Fight poverty, not population, Vatican envoy urges UN
April 13, 2011
The Vatican’s permanent observer at the UN has told a session on population and development that the “increasingly discredited concept of population control must be discarded.”
Rather than assuming that poor people themselves are a problem, Archbishop Francis Chullikatt told the UN, government leaders should focus on “providing the promised development assistance to the approximately 920 million people living on less than $1.25 a day.”
The archbishop attacked the “distorted world-view” that suggests poverty is caused by the growth of population, rather than by the shortage of resources. He pointed out that in many countries today, the shortage of population is causing serious economic programs. In countries where population growth has fallen below replacement level, he observed, it is difficult to “sustain economic development and provide the resources necessary to support those aging populations.”
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