Jose Barzelatto recently spoke to us about how the politics of world population have changed and the forces that brought about that change. Barzelatto, a member of the Center's President's Council, can be seen as one of the architects of an international order that debuted on the world stage at the 1994 Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo. He serves as vice president of the Center for Health and Social Policy, a non-governmental organization that aims to improve world health. Though the offices of the Center are located in Pelham, New York, Barzelatto's call came from his home in Florida, where he spends much of his time.
Barzelatto believes that the driving force behind changes in world population policy can be summed up in a word: women. In this genuinely new world order, the global population crisis is seen, not as a matter of raw numbers, but as a human rights issue that can be solved by focusing on the sexual and reproductive health of people and the education and empowerment of women.
"Women should be the subjects and not the objects of policy," claims Barzelatto. "The whole concern should not be the number of people in the world, but the well-being of people in the world and, in particular, of women because they have been discriminated against by patriarchal societies."
A medical doctor born in Santiago, Chile, who began his career as a specialist in endocrinology and nuclear medicine, Barzelatto is the former director of the Ford Foundation's Reproductive Health and Population Program. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation in 1989, he directed the Special Programme of Research, Development and ResearchTraining in Human Reproduction for the World Health Organization at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
His background places Barzelatto in an ideal position to assess the changes taking place in the world today. Some governments have been slow to accept the new world order, Barzelatto admits, but he believes that "the political fact is, women are forcing governments to accept the new paradigm. At Cairo, it was spectacular. Women activists from all countries were represented there, some as members of their national delegations. You could see them lobbying with each of the members."
Whatever their focus, efforts to stem the tide of global population have been having a spectacular impact, though the job is far from done, Barzelatto believes. "There is no question that the major crisis is decreasing day by day," he says. According to Barzelatto, in 1960, the average woman in the developing world had six children, and in the west, less than three. The fertility rate in many of the more developed nations is now 1.6, less than replacement level, "while in developing countries it has been reduced to 3.5 or a little less than 3.5 children per woman, a significant drop in raw numbers," Barzelatto says.
Nevertheless, experts agree that the population of the planet will continue to grow into the next century, "mainly because of what is called the momentum," says Barzelatto. "If you accept that the new generations will eventually have only two children (that's replacement level) still, the population will double before it stabilizes sometime in the next century. So, yes, there is a problem, but what you can correct of that problem has been more than halfway corrected already. And I believe that that's irreversible. Once the tendency is there, you can't go back."
Motivated by his concern for "human well-being and world justice," Barzelatto is involved in creating a program called "A Forum for Civil Society in the Americas." He was enormously impressed with the skillful lobbying of the woman-run nongovernmental organizations in Cairo and believes that they are "the only real, vital expression of democracy in Latin America. Governments are being diminished. The prestige of political parties is going down. The influence of organized religion is decreasing. So the only grass-roots level forces are the NGOs, and they are fragmented."
Barzelatto also believes that changes in China's draconian population policies may be underway, influenced by what took place in Cairo. "The Chinese government successfully focused for the last 25 years on controlling population growth. In 1971, China's total fertility rate was 5.75. Today it is below 2, and in the coastal areas, the more economically developed, it is 1.2, among the lowest in the world." Now, according to Barzelatto, pilot projects are underway in China to improve the quality of family planning in the context of reproductive health. "Our Center is starting a leadership development program that will receive the visit of 300 top officials both from Beijing and each of the provinces, in groups of 30 over three years, to discuss sexual and reproductive health," says Barzelatto. "They want to be exposed to what is going on in the world after Cairo."
