By Lynette Dumble
A report issued by the United Nations' Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) on February 8 highlighted the devastating impact of the south-east Asian economic crisis on girls and women, through retrenchments and government cutbacks on health-care and education for females.
In the same week, the first major follow-up to Cairo's 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) took place in the Hague. Aside from the odd US editorial regurgitating the "population time-bomb" hysteria fathered by environmentalist Paul Ehrlich in the 1970s, this 1999 UN Population Summit virtually escaped world media attention.
Organised by the UNFPA, the Hague forum was part of ICPD+5, a series of review activities leading up to a special session of the UN General Assembly in New York on June 30 to July 2. The forum report will be the key background document for the preparatory committee for that special session, the UN Commission on Population and Development (UNCPD), which meets on March 24-31.
Population control remains one of society's most contentious issues. Modern disciples of Thomas Malthus, a British clergyman who in the 18th century blamed the social unrest and crime of the industrial revolution on the excessive breeding of the under-classes, and Ehrlich's followers, argue that population control is the solution to global poverty, famine, a declining environment and deteriorating standards of public health.
Others, chiefly feminists, counterclaim that it is the greening of misogyny and racism, the scapegoating of women's fertility for every conceivable global crisis, while ignoring the more obvious causes like militarism, consumerism and the unpaid debts of European colonisation, which left underdeveloped regions poverty stricken.
In 1994, in a break with the past ICPD traditions, people rather than numbers were hailed. In a shift away from demographic targets, girls' education, women's reproductive rights and empowerment and the shared reproductive responsibilities of women and men became the focus of Cairo's 20-year plan of action to stabilise the world's population.
Known as the "Cairo Consensus", the plan projected that the costs of family planning, reproductive health-care, sexually transmitted disease prevention and improved monitoring systems would reach US$17.1 billion by the year 2000. Importantly, investment in female literacy was not included in the plan's budget.
Last month's Hague forum had an audience of 1500 delegates from 179 UN member nations. Confronted by a budget short-fall of more than US$8 billion, the audience was reminded that the Cairo Consensus targets women from developing regions for population control programs. Their countries, many war-plagued, are all burdened with crippling interest repayments to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and by a global economic meltdown which has caused currency values and bilateral aid to decline.
In this context, women are increasingly impoverished, a poverty which is directly linked to new heights of violence against women — escalating female infanticide, trafficking and prostitution. In the words of Nana Rawlings, wife of Ghana's president, Cairo's goal to provide universal access to reproductive health services by 2015 is meaningless for women struggling to survive.
In the opinion of the Hague forum, the Cairo plan can still be made to work if funds can be made to go further. Topping the list of suggested money-savers are the cheap and the nasty (described by neo-Malthusians as the cost-effective): women's sterilisation and long-acting provider-dependent contraceptives like Depo-Provera and Norplant.
In the five years since Cairo, largely because of budgetary constraints, real reproductive choices have failed to reach women of more populous countries, especially the poor in rural regions. Despite the softening of China's one-child policy due to its vast adverse social repercussions, population control incentives still operate. In India, women are coerced to trade their right to reproduce for development rights, even though every day women die in the country's sterilisation camps for the poor.
In Nigeria, women's childbirth-related deaths have soared to 3% of all deaths in recent years because development funds have evaporated under international sanctions and domestic recession. Throughout Asia and Africa, the AIDS pandemic exerts its own population control, with massive death tolls in HIV-infected communities for whom anti-HIV drugs are not affordable.
In many developing countries the Cairo Consensus — code name for population control — translates to castration, and the accompanying risk of death or serious injury, or a life without access to water, sanitation or electricity.
The impact on women of the population policy which underpinned the Cairo Consensus parallels the obnoxious campaigns hailing the sterilisation of native and African-Americans in the US as the surgical solution to racism and civil turbulence.
Taken to its extremes by Adolf Hitler's regime in World War II Europe, racial cleansing prompted a vow from global authorities, and indeed a Universal Human Rights Convention, to prevent any more such crimes against humanity. If the conclusion at the Hague gathering is adopted by the UNCPD, that vow will appear short-lived.
In many ways, the Cairo Consensus takes into account that women given proper access to education, health care and social opportunity will have fewer children. But, as reports at the Hague forum confirmed, funding continues to be disproportionately allocated to reproductive health rather than education.
UNFPA has earmarked October 12 as a day to observe the global population reaching 6 billion. According to UNFPA gospel, whether the world population goes to 8, 10 or 12 billion will depend largely on policy decisions and individual actions in the next decade.
The UNCPD must now prove whether the Cairo Consensus was anything more than rhetoric to justify the extermination of the world's poor. Already the huge budgetary shortfall, together with the broken commitment to female literacy, are ample reasons for modifying the 1994 plan of action.
As an obvious alternative, the application of UNFPA's funds to universal literacy programs would honour the Cairo commitment to women's empowerment, and at the same time slow population growth without dehumanising programs which violate human reproductive rights, overwhelmingly those of indigenous, rural and poor women in underdeveloped countries. After all, the "global emergency" is the frank injustice of female illiteracy, not, as neo-Malthusians would have it, some population time-bomb.
[Dr Lynette Dumble is coordinator of the Global Sisterhood Network and a senior research fellow in the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Melbourne.]