Inter Press Service - September 15, 2004
Marcela Valente

However, poverty reduction in the region remains an elusive goal, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) liaison officer María del Carmen Feijoó told IPS at the presentation of the State of World Population 2004 report in Buenos Aires Wednesday.

"There have been advances in recognition of gender rights and in the implementation of policies for access to reproductive rights, as well as progress in creating public institutions to address problems faced by women. In that sense there has undoubtedly been improvement," said Feijoó, an Argentine sociologist.

But she lamented that within that largely positive context, "uneven progress" has been made in fighting poverty.

"In terms of poverty reduction, I would say that we are very far from any improvement overall," said the official.

This year's annual UNFPA study not only reported on advances and challenges around the world over the past year, but also monitored compliance with the action plan adopted by 179 countries at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.

The programme for action, known as the Cairo Consensus, marked a watershed in the international community's approach to human development. Up to that point, the emphasis was on demographic targets, while the new focus is more heavily based on human rights.

Since that conference, access to sexual and reproductive health services has been considered a basic right of couples and individuals, who should be allowed to freely decide the number of children they wish to have and to space their births, and who should have access to information and the means to fulfil their family planning goals.

In 2000, world leaders meeting in New York set global targets known as the Millenium Development Goals, one of which is to halve the proportion of people living in poverty in the world by 2015, from 1990 levels.

Within the context of the new approach, the developing world has incorporated policies aimed at empowering women and ensuring access to reproductive health services, says the UNFPA report.

Of the developing countries covered by the report, 99 percent have adopted policies, laws or constitutional amendments aimed at protecting the rights of children and women in the past 10 years, and 96 percent reported that they had incorporated population issues in their development strategies.

This year's report, 'The Cairo Consensus at Ten: Population, Reproductive Health and the Global Effort to End Poverty', states that the proportion of couples in developing countries using modern birth control methods has risen from 55 to 61 percent since 1994.

However, the study also underlines the lack of access to family planning services for 350 million couples worldwide; the deaths of 529,000 women a year due to avoidable causes; the rise in the number of people living with HIV, the AIDS virus; and the persistence of poverty, with 2.8 billion people in the world still scraping by on two dollars a day or less.

The tendency in Latin America and the Caribbean is similar to that seen in the rest of the developing world: progress in guaranteeing access to reproductive health services, but little headway in combating poverty at the rate required to meet the target set by the Millenium Goals.

But Feijoó noted that averages tend to cover up major differences, both within countries -- between provinces, states or districts -- and between countries in the region, where uneven progress has been made.

Cuba presented some of the best results in the region, "better than those of the United States," said Feijoó, who also underscored the strong performance of Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay.

A key factor in social development, above and beyond a country's level of economic development, is political will on the part of governments, said Feijoó.

At the other extreme, presenting the least progress in terms of the proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel, reduction of infant mortality and teen pregnancy, and AIDS-related deaths, are Haiti and the Central American nations of Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

A glance at infant mortality rates serves to illustrate the major differences within the region. While 32 of every 1,000 children die before the age of one in Latin America overall, the proportion is seven in 1,000 in Cuba, 10 in Costa Rica, 12 in Chile, 56 in Bolivia and 63 in Haiti.

The top results are close to those reported by rich countries like Switzerland, France, Canada and the United States, while the worst are similar to the indicators found in impoverished African nations like Sudan, Kenya or Cameroon.

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+ State of World Population 2004 (http://www.unfpa.org/swp/swpmain.htm)

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