Pakistan embarks on new campaign to reduce fertility.

There was both international and domestic significance in a plea for population stabilization issued by Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in his address at the recent Earth Summit conference in Rio de Janeiro. Speaking as both a national leader and chairman of the Group of 77, a coalition of developing countries, Sharif said that to eradicate the abject poverty under which more than a billion people in the world live today "developing countries must assume their full responsibility in limiting population growth to manageable levels." Those words may seem odd coming from the leader of a country that has been indifferent about population problems for the past 2 decades. Until Prime Minister Sharif made a public commitment to a population program last July, the last leader of Pakistan to take such action was the late President Ayub Khan in 1969. With an annual 3.1% growth rate, Pakistan's population of 122 million is projected to double in only 23 years. The average Pakistani woman has 6.1 children in her reproductive lifetime. Reduction of population growth was an issue in the October 1990 election campaign. After his Islamic Democratic Alliance won, the government named Syeda Abida Hussain, a prominent and popular politician, to the cabinet post of Minister of Family Welfare. Hussain, who is now Pakistan's Ambassador to the US, recalls that many experts felt that starting a population program would be "an impossible undertaking, "that" attitudes were not conducive to family planning and government would never support it." In a speech on World Population Day in Rio, organized by the Population Institute, she said she soon found that "the problems were managerial, not attitudinal." She maintained that the relatively low acceptance of contraception among the people of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India is not because of religion or ideology "but because they are too poor to have access to birth control." Shortly after Hussain was names Minister of Family Welfare, she travelled throughout Pakistan to promote a small family norm. Under the new government program, family planning services would be provided along with maternal and child health services. Meanwhile, in an address before a national population conference, Prime Minister Sharif made a strong emotional appeal for a slowdown in population growth. He directed all government ministries and departments to provide all possible support. A recent study in Pakistan showed that the lack of service delivery outlets, rather than lack of awareness of family planning, was the reason behind the weak response to earlier programs. The study further indicated that 60% of married women either do not want more children or want to delay their next birth, but only 20% have access to family planning services. 90% said their desired family size was 4 children, yet they were having 7. The shortage of family planning services is especially acute in rural areas. While 54% of the country's 35 million urban residents have access to services, only 5% of rural people do. In the past, population programs in Pakistan have been handicapped by bureaucratic red tape, inefficiency and corruption. But with the Prime Minister solidly supporting lower population growth as a key to the success of his economic initiatives, top managers of the program are optimistic that this time it will work. "Bringing down the population growth rate in Pakistan is not the world's responsibility, "says Ambassador Syeda Abida Hussain. "It is Pakistan's."