| UNFPA IN THE NEWS - WEEK OF FEBRUARY 15-21,
2003
United News of Bangladesh reported February 18 that UNFPA will
provide
assistance to Dhaka University to the tune of US$ 3 lakh or Tk
1.75
crore to strengthen its Population Sciences Department for next
three
years (2003-2005). An agreement to this effect was signed today
between
UNFPA and Dhaka University. Professor Syed Rashidul Hassan, Treasurer
of
DU and UNFPA Representative Suneeta Mukherjee signed the agreement
on
behalf of respective sides.
In a lecture last week at the National Women's Education Center
in
Saitama Prefecture, Suman Mehta, Global HIV/AIDS coordinator
of the
United Nations Population Fund, said the social, economic and
biological
vulnerability of women is one of the reasons the disease has
spread so
rapidly, reported Japan Times on February 21. The UNFPA focuses
on
improving reproductive health care in developing countries. In
2002
alone, 5 million people contracted HIV, pushing the total number
of
those living with HIV to about 42 million worldwide. Read: Japan
Times
Express News Service reported February 17 that the Maharashtra
State
Seminar on Population and Development organized by the Aditya
Birla
Centre and Rotary clubs across Mumbai became a hotbed of semantic
debates with speakers trying to do away with archaic terminology. "Terms
like 'population explosion' and 'control' do not exist. We are
not
beasts. The goal is population stabilisation through social change
and
access to education and healthcare. In Maharashtra, bad population
policies have resulted in an unholy marriage of tradition and
technology
with people using sex determination tests, and sex-selective
abortions.
The sex ratio here has plummeted over the past 10 years by 29
percent," said Dr. Almas Ali, a Population
Policy consultant for the UNFPA. Diego
Palacios, the deputy representative from UNFPA said, "In
India, 75
percent of the population growth is due to this momentum. Twenty-five
percent are unwanted pregnancies arising due to lack of availability
of
contraceptive and family planning measures. Only five per cent
is
because people actually want more children. The 75 percent and
the five
percent, we can never really deal with. What we can do is to
improve
health, education and infrastructure for the 25 per cent who
have no
access so they can make informed choices. All the seminars and
world
summits are now all about this 25 percent." Read: Express
News Service
Kenya's The Nation reported February 19 that representatives
of several
United Nations organizations pledged support for the health sector
that
included the World Health Organization representative, Dr. Peter
Eriki,
his UNFPA and UNAIDS counterparts, Mr. Coulibaly Sidiki and Dr.
Warren
Naamara. Read: The Nation
featured 3 separate stories
- 2 on
Feb. 17 and 1 on Feb. 18
Health Care System Crumbling
North Korea's public health care system is in tatters and lives
are
being lost as a result, foreign aid workers warn, according to
a
February 17 story by Agence France Presse. "The life expectancy
for
women in North Korea has fallen from 73 to 70 over the past decade,"
said Jayanti Tuladhar, an advisor for UNFPA. "For men, its
69." Pregnant
women are among the groups of people who have been particularly
victimized by the government's inability to provide ample health
care.
"
In the early 1990s, maternal mortality was very low for a developing
country," said Siri Tellier, a Beijing-based representative
for UNFPA,
who visits North Korea regularly. "But it has doubled in
the past five
to 10 years, and were concerned about that," she said.
In a February 17 story by Agence France Presse, it noted since
HIV will
inevitably spread to North Korea, measures are needed now, aid
officials
said. "It does not really matter whether the prevalence
of HIV is zero
or very low, sooner or later it will arrive," said Siri
Tellier, a
Beijing-based representative for UNFPA. "The action we should
take-awareness creation, prevention, testing-are the same whether
or not
the prevalence is low or zero."
With
foreign aid dwindling to a trickle, one tragic aspect of the
recent
mass starvation is being played out again with the weakest members
of
society being hit the hardest, noted Agence France Presse in
a February
18 story. "Under-nourishment still affects mothers and children,
and
will continue to do so because international assistance is decreasing,"
said Siri Tellier, a representative for UNFPA.
"
I believe that population growth is a major threat to stability
in
Pakistan in the forthcoming decades," the United Nations
Population
Fund's country representative for Pakistan, Olivier Brasseur,
told IRIN
in Islamabad, according to the Pakistan Newswire on February
17. "There
will be a massive group of young people who will require education
health, employment and, given the current level of literacy rate
and
employment, we can think it will be very hard to accommodate
these
needs," he added.
UNFPA has finalized the consultative meeting on 21st and 22nd
February
03 in Islamabad to finalize the proposals for the years 2004
- 2008,
according to a February 19 story by Pakistan News Service. UNFPA
has
been providing assistance to Pakistan in the fields of population
and
reproductive health for the last over thirty years. Read: Pakistan
News
Service
The Eastern Economist Daily reported on February 17 that as part
of the
UN's ongoing effort to reach out to teenagers, the Dzherelo Cultural
and
Recreational Center hosted a training event for adolescent peer
counselors from Feb. 3-6. For three days, 120 young Ukrainians
aged
12-17 from cities from all over the country took part in the
training
because, as they claimed, "we are to create our own future
and what it
will look like depends only on us." Summing up the results
of the
program, UN Resident Coordinator in Ukraine UNFPA Representative
Douglas
Gardner said, "We, colleagues from the UN, are peers of
yours as well.
We are peers when we are concerned about the future of our planet,
families and communities."
Inter Press Service reported February 20 that population and
women's
reproductive-health groups are calling on U.S. President George
W. Bush
not to impose strict, anti-abortion conditions on his five-year,
15-billion-dollar plans to fight HIV-AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean.
The story noted that as one of his very first acts on taking
office,
Bush reinstated it in 2001 and applied it last year to bar all
U.S. aid
earmarked by Congress for UNFPA and reproductive health research
at the
World Health Organization in Geneva. Read: Inter Press Service
Newsday (New York) featured a February 17 article on the 34 Million
Friends campaign. The article noted that for Jane Roberts, the
idea was
simple: get 34 million people to donate a dollar each to replace
the
money the Bush administration decided last summer to withhold
from the
United Nations Population Fund. When the "34 Million Friends
Campaign"
started, a few dozen donations would arrive daily, according
to Cheryl
Stanley, vice president of development with the U.S. Committee
for the
United Nations Population Fund. Now an average of 2,000 letters
filled
with dollar bills, checks and heartfelt messages arrive daily,
she said.
Donations have ranged from $1 to $25,000. Read: Newsday On February 21, Peter Kostmayer, President of Population Connection,
responded to Newsday's coverage of the campaign in a letter, "We
applaud
your article about the wonderful work of Jane Roberts and Lois
Abraham
["Finding '34 Million Friends,'" News, Feb. 17] to
replace the $34
million that President George W. Bush cut from United Nations
family
planning programs. But you should have pointed out two things.
First,
how absurd it is that private citizens have to raise money to
cover the
cost of something they already paid taxes for; and, second, how
daunting
their task is. If they continue to raise $2,000 a day as mentioned
in
the article, it will take more than 46 years to raise the money
that
Bush cut. The truth is that only Congress can undo this terrible
policy
by restoring the funding." Read: Newsday
The big problem with liberals in international affairs is that
ever
since Woodrow Wilson, they've been too idealistic, stated Nicholas
Kristof in his February 18 column in The New York Times. Liberals
hamstrung the C.I.A. (thus impairing intelligence collection),
scorned
the military (undermining a humanitarian force in places like
Bosnia and
Afghanistan), campaigned against sweatshops in Bangladesh and
Cambodia
(forcing teenage girls out of manufacturing jobs and into the
sex
industry), and imposed economic sanctions on Myanmar (destroying
the
middle class and propping up military dictators). Now, alas,
President
Bush is also trying to be a foreign policy idealist-from the
right-and
is showing the same cavalier obtuseness to practical consequences.
Kristof cited the example that Mr. Bush is outraged at the way
the
Chinese government sometimes forces peasants to have abortions.
Fair
enough. But his solution was to cut off all $34 million in U.S.
funding
for the United Nations Population Fund, leading to the cancellation
of
programs in Africa to train midwives, fight AIDS and help pregnant
women. The upshot is that women and babies are dying in Africa
because
of Mr. Bush's idealism. Kristof concluded, "Let's hope President
Bush
learns from liberal mistakes and worries less about ideals and
more
about practical results. The world may not be able to afford
much more
of his idealism." Read: The New York Times
A February 18 opinion piece by Stephen Jendraszak that ran in
The Daily
News of Ball State University in Indiana mentioned, "Last
July, Bush
made the situation even worse for Afghanistan by blocking $34
million in
Congress-approved funding for the United Nations Population Fund.
The
UNFPA does not offer abortions, but it does provide healthcare
for women
who cannot access hospitals. It gives emergency birthing kits
to Afghan
women, trying to lower one of the highest childbirth mortality
rates in
the world.
A conservative group, Zenit News Agency (Italy), noted February
14 that
the issue of missing girls is well known-in recent months both
the
Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune published lengthy articles
on
the matter. Readers of the latest "State of the World Population" report
by UNFPA, however, will search in vain for an analysis of the
issue. The
2002 report, published in December, centers on how family planning
can
help developing countries and women. An entire chapter is devoted
to
"
Women and Gender Inequality," but no mention is made of
how family
planning has led to the deaths of millions of girls in the most
populous
nations. Read: Zenit News Agency
UNFPA will fund $504,000 for the Vietnamese central city of Da
Nang to
carry out an $800,000 reproductive healthcare project, according
to an
agreement signed by the two sides on February 17, reported Vietnam
News
Brief Service on February 18. The remaining capital will come
from the
local government. The project to be carried out to 2005 will
focus on
women, juveniles and low-income earners. UNFPA has disbursed
more than
$110 million to Vietnam's health sector since 1978. Voice of
Vietnam
also
reported on
this story on February 20.
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