High time for some population intelligence.

Last September, Jane Fonda addressed the United Nations, now preparing for the Conference on Population and development in Cairo, Egypt this September. She and her husband, Ted Turner, are Special Goodwill Ambassadors to the United Nations Population Fund. The following is excerpted from her speech.

Population. I have not spoken about this before. I have been an environmentalist for 20 years, but I never talked about population. I am not alone. The controversy around contraception and abortion made it politically easier to speak and organize around air pollution, deforestation, toxic waste and biodiversity while ignoring the role our own burgeoning species plays in all this: politically correct with blinders on. As Dennis Meadows writes in Limits To Growth, "You can always blame any particular problem on something that is not over population. Nobody ever dies from over population. They die of famine, disease, war."

Scientists agree that the precise relationship between population and environmental destruction is not fully understood. We do know, however, that:

* Every year farmers around the world are trying to feed 90 million more people with 24 billion fewer tons of topsoil.

* Desertification from over-grazing and inefficient farming methods is taking 15 million acres out of use each year.

* Increasing demand for fresh water has diminished our water supplies by trillions of gallons above and below ground. In several regions of northern China, water tables are falling by 12 to 15 feet a year. Parts of Mexico City are sinking as underground aquifers are pumped dry.

* Approximately one billion people do not get enough food to function.

* Our species alone co-opts, consumes or eliminates 40 percent of the Earth's basic photosynthetic energy and appropriates two-thirds of the planet's land surface.

There have been populations in the past which collapsed once critical, natural thresholds were exceeded: the unique Planishing civilization on Easter Island in the South Pacific; the pre-Columbian American civilizations of the Mayans, the Mimbres, and the Anasazis. They had the excuse of not knowing. We know. In early 1992, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London issued an unusual joint report warning that "if current predictions of population growth prove accurate, and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continuing poverty for the most of the world."

But I'm also a woman, and I share the concern that a crisis mentality, which is justified and necessary, might cause us to resort to coercive, insensitive fertility control measures. All of us are in this together, and women must not be blamed because we bear the children. Our health and our bodies must not become the sacrificial altars on which demographic targets are callously arrived at. If we have learned one lesson over the last 30-some years, it is that the way that work best to reduce fertility are ways that are respectful of women.

We must ensure universal access to family planning by the end of this decade. It is unconscionable in a world with so many going hungry that we aren't doing more to prevent unwanted children from being born. Children have the right to be wanted. But cost has stood in the way. Even in the U.S. about 42 percent of the women who want contraception require some assistance to pay for it. We also need new contraceptive choices, such as a safe, effective microbicide which would kill sperm as well as the viruses, bacteria and parasites which play havoc with women's reproductive health.

In virtually every country that has been studied, raising the level of women's education leads to declining birth rates. According to Sharon Camp, formerly with Population Action International, the impact of women's education really becomes strong and consisted at about seven or eight years of formal education. An educated woman will tend to marry an average of four years later, use contraception more effectively, have more self-esteem and empowerment, and want more for her children. The Work Bank estimates the cost of closing the gender gap in primary and secondary school education would be about #3.2 billion. They also say, "No other investment would provide higher returns in social and economic development."

The U.S., I'm ashamed to say, has the highest rate of teen pregnancies of any country in the industrialized world - and the rate is rising. In addition to education and reproductive health services, we must work to repeal the rash of state laws which mandate parental consent or notification for teenagers seeking abortion. Fortunately, our new Surgeon-General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, appears ready to guide us quickly in these directions. We must make sure that Congress supports her efforts.

Now let me mention two family planning success stories. The Bangladesh Women's Health Coalition, founded in 1980, operates seven clinics in impoverished rural and urban areas of Bangladesh. By moving away from coercive sterilization and incentive payments, expanding contraceptive choices and improving individual counseling, contraceptive use in the areas served by the Health Coalition has risen as high as 60 percent. One of their clients said, "I'd heard about family planning before, but not this way. This is the only clinic where I was asked to sit down and was treated as an equal. If I knew about it this way, do you think I'd have six children?"

The Health Coalition offers adult literacy classes, savings plans, and loans for income-generating projects. It holds lectures once a week on topics such as nutrition, family planning and legal rights. Remarkably, the Coalition spends considerably less per capita than comparable family planning clinics, many of which are under-utilized. The secret: Quality services attract a large clientele, so fixed costs are spread over large numbers. By providing a mix of serves, clients visit for more than one purpose, lowering the cost of each service. All this, mind you, in a conservative Moslem country where women have little formal education. We can see in this example that there are ways to address poverty, population and the status of women simultaneously. We don't need to be at odds.

Twenty-five years ago, Colombia's birth rate was among the highest in the world, averaging 6.6 children per family. Today the average is 2.9: cut in half. One of the major catalysts there is an organization called ProFamilia, which has 48 rural and urban clinics, eight of which, interestingly, only serve men, and include vasectomy services. The clinics offer a range of clinical, surgical and community services as well as training, public education and research. They were the first in Latin America to use radio to promote family planning, the first to offer voluntary sterilization services to women as well as men, and the first to do social marketing programs for contraceptives. And they are able to offer these services for an annual fee of about $5 a couple.

The cost of providing worldwide universal access to family planning by the end of this decade will be $11 billion a year. It's affordable. It's just a question of priority. Currently, the U.S. spend $429 million annually on population. This will have to increase to $1.5 billion by the year 2000 if we are to continue our historic role of contributing 30 percent of the population budget. $1.5 billion? In a recession? How do we get it? From the intelligence community. At the height of the Cold War, the CIA's budget was $15 billion. Now, having utterly failed at predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, they've been rewarded by an increase to $30 billion. We need about three percent of that to address the real threats to our national security: Waves of environmental refugees crossing our borders in hopes of food and a job, and a shrinking supply of food and water worldwide.

So far the Clinton Administration has refused to make significant cuts in the intelligence budget. We must change that. Surveys show that 85 to 90 percent of Americans say they are concerned about world population problems. Americans must mobilize to let the Clinton Administration know we want funding for family planning, not bloated CIA budgets. The media must give the population crisis the time and attention it deserves. When thousands of the world's scientists all agree on the severity of the crisis, why do so many in the media still feel that equal time must be given to the very few conservation economists and revisionist environmentalists who disagree? They've had their day. Their view ruled for the past 12 years and it's been a catastrophe.

This is the defining decade. Whatever we do or don't do, the Earth will survive, life will survive. It is we who may not be around to participate. We're smarter than that - aren't we?