Good Morning, Bonjour! It's a wonderful saying that is part of native Canadian, aboriginal Canadians about how we handle responsibility. One that I've always particularly loved is one that is usually taken and referred to the environment. It is this, "That the land is loaned to us by our grandchildren." In other words the planet, the resources, the land that we use is only in trust to us, not from our antecedents but for our grandchildren for it is what we do that will determine the world that they live in. If we take that and extend it beyond the environmental, beyond the physical resources we can very quickly see that the future of the planet is something which is loaned to us by the descendants yet to come. Particularly to those of us who are fortunate to live in countries where our grandparents believed in things like primary educational systems, health care systems we benefited individually and collectively. But we have to look at what we are doing about the preparation of this land, this planet for our future.
As our ability to see that futures grows so does our responsibility. When we could see less far we had less responsibility. Now we know what must be done as Jim Grant has just said to us, "If we understand the torment of children and we do nothing about it then we have become one of the tormentors". We do understand much about the torment of children and we know much about lifting that torment, immunization, the removal of scourges such as polio, measles, small pox, the introduction of universal primary education around the world, the elimination of tobacco, starting to work on the threat of violence. These are things which prepare the land, prepare the planet for the generations to come. They remove the torment and in a way they become a great success of the child health and survival revolution.
Population issues are very much a reflection of this revolution in child health and yet one of the questions when I was in UNICEF that was constantly being asked of us sometimes by people who were a little embarrassed about how to frame the question, was the following. "Is it really a good thing to change and to save children's lives when we've got so much problem with population? Is this really something we ought to be doing?" And it was such a good thing to be able to say that the child survival revolution and that saving children's lives was an absolutely integral part of the movement to try and make sure that families had the number of children that they want to have and that the global population began to diminish in its growth.
Why was this? Let's talk entirely about this and let me link these two needed revolutions, child survival and a change in the outlook for global population. To do this you need a little bit of a demographic lesson but rather short and very painless. We are nearing the year 2000. We talk now in terms of 2000. This conference is called 2000. So let's maybe go back 2000 years as a starting point and we find out that the population of the whole world was probably about 10 times what it is in Canada today, about 250 million people. The same population of the United States. One fifth of the population of China and that was the population of the whole world and because there was so much death and so much disease and life expectancy was so low, particularly among children. This is what Dr. Nakajima was telling us. The world's population grew very, very slowly indeed so that when we got to the year 1850 we had still only reached about the population of India today or nearing one billion people. What happened? We began to have a global health revolution and because of that population growth began and began to accelerate very quickly indeed so that in contrast to that 2000 year period to move up to having a billion people we now, because more people are staying alive, add a billion people this decade, a billion people next decade and maybe a billion people the next decade after but that's something we can do something about and it won't surprise you to discover that the tools are very much the same ones we are talking about in terms of the child health revolution.
One of the things the population council does is research on what the cause and impact this kind of population growth is going to be in our planet for of course we worry about it. We see a planet that already appears to be under stress in terms of food availability, in terms of environmental impact and in terms of communities already running very fast to try and provide primary education, better health services, immunization, a better life in terms of job employment for their people. We wonder to ourselves how can this old planet with the systems that we have now cope with this population growth, particularly since we think it is going to double by the time we reach global health 3000. In other words at the end of the next millennium or the end of the next century we are looking for a double. So it is only global health 2100 that we are talking about. We will be doubling the current population. One of the tasks we have is to analyze the causes of this and I'll tell you about them because they make eminent sense in terms of the child health revolution.
One of the causes of that population growth is that despite an extraordinary outreach about 120 to 140 million families around the world still don't have the services that they need to try and limit their families in the way that they would like to. In other words when you go and you ask families do you have the number of children that you would like. Would you like not to have any more children or to space or delay your next child? 140 million families answer yes, we would like to do that, but they are not now able to do so. So that becomes really the first item on the agenda doesn't it. Making sure that people really do have
the families they want because family sizes have already moved down from six children to four. Contraceptive use has moved us from about 10% to 50 or 60% and that's just as remarkable revolution as the revolution in immunization that is being talked about here. So obviously the first task is to give more urgent attention to making sure that people can indeed have the family size that they want to have and you use the same networks, the same outreach that we are talking about now. But that's 35% of the direction. What's the rest of the 65%?
Fifteen percent of this enormous doubling, this increase that is probably going to happen is because people feel they need large family sizes. Why do they feel that way? Because of what Richard Jolly was talking about, we still have a billion people trying to get by on a dollar or less a day. We have two billion people trying to get by if you double that amount to become a colossal two dollars a day. For those people who don't have social security who are facing the prospect of not very long lives and therefore widowhood in the case of women or lack of social security, having a large family makes more sense. For people who are living in areas of strong son preference they feel they need to go forward until they have at least one son and maybe two. For areas in which women have no access to resources through their children, don't have credit, don't have inheritance, it makes more sense for a large family size. The interlinking of the poverty that exists in the world still and the fact that living in that poverty is one of the preconditions for wanting larger family sizes is one of the things that we really have to occupy ourselves with. So that's 35% because we don't have services yet around the world although these are expanding and 15% because people still feel the need, particularly those in poverty, to have large families.
What's the final 40 to 50%? It's this. Because 50% of many populations are twenty-five years old, in the case of many African countries under fifteen years old, the shear momentum of the children that are alive with us today and the fact that they will want to have children and form families will carry us into an enormous population increase which is why we will add that same billion, that it took us a million years to achieve, in this decade and the decade to come. What can we do about that? Isn't that something that is immutable? We can cherish our children, not just at the age where we have been looking at where they need immunization, where they need breast feeding, where they need all of the factors that have gone into the child health revolution but a little bit beyond we can take that into cherishing adolescents so that they in turn do not become parents, so that girls are looked after, so that girls do not go off screened after they have been immunized and in particular get to school, become cherished and become cherished equally within families and within communities. If all of this sounds familiar it's because exactly the same ingredients that go into a child health and survival revolution are those that go into the decisions on the personal, the community, the village, the national level that families can afford to have fewer children. Sounds surprising doesn't it because most people talk about how can families afford to have more children, but in fact for very poor families the reality is that families can take the chance to have fewer children because they are confident that their children will survive and that's the linkage between lower infant mortality rates and the need to have less children on a per family basis because they will not need those children to become workers at an early age and can in fact get rid of the scourge of child labor at the same time that we start to solve some of our worries about ongoing population.
Thirty- five percent because there are still 140 million women and families around the world that need services extended to them. Family planning is important. Fifteen percent because we still need to work on infant mortality rates, on women's roles, on getting and keeping girls in school, on credit for women and on giving women alternatives to a better life than those that can be achieve through fertility. Forty to fifty percent because the age of marriage, because of adolescents, because we don't look out for adolescents, particularly not adolescent girls. When a girl is educated her age of marriage moves from 16 to 17 up to twenty-one to twenty-three. When a girl is educated and has more than ten years of school she will have three children. When she has no education the number that she will have across the globe is closer to six. If we want to protect our planet. If we want to eliminate or at least down scale the worries we have about the political stability, economic and political management, environmental stability, food availability, and water availability that we are already having trouble coping with and really wonder how we will cope with double this current population in a very short 100 years. We have to intensify the child survival revolution not eliminate it.
Do you ever stop the child health survival revolution to stop population growth? Never! It is quite the contrary. We have to accelerate the search for these goals because in accelerating these we will also start finding the solutions to a world that seems desperately overcrowded. "This land, this planet is loaned to us by our grandchildren", Jim Grant knew that. He was tireless in upreach and outreach, he was inclusive, he was dedicated to humanity. He was dedicated to the fate of the planet and particularly the youngest people on it. For the sake of those youngest people also for the sake of the planet we wish to create and we wish to live in let's get busy and finish that revolution! Thank you very much.