PRESS BRIEFING BY SENIOR RESEARCHER OF UNFPA

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY SENIOR RESEARCHER OF UNFPA

The global population of nearly 6 billion people was made up of record numbers of young and older persons, correspondents were told this morning at a Headquarters press briefing to launch the new report: The State of the World Population 1998.

Today there were over 1 billion people between the ages of 15 and 24, continued Stan Bernstein, senior research adviser of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Their entry into peak reproductive years and early employment, as well as their full integration into society, would determine the world's future. It was vitally important that these people were provided with education and health care -- including reproductive health care, services and information -- to be able to exercise their right to make responsible and voluntary decisions about the size of their families. These factors would help influence the way they lived and, to some extent, determine how large the global population would eventually become.

While there were currently 5.9 billion people in the world, he said, the population had been 3 billion in 1960 and 2 billion around 1930. Meanwhile, the world was experiencing the fastest population growth in history -- about 80 million per year. Progress in providing information and services and in reducing fertility rates over the past four decades offered a window of opportunity -- "a demographic bonus" -- to accelerate social and economic development, Mr. Bernstein continued. Current fertility rates had fallen to about three children per woman, from about six per woman in 1960. Having fewer "birth cohorts" entering the global population meant that the size of the working age population relative to the non-working age population could increase in many parts of the developing world, he said. This provided an opportunity to accelerate development in the coming years if the proper policies were in place and if there was adequate investment in education, health and employment.

Also today, more than 560 million people were over the age of 60, he said. The prospects for people to have healthy, contributory and productive older age depended on: investments in preventive health services; on the opportunities given to people throughout their lives; and on efforts to ensure gender equity and gender equality. Because of the different life expectancies for men and women, the larger proportion of older persons were women, he continued. They often came into older age suffering the burdens of a lifetime of restricted opportunity and restricted control over resources. However, in the future, the situation for older persons could improve as there was time to establish policies and strategies to ensure an increase in gender equity, generational equity, and the ability of people to exercise their fundamental human rights, including reproductive health rights. A correspondent asked about the United States contribution and involvement in UNFPA efforts. Mr. Bernstein said the United States was a major actor through its bilateral programmes and through its contributions to UNFPA. It stood firmly behind the principles of the 1994 International

UNFPA Press Briefing - 2 - 2 September 1998

Conference on Population and Development to expand and extend the right of individuals and couples to make voluntary choices regarding reproductive health and to expand health services and their capacity to meet basic social needs throughout the world.

A correspondent said there was concern in Italy -- on the part of the Vatican and other parties -- that the population growth rate was so low that Italians would eventually be phased out. She asked for Mr. Bernstein's response. He said that in developed countries, there was growing alarm, whipped up by misinformation, about future population dynamics. In some of those countries, fertility had reached low levels. But, if one examined the situation, it became clear that married persons were having more than a replacement number of children.

People's right to make voluntary and informed decisions about the timing and spacing of their children was equally important in developed and developing countries, he continued. In the latter, the issue was often the need for information and services to allow people to exercise their choices. The more developed countries had to review social and economic policies that created obstacles to people forming families when they wanted, including issues related to employment and housing.

Hugh O'Haire, UNFPA spokesman, said that never had a Government been successful in encouraging women to have more children than they wanted. The French had been trying to do it for 70 years, but such efforts did not work. Once women decided the amount of children they wanted to have -- if they had the choice -- they would settle on that number and not change. It was only when people were denied services or contraceptives, that such an effect could be seen.

A correspondent asked when the large numbers of young people visible on the current population curve had been born. They were the children of the larger initial high fertility generations, Mr. Bernstein said. Also, reductions in infant mortality had begun to accelerate after the Second World War. The "baby boom" was more a change in the timing of births than in the number of births, he explained. After the economic privations of the depression and the disturbances of the Second World War, the timing and pace of family formation changed, and people had begun to have children earlier. The large generations that were born, then combined with improvements in health conditions, had led to the rapid increase in the numbers of young people in the years that followed.

A correspondent asked about population efforts in countries that preferred to increase rather than decrease their populations. Mr. Bernstein said that only a few countries wanted to increase their fertility levels. In the developing world, these were primarily countries in post-conflict situations. Regarding European countries, he said some analysts suggested that the decline in fertility rates observed in Sweden were on the verge of being reversed. Sweden took pride in its efforts to achieve gender equality and in its ability to develop new living and working arrangements which allow women to participate in the workplace, as well as in family life.

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