Cairo Population Conference To Examine Growth Problems

In September, representatives of governments, international groups and 1,000 private non-governmental organizations will assemble in Cairo to consider questions of world population and development. The good news for planners is that population growth rates are dropping in every portion of the globe.

The sobering news is that world population, which was 2.5 billion in 1950 and is 5.5 billion in 1992, is expected, despite the drop in birth rates, to reach 6.2 billion in 2,000, and 8.5 billion in 2025. Demographers predict that overall world population may climb as high as 11 billion in 2100 before stability sets in a 11.6 billion between 2150 and 2200.

The bad news, according to International Labor Organization experts preparing for the Cairo conference, is that 30 percent of the world's labor force does not earn enough to rise above the poverty line and, despite the present global abundance of food, many individuals cannot afford enough to eat. Demographers everywhere point out that birth rates drop where life becomes more secure, education is more readily available, and children no longer are regarded as a potential work force for families, and the only realistic "safety net" for aging parents.

These, and agricultural and environmental factors, will provide the background for the Cairo conference, as they did for the just-concluded preliminary conference in New York. The U.S. spends $500 million annually on international family planning programs, part of a worldwide total of $4.6 billion. In Cairo, conferees are expected to agree that the primary goal of such international efforts must be to make family planning services available to millions of couples who want but do not now have access to them.

In New York, it became apparent that demographic matters are less politicized under the Clinton administration than they were in the Reagan era, when the U.S. government made a point of withholding cooperation from countries believed to be providing abortion advice or services in government facilities. Faith Mitchell, a medical anthropologist and former head of a population program for a private foundation, has been appointed senior State Department population coordinator under former Colorado Senator Timothy E. Wirth.

"We advocate the international right of couples freely and responsibly to determine the size and spacing of their family," Mitchell told The Washington Post prior to the New York conference.

Opposition to the spread of artificial family planning services comes from the Vatican, although birthrates among Catholic countries do not differ significantly from those in non-Catholic countries at the same level of educational and economic development. There also is strong resistance to family planning in some conservative, oil rich and lightly populated Islamic countries of the Arabian peninsula.

Egypt, the site of the coming world population conference, has made family planning information and services available through a network of government and privately operated clinics for nearly two decades. These government measures, plus improved educational and health facilities, and the increased urbanization that has brought up to one-quarter of the country's inhabitants to Cairo, with an estimated population of 12 to 16 million, have lowered the Egyptian birthrate by 42 percent in the past 30 years.

By contrast the Gaza Strip, which borders on Egypt, has the highest birthrate in the Middle East and possibly in the world. Causal factors include 40 percent unemployment under Israeli military occupation, lack of educational and job opportunities for women, poor health standards, a high mortality rate among children and youths during the intifada, and the fact that the three-generation Israeli-Palestinian struggle has made having children a patriotic statement for Gaza Palestinians, a majority of whom are refugees or the descendants of refugees from Israel.

—RHC