Call for reining in population growth

Speakers say sustainable development will remain elusive sans focus on education, healthcare and family planning

ISLAMABAD:

Speakers have called for reining in the population explosion for sustainable development.

They were speaking at a meeting held on economic and human development successes of Asian countries and the role of enhanced funding to improve family planning and population programmes in the country.

Population Council Project Director Samia Ali Shah said that Pakistan can achieve economic and social development with a sustained decline in population growth. “Our development prospects will remain elusive till we focus simultaneously on education; healthcare, including family planning; and female workforce participation. Smaller families provide greater opportunities to save more, contribute to national savings, and improve health and other development indicators for women and children. Media’s role is central in bringing government’s focus on these issues of national importance.”

The Population Council shared evidence-based data on how fertility reduction helps economic growth by reducing the size of the economically less productive dependent population of young persons below 15 years of age, freeing up government resources that would have been required to meet continually expanding educational and health infrastructure needs.

Population Council Senior Director Programmes Dr Ali Mir stressed the need for maintaining a balance between the population size and natural resources as Pakistan was already one of the top three most water-stressed countries in the world and its agricultural land has depleted rapidly making it a food import country.

Speaking on Pakistan’s population financing landscape, former economist at the World Bank Dr Hanid Mukhtar said that Pakistan has one of the lowest (0.26%) ratios of population expenditure to GDP among other regional countries such as Bangladesh. In the past few years, he said, Bangladesh’s GDP grew to 6.5% and its population grew by 1.3% as compared to Pakistan’s high population growth of 2.5% whereas GDP grew only to 3.5%.

“Pakistan’s trend in public expenditure of population services has a low and rapidly declining budgetary priority and even though financing for population services has increased at a moderate rate of about 6 per cent per annum in the last four years, almost two-thirds of this budget goes for payment of wages and salaries and less on procurement of contraceptives, facilities and trained staff. As a result, more and more people are forced to pay out-of-pocket for health and family planning services, face critical gaps in services and delay uptake of family planning services.”

He further said 85 per cent of productive farms in Pakistan were less than five acres of land as compared to the global minimum of 7.5 acres required to produce enough produce for a family to survive. Rapid and unchecked population growth has eaten away Pakistan’s national resources.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, June 25^th, 2022.