KQED Forum: Population and resources (includes audio link. For this segment, advance to 34:37.)
Michael Krasny: Let me bring more of our callers in, and we go to Brian in San Francisco, good morning.
Brian Webster: Yes, I am a citizen’s activist with RESULTS and the ONE campaign, and a supporter of the Millennium Development Goals, which is a worldwide strategy for economic development for the world's poorest people, the one billion people on the bottom of the economic pyramid. And I know that, as these people are able to increase their income and women have more choices, that they choose to have smaller families. My question is, there’s a Millennium Development Goals evaluation summit coming up in September at the United Nations, where President Obama is committed to make a policy statement about the United States in relation to the Millennium Development Goals. Do the panelists have any suggestions on what President Obama should say at the Millennium Development Goals summit at the UN coming up in September?
Michael Krasny: Now, Bill Ryerson, if you were writing his speech, what would you want him to say?
William Ryerson [panelist, president of Population Media Center and population fellow at the Post Carbon Institute]: Well, clearly, we’ve been talking about one aspect of the Millennium Development Goal. Goal number 5 has to do with maternal and reproductive health. And, funding for family planning, which is a key part of the solution of what we’ve been discussing this morning — a population problem that is imperiling global sustainability — funding has been cut since the Cairo population conference, so, while Obama has started to restore and increase support for family planning assistance around the world, since the years of the Bush administration, I think he should announce that we're going to give this much higher priority, along with much higher priority to addressing climate issues than we have to date.
Michael Krasny: Let me thank the caller. . . .