Weaving a wider net: United Nations moves to consolidate its anti-natalist gains

With the conclusion of the recent Food Summit, in Rome 13–17 November, the United Nations (UN) has consolidated its position as the world’s largest and most systematically anti-natalist organization. Armed with “‘plans of action” from each of this decade’s other major global summits, UN bureaucrats stand poised to foist a de-facto ‘global constitution’ upon the rest of the world. This ‘constitution’ will not consist of a codified legal document backed by hundreds of years of common law, but will instead be a system of interlocking coercive relationships between international organizations dominated by first world nations on the one hand and poorer countries of the developing world on the other.

Based on the so-called “consensus” from the previously mentioned summit agreements, these coercive relationships will together seek to transform human life at every stage of its biologic and civil development and in every conceivable society. If UN officials succeed, no one, from the youngest child in the poorest village to the oldest official of the most sovereign nation, will be able to escape the east of their net and literally millions more people in the developing world will die aborning.

Integration’s first step

While UN observers have been able to discern the outline of the broader UN agenda during the previous four major summits, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizations World Food Summit in Rome presented that agenda in much more defined — and practical — terms than had previously been the case. The Rome summit shared some of the size and scope of this decade’s other UN conferences, but was different from the others in the degree that UN officials wished its final “plan of action” to represent consensus and cooperation.

They sought this consensus because Rome’s summit was not to be like the other divisive battles in Cairo and Beijing, which were dominated by quarrels over population control, abortion and gender-related language. In particular it was not to be like the summit in Istanbul, where many of the poorer nations of the developing world had refused to include language endorsing population control and abortion in the final document.

No, the point of the Food Summit was to formulate the first step in the integration and implementation phases of the UN’s plan, and to this end it was kept a highly stage-managed affair. Delegates were kept carefully screened from either journalists or NGO members who might have raised questions about why, if some of the UN’s own numbers showed sufficient food supplies currently and into the future, did nations have to reduce their populations at all? Everything was kept organized, managed and tidy, for the UN looked beyond Rome to the work of building what it euphemistically calls the ‘civil society’1 for the world, and Rome was but the first stop. [For a more complete discussion of the way UN officials manipulated the Food Summit please see Rome’s other ghosts on page 3.]

“Thrusting” plans

Much of the UN’s over-all anti-natalist effort is being conducted under the guise of eliminating poverty.

It consists, according to James Gustave Speth, the Administrator of the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations’ “Special Coordinator for Economic and Social Development,” in a plan which concurrently integrates UN machinations along five different task forces, or “thrusts.”2

Although overall management of this “thrusting” at first the regional and then national and local levels is the responsibility of a committee of UN agencies, assisted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, each task force is to have a lead coordinating agency. Here are each of the five areas, and the lead agency for each.

“Basic Social Services”

The first seeks to ensure that every human being is subject to what the UN euphemistically calls “basic social services.” This effort also goes under the flag of “investing in people” and takes its cues from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), long the biggest and fiercest member of the global anti-natalist collaboration.

Other agencies on the committee include the United Nations Children’s Educational Fund (UNICEF), which recently lost even token funding from the Vatican because of its documented efforts to force abortion and “family planning” onto refugees, and the World Health Organization (WHO), which was recently further implicated in suspected efforts to vaccinate Philippine women against pregnancy.

Whatever else makes up “basic social services” at the village level, the membership of the committee leaves little doubt that it will also include family planning, likely by government fiat, a policy which is, by its very nature, coercive. In an interview with Marguerite Peeters of the Center for a New Europe, Alexander Marshall, the UNFPA’s media director, explained the meaning and philosophy behind “basic social services” this way:

The purpose of the task force on basic social services for all is to bring together and harmonize activities around the findings of all the conferences that have happened this decade in relation to social services. That would include for instance the findings of the population conference in Cairo, the Social Summit in Copenhagen and this conference in Rome. The task force was set up in recognition of the fact that you cannot separate the subjects, although the conferences have been on separate subjects: in the end, all subjects converge. So you cannot talk about population without talking about food security, you cannot talk about food security without talking about gender issues, you cannot talk about gender issues without talking about human rights, you cannot talk about human rights without talking about polity so the circle comes around.3

“Sustainable” labor

The second task force is responsible for making sure that every human being in the world works at a job which is “sustainable” for the environment and the “broader society”. The International Labor Organization (ILO) heads this committee, whose members include UNDP and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), among others. Under the guidance of these agencies, agriculture will be restricted to primarily what is ‘sustainable” and, by necessity, lower yielding. Only in this way, by aggressively wrong-headed government intervention, might the hysterical predictions about global starvation of Lester Brown’s Worldwatch Institute finally be made to come true. Alex Avery, an analyst with the Frasier Institute in Canada and the Center for Global Food Initiatives in the United States explains:

The FAO currently recommends minimal fertilizer and input use, and only when absolutely necessary. This is called Low Input Sustainable Agriculture (LISA). But LISA is not only low input, it also lower output. Insufficient fertilizer use is one of the main reasons for lower than potential yields already noted by the FAO. It is ridiculous for an agency which identifies increased productivity as critical to food security fertilizer use is one of the main reasons for lower than potential yields already noted by the FAO. It is ridiculous for an agency which identifies increased productivity as critical to food security to recommend low-output farming.

But, of course, if the world is being de-populated anyway, the remaining people will not need nearly the same amounts of food.

Agenda 21

The third thrust concerns protecting the environment (“the natural resource base”). In practice this means implementing the Rio conference’s so-called Agenda 21, ironically in the name of the poor. The UNDP itself heads up this effort, which is considered so important that Speth listed no other cooperating agency on the task. Because UNDP is the overall coordinating agency for all these efforts, and has taken particular responsibility for this “thrust,” this particular task force needs no specific committee members. All the other agencies, by definition, are included.

Women

“Advancing” and “empowering” women constitute the assault’s fourth front which is the responsibility of the United Nation’s “special representative” on gender issues with support from the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

UNIFEM “directly funds programs and projects than enable women to enhance their economic and civic activities that ensure that the needs of both women and men receive consideration when large-scale assistance is given to developing countries,” the organization states.

UNIFEM will probably increase in importance during the coming implementation phase of the UN plan, when so many of these “thrusts” are to be brought to bear on regional, national and local levels of human society.

One of UNIFEM’s strengths, according to A Woman is Development Agenda for the 21^st Century is “[its] partnership with NGO’s in developing initiatives.” The UNIFEM booklet explains that: “‘UNIFEM has the most extensive experience in the UN system in mobilizing and working with women’s organizations at all levels — grassroots, national, regional and local.” Further. UNIFEM may be funded independently from the UNDP itself. At the recent UN pledge day, when governments are asked to pledge money to support UN activities, UNIFEM was able to garner about $13 million. It expects to bring in more in the coming months.

The color of money

Responsibility for the final UN “thrust” belongs to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other related international financial institutions. This effort, as such, has no clearly delineated area of interest. Instead it is meant to serve all the other efforts by helping to create the “overarching, enabling environment” under which they are meant to advance. And it is this area which is truly the most crucial, for without World Bank and similar institutions acting as loan sharks to the UN syndicate, none of these task forces will achieve their bullying ends.

The World Bank has been explicitly involved in funding global population control, including abortion (both surgical and through abortifacient chemicals), since Cairo in 1994 and implicitly involved for many years before that.

A World Bank document entitled Improving Reproductive Health: The role of the World Bank4 declares that, since the Cairo summit, the first of the World Bank’s goals in this area has been “providing access and choice in family planning.” Except for its candor, this should come as no surprise. The same document states that the World Bank has spent more than $2.5 billion over the last twenty-five years to support 130 reproductive health projects in over 70 countries.

These projects have included, according to the document, “mobilizing public awareness and political support” (lobbying) for abortion and other reproductive health services in Burkina Faso as well as conducting “information, education and communication” campaigns about sex and reproductive health in Indonesia and Lesotho.

World Bank money, the document blithely claims, has “helped bring India two-thirds of the way towards her goal of replacement level fertility.” (The Indian campaigns have been notorious for their coercive tactics). All this experience undoubtedly contributed to the UNDP’s decision to place the bank in such a pivotal role in serving to both finance and bully sovereign nations into accepting the entire United Nations anti-natalist agenda.

Putting it all together

Once the various thrusts are “integrated” into a single net, the next step will be to cast that net broadly to capture as many sovereign nations and people as possible. In this the UN counts on what can best be called the “sandwich approach.” In its most basic form this consists of a two-part strategy:

First, convince the people of a given nation that they really need the various things the UN offers (including population control and “family planning”).

Second, use the World Bank and other financial institutions to pressure sovereign nations into accepting them.

Thus these countries’ governments will become “sandwiched” between two forces — politically motivated pressure from below and financially fueled pressure from above.

The UN is relying for assistance in the first part on Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s). NGO’s range from small groups of people who work on small development projects or tackle very specific problems to large lobbying organizations and front organizations for governments. The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), for example, is considered an NGO and thus merits inclusion into the elite of the UN’s so-called “civil society.” Other population control institutions, like the Pathfinder Fund, which have been shown to be little more than front agencies for United States’ population control efforts, are considered NGOs as well.

The work of the NGOs in each of these countries will be very important because it will be these groups which will appear before the people to tell them to contact their government in support of the alleged good, or collateral goods, that the NGO offers.

The problem with “integration” is that with NGO-government intervention the results are insidious. Increasing amounts of population control activity are being subsumed into other health related services, immunizations, healthy baby initiatives, and the like, which people in a poor area may genuinely need and desire. Few will want to willingly let an opportunity for such a health program pass them by, but if they accept it they must also accept abortion, intrusive contraception and sterilization. Under “integration” you aren’t allowed buy only the raisins, you have to buy the oatmeal too.

The second part of the strategy consists of getting the World Bank or other financial institutions to withhold loans or debt restructuring in order to force nations to accept what they would otherwise resist mightily.

James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, alluded to this strategy several times during a press conference at the World Hood Summit in Rome. Pointedly asked how the World Bank understood its mission towards the developing world, Wolfensohn replied that there was a “new paradigm” at the Bank.

“From now on,” Wolfensohn said, “the business of the World Bank will not be primarily economic reform, or governmental reform. The business of the World Bank will primarily be social reform.” The Bank has learned, he added, that attempting to reform a nation’s economics or government without first reforming the society “usually means failure.”

The benefits to nations who are willing to fall into line in the “civil society” will be immediate and intensely attractive.

“The World Bank will be willing to look favorably on any reasonable plan for debt reduction — and even debt forgiveness,” Wolfensohn told the assembled reporters, “provided the nation in question is willing to follow a sensible social policy.”

And when cornered later by inquisitive reporters Wolfensohn admitted to this smaller group that population control activities are a sine qua non for any social policy to be considered “sensible.”

The World Bank is also involved in the first part of the strategy. According to Wolfensohn the Bank is prepared to begin “directly funding — not though loans” (lest anyone misunderstand) certain NGOs in the countries involved, thus giving them an immeasurable boost over whatever government or popular opposition they might confront.

Anyone familiar with the developing world recognizes the power an accessible supply of hard currency conveys within an otherwise impoverished society. Indeed, fueled with money from the World Bank, the heat these favored NGO’s will be able to generate on their governments will be sizzling indeed. So the net is woven and cast. Imagine the scene. The government of Guatemala (or any other government) is opposed to population control, or the society has within it many people who oppose abortion, contraception and sterilization.

But the society also has extremely well-funded NGOs who are trying to sway the people from their traditional opposition to these things. These NGOs are persistent and may have already attracted a certain percentage of the country’s elite to share their views. They begin to speak out in the press against the opposition to population control promote the new “civil society.”

At the same time the World Bank tells the government that unless it agrees to adopt the NGO’s “sensible” social policy the Bank will not be inclined to restructure the nation’s debt.

Or, conversely, if the government would only accept that “sensible” policy, the Bank would be glad to forgive all or some portion of that debt. Imagine the pressure. How many nations will be able to resist selling their sovereignty for such an attractive package?

Conclusion

As wide and strong as it seems to be, the UN net is not yet a completely finished product. It’s still not too late to tear the net asunder before it becomes to strong or too broad. Two things will be necessary in order for this to happen:

First, nations which contribute heavily to the United Nations should rethink their contributions to this institution-run-amok. Concerned people of good will in so called First World nations need to begin questioning why efforts to eradicate poverty seem so intent instead on eliminating the poor. Instances of coerced contraception and “family planning” need to continue to be documented, and any funding of UN initiatives and efforts needs to cease until such time as the UN backs off its anti-natalism and adopts a policy which recognizes the importance of human resources as very real resources indeed.

Second, nations in the developing world can, and should, band together to leave these UN summit agreements en masse. It’s not too late for nations to back out. None of the agreements which form the foundation of all this mischief are binding. All could be jettisoned in favor of other agreements which adopt a more genuine approach to authentic human development. This will undoubtedly require a great act of political and economic will on the part of the developing nations, but the rewards down the road in terms of development without abandoning sovereignty cannot be overlooked.