Is it time for another world population conference?
Written by Marian Starkey | Published: July 17, 2024
Slowing global population growth used to be an international priority, but an ideologically-driven shift away from pursuing demographic targets in the ’90s seems to have led to stagnating funding for international family planning programs. We take a look at the major high-level population conferences through recent history and argue that it’s time to revive interest in empowering population solutions to put us on track for a more sustainable population size at the end of the century.
Population on the international agenda
At a time when there were only 2.7 billion people on Earth (a third of today’s 8.2 billion), agronomists and economists were already beginning to worry that the global population was too large and growing too quickly.
That was 70 years ago, in the summer of 1954, when the first United Nations World Population Conference was convened in Rome. Nearly every “major” country on Earth came together to discuss the challenges population growth posed to food security and to developing economies.
UN international population conferences continued to be held each decade until the landmark International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994. That conference was a turning point in the expressed aims of the global population agenda, from a focus on demographic estimates, projections, and targets to a new and narrow focus on women and their health and rights. No longer would family planning be discussed as a tool to bend the population growth curve downward — henceforth, it would be regarded as an implement for women’s empowerment and nothing else. Surely, thought those participants at the conference who were opposed to a “demography is destiny” outlook, donor funding would freely flow now that the incidental benefits of family planning were banished from the discussion.
A persistent funding gap
Perhaps these well-meaning (if idealistic) participants hadn’t noticed that women’s health and rights have sadly always been far lower on leaders’ and donors’ agendas than economic, resource, and national security. It should surprise no one that this ranking of concerns on the part of those who create policy and determine funding levels hasn’t shifted in the 30 years since that watershed conference. Tellingly, there has been no major world population conference since.
So here we find ourselves, with a $5.5 billion funding gap for providing family planning to all women in developing regions — an estimated 218 million of them — who have an expressed unmet need for modern contraception.
It’s been 14 years since the United States increased its international family planning funding appropriations, and that’s not even considering inflation. Instead of investing the $1.74 billion that is our “fair share” amount based on the commitment we made in Cairo, we have been stuck at $607.5 million — just over a third of what we pledged. And we have to fight the right-wing factions in both houses of Congress every year just to keep that funding flat, as House and Senate extremists try to slash it down or even zero it out.
The wholesale dismissal of demographic targets has unfortunately backfired when it comes to funding international family planning. We should be targeting a lower and earlier population peak. The UN projected in 2022 with 95% confidence that the world population would be between 8.9 billion and 12.4 billion at the end of the century. A difference of 3.5 billion people is huge — in the mid-late 1960s, when concerns over population growth prompted the introduction of USAID’s family planning program, the founding of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), and the writing of The Population Bomb, the entire world population was 3.5 billion.
Time for a course change
What if we were to bring the environmental, economic development, and national security benefits of family planning back into the discussion and extend an invitation to leaders in those fields to join us in pushing for this incredibly effective and inexpensive solution? Publicly acknowledging that women’s reproductive autonomy leads to smaller families and slower population growth, and that this eases pressure on biodiversity and natural resources and creates a window of opportunity for less developed countries to grow their economies, might be just the strategy needed for closing that $5.5 billion funding gap.
If the major donor countries and philanthropies had determined that women’s health and empowerment were intrinsically important enough to fund at the [relatively low] level requested, there would be no need to expand the family planning discourse to include other objectives. But 30 years after castigating environmentalists, development workers, and national security experts for supporting lower population growth to achieve their crucial aims, we are billions of dollars short of fulfilling one of people’s most basic human rights: the ability to determine for themselves whether, when, and with whom to have children.
If we’re serious about addressing any of the world’s most pressing problems, we can’t continue to ignore population growth and the impact it has on the planet or on its poorest people. Perhaps it’s time for another major world population conference and a course correction that improves our chances of closing out the century with fewer than 9 billion people as opposed to soaring past 12 billion.