The Still Unfinished Business From the 1994 ICPD

One of the most contentious issues at the most recent--1994--UN-sponsored World Population Conference, which is known as the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), was the rights of women in general, and more specifically with respect to reproduction. This week a follow-up conference was held in Istanbul, Turkey:

Lawmakers from 110 countries reaffirmed today their support to the principles and goals of the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), emphasizing their continued centrality to efforts to reduce poverty and safeguard people’s health and rights, including sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.

At the fifth global parliamentarians’ conference on population and development, held here on 24-25 May, some 400 delegates, including more than 200 parliamentarians, discussed a course of action over the coming years to implement the ICPD Programme of Action by 2014 and beyond. They also considered ways to influence any new development framework to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015

“ICPD is about human beings, respect, rights, and what we can do to ensure that every individual can make his or her own decisions,” said Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. “Only then would the world be in a better place.” 

With only two years until the Cairo agenda is expected to be complete, delegates committed themselves to its unfinished plan by unanimously adopting the Istanbul Declaration of Commitment. In it, and under the theme, Keeping Promises — Measuring Results, they determined to advocate for increased national and external funding for the entire implementation of the ICPD agenda in order to achieve access to sexual and reproductive health, including family planning.

The Istanbul conference, which concluded with an address by Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was organized by the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (EPF) and UNFPA, under the auspices of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly. It followed four similar global conferences, in Bangkok in 2006, Strasbourg in 2004, Ottawa in 2002 and Addis Ababa in 2009.

So, keeping in mind that the conference was in Istanbul and was addressed by the Turkish Prime Minister, you might be surprised then to learn that the very same Turkish Prime Minister made headlines in the New York Times this week by suggesting that abortion was murder and should be abolished.

Since 1983, abortion has been legal inTurkey for up to 10 weeks after conception, with emergency abortions allowed for medical reasons after that. Mr. Erdogan proposed outlawing all abortions that are not medically necessary, and limiting medically necessary abortions to the first eight weeks after conception, according to NTV, a private television news network.

Mr. Erdogan, who wants every married couple to have at least three children, dismissed criticism of his position, saying Friday that abortion “has no place in our values” and on Saturday that “our only goal is to elevate this country above the levels of developed civilizations, for which we need a young and dynamic population.”

This would seem to put a radically different spin on the "Istanbul Declaration of Commitment" than most of the delegates at the conference would likely agree with.

The Greek Brain Drain

One of the not-so-surprising side-effects of the budget crisis in Greece has been that younger Greeks are bailing out, creating a brain drain. We expect that those with the most salable skills are likely to be the ones to go elsewhere when the economy collapses. But what is especially surprising, according to a story today on MSNBC, is where they are heading.

Germany, Europe's economic powerhouse and a country which has been criticized by many Greeks over its harsh demands for austerity cuts in return for bailout cash, has experienced an influx of young skilled immigrants.
Der Spiegel magazine noted that while Greek newspapers "printed cartoons depicting the Germans as Nazis, concentration camp guards and eurozone imperialists who allow their debtors to bleed to death," the Greeks have kept arriving – bringing an "anything is better than Athens" attitude with them.
With more than 50 percent of young Greeks out of work, it's not surprising that official statistics show the number of Greeks who moved to Germany increased 90 percent during 2011.
Unemployment rates have consistently been shrinking in Germany in recent years and the economy is thriving despite Europe's ongoing financial crisis. Relaxed cross-border employment regulations for member states of the European Union also make Germany an attractive choice for job seekers. And while Germany is in need of specialized workers, the Greek labor market has little to offer.

This turn of events is generally good for those Greeks who can find work in Germany, although in the long term the demographic shift will clearly benefit German society at the continued expense of Greece. These younger Greeks will help to pay the pensions for aging Germans, but they will be contributing little if anything to the Greek economy. Of course, to the extent that Germany's economy is bailing out Greece, the transfer of labor power from Greece (where they wouldn't be working) to Germany (where they are more likely to be working) is probably an economically good situation.

Can the Urban Health Advantage be Maintained?

For most of human history, cities had higher death rates than rural places because crowding people together in an unsanitary environment increased the spread of disease. The public health revolution that began in the 19th century changed all that, and for the last 100 or more years, urban places have held the health advantage over rural populations. But can that hold up as more and more people crowd into cities in developing countries? That question drives much of my own current NIH-funded research and it is the topic of a Scientific American online article:

“While cities have the potential to be healthier places for their citizens, this requires active planning,”Yvonne Rydin, of the University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, said in a prepared statement. The authors conclude that urbanization alone will not automatically help everyone lead healthier, happier lives. Already about 1 billion , and that number could double in the next 18 years. The tide of urbanization is not going to raise all proverbial ships. “Economic growth cannot be assumed to lift all urban citizens into a zone of better health,” Rydin said. “In many urban areas, rich people and poor people live in different epidemiological worlds, and the burden of ill-health is highest in the poorest groups. The double burden of communicable and non-communicable disease is borne predominantly by poor people.” To improve the health of all urban dwellers present and future concerted planning will be necessary, but global payoffs will be great.

The article unfortunately speaks to simple things like walkable neighborhoods and urban gardens. Those are the luxuries of the rich. In cities of poor countries, the health issues revolve around basic infrastructure such as clean water, sewerage, adequate housing, access to health care facilities, along with basic education about health issues, and the ability of people living on very little money to have an adequate diet that increases their chances of resisting both communicable and non-communicable disease.

Will the Arab Spring be Wasted on the Young?

Richard Cincotta is one of the foremost authorities on age structures and democracy, and the NewScientist has a story about the paper that he presented at the recent annual meeting of the Population Association of America:

A YEAR after ousting Hosni Mubarak, Egypt appears poised this week to elect his former minister of foreign affairs, Amr Moussa, as its next president. Many commentators say his presidency will differ little from Mubarak's, disappointing those who hoped to see a liberal democracy emerge from the youthful uprisings last year.

Meanwhile, Yemen elected their ousted leader's vice-president on a single-candidate ballot, violence surrounds Libya's elections and Syrian protests get bloodier by the day. Was the Arab Spring all for naught?

The recent turn of events does not surprise demographer Richard Cincotta of the Stimson Center in Washington DC. The fact that the populations of these countries are all very young, he argues, predicted not only that revolutions would occur, but also that it may be some time before they make a successful transition to liberal democracies.

Cincotta studied revolutions between 1972 and 1989, focusing on the age structure of countries. He found that oppressive autocracies with a median population age between 25 and 35 had the best chances of becoming democracies.

All of the countries that made the transition when their median age was greater than 30 are still democracies today. Nine out of 10 countries with a median age less than 25 slid back into oppressive regimes following revolution. Any older than 35 and revolutions did not occur in the first place. The only other indicator that came close to predicting transition success with the same level of accuracy was wealth per capita.

If the pattern holds, Tunisia - with a median age of 30 - is the Arab Spring country most likely to hold a democracy permanently. Egypt and Libya have median ages of 25 and 26, respectively, giving them a fighting chance of moving to democracy in the next few years, according to Cincotta. But Syria and Yemen - at 21 and 17, respectively - will be lucky to end up with even partial democracies, he says.

You can read more about Cincotta's work, along with other analyses of the youth bulge, in the recently published book that Debbie Fugate and I co-edited on "The Youth Bulge: Challenge or Opportunity."

We Are All African

A few days ago, I linked to the special issue of Nature on peopling the planet, which is based on the premise that human society began in Africa and migrated out from there over the span of tens of thousands of years. That idea draws from evolutionary theory which, unfortunately, not everyone buys into. Why unfortunate? Richard Leakey answered that question today, in a story from the Associated Press:

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."
"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

Thus, the point is that without this understanding of how the real really works, it will be impossible to solve the problems that we have created for ourselves by unprecedented population growth and economic development.

Now 67, Leakey is the son of the late Louis and Mary Leakey and conducts research with his wife, Meave, and daughter, Louise. The family claims to have unearthed "much of the existing fossil evidence for human evolution."
On the eve of his return to Africa earlier this week, Leakey spoke to The Associated Press in New York City about the past and the future.
"If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you've got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena," Leakey says. "Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one."
Any hope for mankind's future, he insists, rests on accepting existing scientific evidence of its past.
"If we're spreading out across the world from centers like Europe and America that evolution is nonsense and science is nonsense, how do you combat new pathogens, how do you combat new strains of disease that are evolving in the environment?" he asked.