Nations Willing to Spend More to Cut Population

As debate drew to a close Thursday over the divisive issue of abortion, the world’s donor nations signaled that they are ready to consider tripling their spending on population programs to pay for an ambitious new strategy of family planning, reproductive health and women’s programs.

A drafting committee at the International Conference for Population and Development took up the financing issue Thursday morning, and committee chairman Nicolaas Biegman said donor nations have indicated their readiness to pay about a third of the $17 billion a year envisioned for new population programs.

The $2.1 billion a year now allocated by foreign donors finances only about a fourth of the costs for family planning programs, which will rise to unprecedented dimensions under the new, 20-year global population plan being reviewed this week in Cairo.

The plan calls not only for expanding traditional contraceptive programs but instituting a wide variety of related programs aimed at reducing birthrates by improving the health and social and educational status of women. They include everything from maternal health care to early education programs for girls, AIDS prevention and vocational training for poor women in the developing world.

The United States recently raised its annual family planning allocation from $425 million to $585 million, “and there is the likelihood it will go up again,” said J. Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“We’ll be doing a lot more of what we’ve been doing, a lot more intensively, with very specific indicators in mind,” said Atwood, whose agency is the single largest funder of family planning programs in the world, with total expenditures of $5.8 billion since 1965.

“We need to increase in real terms what we’re providing, and we need to encourage others to do more,” Atwood said.

Along with the annual increase to $585 million, President Clinton before this week’s conference said U.S. spending on family planning programs would increase to nearly $2 billion by 2000.

Throughout the week, U.S., European and World Bank officials have been noncommittal but upbeat about prospects for funding the global plan, whose costs will escalate to $21.7 billion a year by 2015.

“Strangely enough, I don’t think resources are an issue,” said World Bank President Lewis T. Preston. “The reality is that a lot of what we’re talking about is not really very high cost. . . . Reallocation, I think, will take care of the resource question.”

*

World Bank estimates say a new preventive health care package, including maternal and child care, can be provided at an annual cost of only about $8 per person in the poorest countries. Raising girls’ primary school enrollment rates to equal boys’ would cost slightly less than $1 billion--about 2% of annual education spending in the developing world.

Japan recently announced it will increase its family planning spending tenfold, from $40 million a year to $400 million. Germany said this week it will spend $2 billion over the next seven years; several other countries have also announced funding boosts during conference discussions this week.

In a study of future financing needs, the independent, nonprofit Population Action International Organization estimated that the United States would have to increase its family planning allocation to $1.85 billion over the next six years, and $2.35 billion a year by 2015, to meet its share of the need. That analysis is based on a formula in which developing and industrialized nations share the costs based on their average wealth.

The United States has resisted any formula for cost sharing that would commit it to future appropriations. “We strongly prefer not to use quantitative or percentage targets, but operate in the spirit of best effort,” said a member of the U.S. delegation to the conference.

U.S. officials concede that funding major new aid programs will be difficult, and say new money for population programs will probably have to be reallocations from other programs.

“We are going through a period, if not of donor fatigue, (then) of post-Cold War reassessment, including the area of foreign aid,” said the U.S. delegate.

Ten countries--the United States, Germany, Japan, Norway, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, Finland and Denmark--now account for 90% of all donor contributions to family planning programs worldwide.

Conference delegates predicted they would move quickly through the remaining resource allocation issues to be discussed, and a final resolution of the abortion debate was expected this morning.

Seeking to break a logjam that developed when several Latin American nations joined the Vatican in opposing wording on abortion in the program of action, conferees circulated a new amendment substantially similar to an earlier compromise. It removes all references to “legal” abortion.

In response to complaints about terming some abortions “unsafe,” since some regard all abortions as unsafe, a World Health Organization definition of unsafe abortion is appended.

The drafting committee broke for an overnight recess and was scheduled to make a final decision today. But Biegman made it clear that he was not prepared to continue the argument for long.

“It is exceedingly improbable that in the end the Vatican will take part in the final consensus on the document, which does not detract very much from the document. I’ve never heard anyone say on the part of past U.N. documents, ‘But the Vatican doesn’t agree.’ The trend rolls along,” said Biegman, who is part of the Dutch delegation.

“We have to try as long as we can to accommodate them. And then the moment comes, it may be at a very late stage, that we say, ‘This is the text.’ ”