you that no matter what
corrective course we may steer, the earth's population will
reach 8 billion. The reason is our built-in demographic
momentum: there are one billion people today between the ages
of 15 and 24, the largest number of people entering their
reproductive years at the same time than at any other time in
the history of the world.

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How can we hold the number of people on earth down to
approximately 8 billion? The answer to that question lies
with providing access to voluntary family planning for the
more than 300 million couples in the world who today want to
make their own decisions about when and if they will have
children--couples who in many cases did not want their last
child and do not want another.
Accommodating these couples, however, is another matter
that has been complicated by the anti-abortion movement. Let
me say here that the Population Institute is passionately
dedicated to providing access to family planning information,
means and services; we do not consider abortion to be a
method of family planning. As a matter of fact, abortion is a
procedure to which many women resort who lack access to
family planning.
However, a sizable contingent of those who have the
audacity to label themselves ``pro-life'' because they oppose
abortion have become perhaps the single greatest obstacle to
those 300 million-plus women obtaining family planning.
If you want to prevent abortion, the first line of defense
is preventing pregnancy. And that is what family planning is
about: preventing pregnancies, not terminating them.
And if the Bush administration is serious about being
``prolife,'' it should be promoting family planning--not
signing executive orders that cut off the congressionally
approved $34 million United States contribution to the United
Nations Population Fund, the largest multilateral provider of
international population assistance, as the President has.
But the obstacles to universal access to family planning
are not solely within the anti-abortion movement. Population
policy today is a matter of failure, ignorance, and timidity.
Last month I was in Johannesburg, South Africa, attending
the World Summit on Sustainable Development--the most
important global meeting on environment and development since
the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Oddly, population
growth had no place on the official agenda. But there can be
no doubt that population and sustainable development are
inexorably linked.
After all, we live in a world where 70 percent of all
families are dependent on firewood as their primary source of
heating and cooking fuel. A world where 600,000 square miles
of forest have been cut down worldwide, just over the past 10
years. A world where forestland equivalent to three times the
size of Belgium is annually cut down in the Congo Basin
alone.
Though there were some achievements at the Johannesburg
summit, it was seriously flawed by the neglect to link human
growth with environmental well being in the face of economic
growth.
The Johannesburg summit succeeded in establishing clearly
important time-tables for pressing matters, such as: halving
the number of people living in poverty who lack access to
clean water and adequate sanitation by 2015; restoring
depleted fish stocks by 2015; and significantly reducing the
extinction rate of the world's plant and animal life by 2010.
I seriously question, however, how any one of these
obviously significant and desirable targets can be reached
until we, first and foremost, establish a crystal clear
accelerated target for providing voluntary family planning
and reproductive health care to those more than 300 million
who need and want fewer children but lack the information,
education and the affordable means to control their own
fertility. The Johannesburg summit was not a failure; I
believe that so long as nations of the world continue to
discuss relevant issues at very least it achieves the
opportunity for mutual understanding and mutual respect. But
I also believe that much more could have been accomplished
had the meeting not been bogged down in coddling the
comfortable and ignoring the afflicted.
Considering the political climate, especially in the United
States, at the time of the WSSD, many feel that population
stabilization advocates should count themselves fortunate
that the summit reaffirmed the 1994 International Conference
on Population and Development (ICPD) Plan of Action, as well
as the results of the 1999 ICPD+5 meeting and the Millennium
Development Goals--all of which had important population
policy and program recommendations. In hindsight, this
appears to be true enough. Yet while reaffirmations are not
insignificant, in my view summit meetings should be about
more than acknowledgments of what already has been approved.
They should focus on progress: developing new strategies to
attain established goals and objectives, where they are
needed, and accelerating efforts to reach these goals and
objectives, where it is applicable. It is in these areas
where, as far as world population issues arc concerned, the
WSSD was disappointing.
In addition to squandering an opportunity to accelerate
progress on universal access to family planning, the
Johannesburg summit failed to establish a target for vastly
reducing the carbon emissions responsible for global warming
and increasing reliance on renewable energy sources such as
solar and wind power.
We know that the planet in many respects has an impressive
capacity for resilience. Some years back British scientists
reported that the ozone layer--the protective shield that
prevents ultra-violet B rays from devastating the earth with
skin cancer--was thinning in the southern hemisphere and had
virtually disappeared over Antarctica, the world. For years,
industries producing chlorofluorocarbons influenced
industrialized countries responsible for most of the
emissions to forego becoming involved in an effort to prevent
such emissions. But with new and compelling scientific
evidence before the world, nations hastened to approve the
Montreal Protocol, phasing out CFCs and other ozone-depleting
chemicals by 1996. Within recent weeks, it has been reported
that the shield is thickening at a pace that might close the
10,000 square mile hole in the layer over Antarctica within
50 years.
I am convinced we can have similar success in overall
sustainable development, if we have the foresight and the
courage to establish rational and effective timetables. The
timetable for reducing world population growth to a figure
closer to 8 billion rather than 9 billion would specifying
dates for:
Widening women's educational opportunities--at all levels,
primary, secondary and higher education. In country after
country studies, show that the more education a woman has the
more likely she is to have only the number of children she
can nurture and educate;
Increasing employment opportunities for women. Studies also
show that when women have income-generating employment, they
are likely to have fewer children;
Reduction of infant and child mortality. A major factor
contributing to larger family size in many developing
countries is that infant and child survival is precarious at
best. Couples frequently have six, seven or eight children in
the hope that one, two, or three will survive. With adequate
prenatal and postnatal care, infant and child mortality can
be vastly reduced.
Universal access to family planning information, education,
and the affordable means to practice it.
Some years back, World Bank President Robert McNamara said
in a celebrated speech at Notre Dame University that time
lost in the effort to reduce rampant population growth can
never be recovered. I believe that rapid population growth is
a problem the entire world must address. Failure to do so
would be the ultimate global blunder, one from which there is
no recovery.

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