Large-scale commemorations were held in Beijing on Thursday to mark
the 13th World Population Day.
Activities organized by the State Family Planning
Commission at Zhongshan Park near Tian'anmen Square, included a
conference highlighting "Poverty, Population and Development," a
photographic exhibition showing poor mothers benefiting from
China's poverty-alleviation programs, and advice on women's
reproductive health, contraception, mental health and bearing and
rearing healthier children.
Siri Tellier, representative of the United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA), said at the conference that China, the most populous
developing country, had done a great job in improving women's
reproductive health and eliminating poverty.
As
the world's destitute continue to increase and the economic and
technical gaps between the most and least developed countries keeps
widening, the UNFPA is urging the world to pay more attention to
men and women trapped in extreme poverty who lack real choices,
opportunities and basic services to improve their lot.
A
recent survey released by the World Bank predicts that the world's
destitute may top 1.5 billion by the year's end and nearly75
percent of them live in remote rural areas.
With such side-effects of poverty as unemployment, malnutrition,
illiteracy, discrimination against women and environmental
degradation rampant worldwide, "we must step up family planning
efforts, and the war on poverty will not be won unless we direct
more resources to women and reproductive health," Thoraya Ahmed
Obald, executive director of the UNFPA said in her message for 2002
World Population Day.
According to Pan Guiyu, deputy head of the State Family Planning
Commission, China has stuck to a family-planning policy with
poverty alleviation as its final goal since the International
Population and Development Conference in Cairo in 1994.
The Chinese government not only increased its financial support to
family planning in poverty-stricken central and western areas, but
also mapped out a series of preferential policies to benefit
destitute households adopting the family planning policy.
So
far, China's destitute population has dropped from 250 million in
1979 to 30 million at present. In rural areas, the proportion of
destitute people has also declined from 30.7 percent to 3 percent
during the same period.
World Population Day was first inaugurated by the United Nations in
1990 to mark the date of July 11, 1987 when the world's population
hit 5 billion.
Since 1996, every World Population Day has had a special theme
defined by the UNFPA.
(Xinhua News
Agency July 11, 2002)