Are People the Problem?
UNFPA’s annual world population report.

he 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.