Fight poverty, not population, Vatican envoy urges UN

(April 15, 2011) The Vatican’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations in New York has told a session on population and development that the “increasingly discredited concept of population control must be discarded.” Rather than assuming that poor people themselves are a problem, Indian Archbishop Francis Chullikatt told the UN that government leaders should focus on “providing the promised development assistance to the approximately 920 million people living on less than $1.25 a day.” The archbishop attacked the “distorted world-view” that suggests poverty is caused by the growth of population, rather than by the shortage of resources. He denounced the distorted world-view that regards the poor as a problem to be commoditized and managed as if they were inconsequential objects rather than as unique persons with innate dignity. The poor he said, require the full commitment of the international community to provide assistance so that they can realize their full potential. The Vatican representative pointed out that in many countries today where population growth has fallen below replacement level, it is difficult to “sustain economic development and provide the resources necessary to support those aging populations.”