Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
Fornos Whines for Population Grants
Population Institute President Werner Fornos, in an Opinion-Essay article in the 6 September Christian Science Monitor (p. 20), made a plea for United States funding of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Mr. Fornos, however, is hardly a disinterested, uninvolved, altruistic bystander.
Through the years, Mr. Fornos and his Population Institute have received substantial sums of money from the UNFPA to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of worldwide population control. Much of that funding has come from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funneled through the UNFPA into the Population Institute’s coffers.
In a 1985 lawsuit on behalf of such funding, filed in the U.S.
District Court for the District of Columbia, Mr. Fornos spelled out
his cozy relationship with UNFPA and USAID: “In fiscal year 1985
the Population Institute received $150,000 from UNFPA and expected to
receive an additional $100,000 when [US]AID re1eased…[funds]
that it had earlier withheld from UNFPA.”1 Because of the Reagan administrations
cutoff of U.S. funding for the UNFPA, Mr. Fornos had to inform
“seven employees of the Population Institute — about
one-third of my staff — that we no longer have funds to pay their
salaries. Additional lay-offs may become necessary if UNFPA is not
funded by AID, and thus cannot fund the Population Institute
.…” This writer thinks Mr. Fornos should stop
propagandizing for U.S. population control funding that winds up in
his pockets. Let Fornos raise his funds the old-fashioned way —
by his own efforts — and stop sticking the American taxpayer with
his personal bills.
Hunger/Starvation Death Twaddle
A Mr. Anders Corr, in a 22 September letter published in The New York Times, claimed that “Worldwide, 60,000 people die of hunger every day .…”
Mr. Corr’s assertion is false and is just another one of the preposterous claims so often made about world hunger-starvation deaths.2
Corr’s figure of 60,000 deaths daily would equate to 21,900,000 deaths yearly. According to the United Nations, the WHO, and the World Bank, there are some 50 million deaths in the world yearly, of which 1l million occur in the developed world and 39 million in the underdeveloped. For all practical purposes, no one dies of hunger in the developed world (the United States, Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia, etc.). Thus, if Mr. Corr is correct, the majority of deaths in the underdeveloped countries, the so-called third world, must be due to hunger.
But the World Bank ‘s World Development Report l993, “Investing in Health,” has neatly itemized the third world’s deaths by cause (pp. 224-5) as follows (in millions): cardio-vascular (9), respiratory infections (4), malignant neoplasms (3.2), injuries (3.4), perinatal (2.4), respiratory, non infectious (2.3), tuberculosis (2), digestive (1.4), measles (1), malaria (1), neuropsychiatric (0.6), congenital abnormalities (0.6), genitourinary (0.5), tetanus (0.5), diabetes (0.4), maternal (0.4), pertussis (0.3), HIV/AIDS (0.2), meningitis (0,2), sexually transmitted, ex HIV (0.2), and tropical diseases (0.2).3 These causes total to more than 34 million of the Third World’s 39 million deaths!
Of the remaining less than 5 million deaths, only the 600 thousand due to nutritional and endocrine deficiencies may fairly be classified as “hunger” deaths along with some of the 3 million childhood diarrheal deaths. (UNICEF has long said that most of the malnutrition often associated with diarrhea is a result of the disease rather than its cause.)4
The ridiculous hunger-starvation death numbers so often flung about are thus seen to be nothing more than the fiction of over-population propagandists and others attempting to advance their pct cause or agenda.
Counting Children Before the Grandparents Are Even Hatched
Dr. Halfdan Mahler, the outgoing “Secretary-General” of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, was recently honored with the United Nations Population Award. In his acceptance speech Dr. Mahler stated that “There are currently more than 500 million people between the ages of 15 and 19, and their numbers will grow for at least another century .”5
While Dr. Mahler is correct about the current numbers of teenaged youngsters — there are approximately 140 million births annually in the world — his estimate of the numbers of teens in the future is utter nonsense. No responsible demographer would estimate the size of a future population the grandparents of whom have yet to be born.
It’s Always the Other Guy
“The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.” G.K. Chesterton, introduction to “A Christmas Carol ”
