THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Monday, August 8, 1994                 TAG: 9408060017
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A06  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                             LENGTH: Short :   47 lines

U.N. POPULATION CONFERENCE PEOPLE

Next month, the United Nations is sponsoring in Cairo a conference on ways of limiting world population growth. The Clinton administration is expected to announce that it will resume U.S. support for population-control measures that include abortion, reversing a position taken by the Reagan administration.

But is alarm over world population trends really warranted? The figures suggest that much of the conventional wisdom about an exploding world population is either misleading or simply not true.

Almost everywhere, in both the developed and the undeveloped world, women are actually having fewer children, not more, than they used to. Worldwide, the average woman now has 3.2 children, down from 5.0 in the 1950s. The overall population keeps climbing not because of rising birth rates, but because infant mortality has been plummeting. Thanks to improved health care and better nutrition, millions of children who would have died in earlier years are now growing up and having children of their own.

Nor does a lack of birth control necessarily explain high birth rates in places where women have large families. In the world's backward areas where infant mortality is still high and a family's survival is dependent on the crops it can coax from the soil, large families are an economic necessity. Government promises of security in old age are a poor substitute for children.

Nor is the developed world being flooded by refugees from overpopulated homelands, as some have warned. Sub-Saharan Africa countries, which have the highest birth rates, are negligible contributors to world immigration patterns. Western Europe is far more concerned with immigration from the former Eastern Bloc.

People are a resource, not a problem. They become a burden only when governments pursuing socialist economic policies refuse to allow their people to pursue their own interests and create the wealth necessary to support themselves. The Clinton administration would be better advised to export free enterprise to the Third World rather than condoms and birth-control pills.

KEYWORDS: POPULATION GROWTH POPULATION CONTROL

by CNB