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United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) gave the world a little glimpse
of wedded bliss, U.N.-style, in the population report it released
last week. The report describes how in Niger, "Many women now
work alongside their husbands scooping salt from pits — something
not possible a generation ago." In the whole world, this seemed
to be the only good news UNFPA could find (wait until they discover
that salt mines have glass ceilings).
Leaving African
women's newfound right to backbreaking, perilous labor aside, UNPFA
considers the rest of world in almost irreparable straits. UNFPA,
which is in charge of U.N. programs for population control, asserts
that as a result of uncontrolled population growth, billions of
people are poor and hungry. They also fully expect just about every
animal species to be skinned, gobbled, or stuffed into extinction
by the great hordes of humanity. The report, entitled "Footprints
and Milestones," advances the increasingly discredited population-bomb
theory everyone under 40 learned practically at their mother's breast.
The problem
with the UNFPA report, however, is that it is flatly contradicted
by a more credible U.N. source — the Population Division, the
official U.N. number crunchers. The differences between the two
reports were so stark and so embarrassing that Population Division
chief Joseph Chamie announced that UNFPA's report amounted to little
more than propaganda. "The relationship between population
and the environment is very complex," he said. "UNFPA
is a fund; they have an agenda."
UNFPA claims
that population growth has led to intractable poverty, and that
"poverty persists and, in many parts of the world, deepens."
The Population Division disagrees. "From 1900 to 2000, world
population grew from 1.6 billion persons to 6.1 billion. However,
while the world population increased close to 4 times, world real
gross domestic output increased 20 to 40 times, allowing the world
to not only sustain a four-fold population increase, but also to
do so at vastly higher standards of living." The Population
Division adds that "…even many low-income countries have
achieved substantial improvements in the quality and length of life."
According to
UNFPA, "In many countries population growth has raced ahead
of food production," and as a result "some 800 million
people are chronically malnourished and 2 billion people lack food
security." The Population Division, by contrast, contends that
"Over the period 1961-1998 world per capita food available
for human consumption increased by 24 per cent, and there is enough
being produced for everyone on the planet to be adequately nourished."
It's highly
enjoyable to watch U.N. bureaucrats publicly attack their colleagues'
credibility, and UNFPA is an awfully tasty target. But the disagreement
also has profound implications. UNFPA hopes to use its new report
as proof that "reproductive health" must be financed by
the international community. And UNFPA has powerful allies on Capitol
Hill.
U.S. funding
for UNFPA may rise from last year's level of $21.5 to at least $34
million. If the Democrats in the conference committee (which is
now taking place) have their way, funding will go even higher, reaching
$37.5 million. Because of governments like our own, UNFPA is backed
up by loads of cash, which it uses to bribe developing countries
into accepting the UNFPA population theory — and the programs
that inevitably follow in its wake. The Population Division, by
contrast, has no such cash, only facts.
But UNFPA's
credibility is slipping. Its connivance in Chinese population coercion
is now an established fact. A number of UNFPA officials have been
quoted as praising China's one-child policy. "For all of the
bad press, China has achieved the impossible," said the UNFPA
representative in Beijing. "The country has solved its population
problem." Human-rights activists in the U.S. and Peru have
charged UNFPA with complicity in the coerced sterilization of native
Peruvians. And new allegations surfaced three weeks ago when eyewitnesses
told Representative Henry Hyde's House International Affairs Committee
that, despite UNFPA assurances to the contrary, forced abortions
still occur in UNFPA-funded Chinese counties.
On the other
hand, the Population Division began a drumbeat in 1997 to the effect
that, far from facing a population explosion, the world risks a
population implosion, and a demographic shift with truly catastrophic
consequences. Indeed, in the past three years the Population Division
has hosted two expert group meetings at U.N. headquarters where
demographic experts from all over the world have agreed that the
current downward fertility trajectory will bring about population
decline, intergenerational financial warfare, and a pension and
health system meltdown. They concluded that, without massive immigration,
the developed world faces a future of economic crisis.
UNFPA is looking
to use the threats of environmental degradation, poverty, sickness,
etc., to advance the spread of its favorite things: contraception,
sterilization, and abortion. UNFPA's tired argument is that people
are the problem, and so the fewer of them, the better. UNFPA is
therefore ideologically unprepared to recognize the gravity of the
real population problem — fertility decline in the developed
world — let alone to address it. Since UNFPA guides the U.N.
on population issues, we shouldn't be surprised if the U.N. keeps
handing out condoms even when the whole world has gone gray, and
when there aren't even enough women left to work the salt mines.
UNFPA is a
$395 million-dollar agency that funds "family planning"
programs around the world. Its chief clients are branches of the
International Planned Parenthood Federation — the largest abortion-provider
in the world — and such unsavory population controllers as
the Chinese government. The only way to stop UNFPA is to dry up
its funding. A small but necessary first step would be to ensure
that UNFPA gets at most $21 million dollars of our money, rather
than $37 million.
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