Population report is agenda-driven. (United Nations).

New York--Joseph Chamie, director of the Population Division of the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, told the Washington Times that a recent report of the U.N. Population Fund (UNPFA) presented the most un-favourable scenarios in order to make a point. "The relationship between population and the environment is very complex," said Chamie. "UNPFA is a fund; they have an agenda. The Population Division does not put out a report that has any advocacy role."

UNPFA argued that the world must slow population growth to save the environment. The Population Division came to the opposite conclusion: "Even for those environmental problems that are concentrated in countries with rapid population growth, it is not necessarily the case that population increase is the main root cause, nor that slowing the population growth would make an important contribution to resolving the problem."

UNPFA claims that population growth has led to poverty and lack of food. The Population Division points out that while the world population increased four times in the twentieth century--from 1.6 billion persons to 6.1 billion--world real gross domestic output increased twenty to forty times, so that the world could not only sustain a fourfold population increase but raise standards of living substantially. Between 1961 and 1998, food available for human consumption increased by 24 per cent, and there is enough being produced for everyone on this planet to be adequately nourished.

So the Population Division flatly contradicts UNPFA's gloomy forecast of a world facing starvation. Even low-income countries, it points out, have achieved substantial improvements in quality of life and length of life.