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‘MMA not blocking family planning’

By Zakir Hassnain

PESHAWAR Inayatullah Khan, provincial health and population welfare minister, has said that the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal government was not obstructing the family planning programme and would implement recommendations on family planning if they were not in conflict with religious, social and cultural values.

The family planning programme can only succeed if poverty is eradicated, education promoted and development made, Mr Khan said while addressing an executive seminar on ‘Emerging Population Challenges: Policy and Management Response in NWFP’ on Wednesday.

The population welfare ministry had organised the three-day seminar, part of a series of executive seminars, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University in the US. The seminar in the NWFP was the second in the series.

“Population growth is a serious issue and needs to be debated seriously,” said Mr Khan. He said that the provincial government was committed to a population welfare policy and had raised the strength of district population welfare officers from 13 to 24 districts of the province. He added that the government would open 104 family welfare centres. “The basic idea of these centres will be to make this programme acceptable to people,” he said.

Mr Khan said that contraceptives used in Pakistan were not recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) because they were not up to its standards.

Dr Amy Ong Tsui, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, said the Millennium Development Goal-1 was to eradicate poverty and hunger.

She said that major income disparities existed between the developed and developing countries and Asia’s level was less than 10 percent of developed regions.

Dr Tsui said Pakistan was ranked 158 out of 208 countries with $2000 GNP per capita 2002. She said that one-third of the world’s population lacked sufficient clean water and a child is killed by malaria every 30 seconds. Dr Tsui said that 820 million of the world’s six billion people were malnourished. She warned that South Asia would be hit by epidemics in the future, faster than the rest of the world.

Earlier, Shakil Durrani, secretary of the federal population welfare ministry, said that population growth had been acknowledged as Pakistan’s foremost problem. Mr Durrani said that Pakistan’s population had increased five-fold since independence - in 1947 it was 33 million whereas today it stood at 150 million. He said that Pakistan’s population was expected to increase from 150 million to 220 million in 2020. It is a serious problem and will cause tremendous unemployment in the country, said Mr Durrani.

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