A global effort to fight poverty with better population management that UN officials once hoped could "change the world" has made limited progress after one decade, a new UN study said yesterday.
UN member nations agreed at a landmark 1994 Cairo meeting on a wide-ranging plan that said birth control and other measures were essential in the battle to improve the plight of the poor and hungry, especially in developing countries.
But 10 years on, the effort to reach an ambitious series of UN targets aimed at bettering the fate of people and nations worldwide by 2015 has been held back by a host of problems including a lack of funds, the study said.
"The response of the international community has been inadequate," the study by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) concluded.
"Past commitments to development assistance must move from declarations of good intentions to active partnerships and investments," it said.
The Cairo accord said giving women the right to choose when to have babies -- birth control, in effect -- was essential to meeting a range of goals like ending extreme poverty and hunger, and fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Many developing countries have made strides in putting that plan into action but a shortage of money and "persistent gaps" in reaching the world's poorest people are hampering progress towards those goals, UNFPA said.
"Differences between poor and rich populations' access to family planning are staggering," it said.
"Women in the richest fifth of the population are five times more likely to have access to and use contraception than women in the poorest fifth," the study said.
It also outlined a number of other shortcomings, saying in particular that population growth was "increasing stress" on the environment amid global warming and water shortages.
"More than 350 million couples still lack access to a full range of family planning services ... [and] one third of all pregnant women receive no health care during pregnancy," it said.
"Some eight million women each year suffer life-threatening pregnancy related complications. Over 529,000 die as a consequence, 99 percent of them in developing countries," the study said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS