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.
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