The United Nations Population Fund has projected
that the world will reach the milestone of 7 billion on October 31, 2011.
A new report entitled The State of the World Population 2011 reports
on trends in population and emphasizes that opportunities exist to continue
building on successes such as increasing average life expectancy and reducing
childhood diseases. “The reality is that the world’s population continues
to grow exponentially but the Earth has a finite carrying capacity. We
must continue to focus on poverty alleviation, education of women and girls,
access to primary health care and family planning, political
autonomy and economic power for women. These are the factors that
contribute to the lowering of fertility rates,” said Green Leader Elizabeth
May.
The Green Party of Canada
is the only party that has a population policy. Key elements include:
· Significantly increase Canadian overseas development assistance focused
on improving the education, and the social and economic power and status, of
women and girls.
· Integrate goals for reduced fertility into the overall efforts to
eliminate poverty.
· Ensure that maternal health programmes funded by Canada do not limit
access to any form of family planning and primary health care, including access
to safe, legal abortions.
· Address the problem of global overpopulation through a foreign policy
committed to environmentally sustainable local economies, improving education
and health care, and fostering political and economic rights of women as equal
participants in society.
· Integrate goals for improved health care and spreading knowledge of
birth control methods and efforts that increase the availability of birth
control equipment and supplies into the overall efforts to eliminate poverty.
· Provide development aid to assist countries in building up their
capacity to support improved public services and provide greater income
security for support in old age so that security is not dependent on the number
of one’s children.
· Recognize that the high level of per capita resource consumption in
developed countries makes the impact of their populations much more serious.
The Green Party realizes that failure to stabilize and reduce human
population within a reasonable time will result in the inevitable reduction of
human population by means of high death rates as the Earth’s human carrying
capacity is not only exceeded but reduced by the consumption of resources and
the destruction of biological capital, resulting in poverty, starvation, disease,
great human suffering and possibly social disruption.
Ms. May has recently joined the Canadian Association for
Parliamentarians on Population and Development (CAPPD) and will continue to
advocate for these policy changes.
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Media Contact:
Rebecca Harrison
rebecca.harrison@greenparty.ca
613-614-4916