London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Population experts will gather at the House of Commons tonight to call for a new agenda to tackle the world's population crisis, which is placing a huge strain on the world's resources and condemning millions of people in developing countries to poverty, illness and hunger.

Population: the Unfinished Agenda is the culmination of a key series of forums which began in September 2006, to complement the Parliamentary Hearings on Population. Each looked at a particular issue linked to the Millennium Development Goals and Population Growth - poverty, gender and women's empowerment, contraception, maternal and child mortality, HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability and the relationship between states and individuals in relation to the discourse of rights.

The series has aimed to initiate changes in policy and practice relating to population growth, and to reverse the general reluctance by politicians and development agencies to discuss the issue because of its associations with ideas about coercion and control. Professor Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, has called population growth 'the "Cinderella" of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private'.

Tonight's speakers will include Professor Rapley and Dr Nafis Sadik, Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General and UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, who is an advocate of slowing population growth and well known for her commitment to advancing family planning and greater reproductive freedoms for women while working as a medical practitioner in Pakistan. Gareth Thomas MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development, will be the initial speaker.

Catherine Budgett-Meakin, Director of the Population and Sustainability Network, which is co-organising tonight's event along with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine's Centre for Population Studies, comments: 'The right to contraception is a fundamental human right. Increasing resources for family planning would mean real progress towards the achievement of the MDGs, a real win-win situation for the individual and the alleviation of poverty and environmental pressure'.

Susannah Mayhew, Lecturer in Policy and Reproductive Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, adds: 'The funding and sustaining of population programmes has fallen out of favour over the last decade - with disastrous effects on the health and welfare of the world's poorest people. The UK government has a critical leadership role to play in reversing this trend and making a real impact on equitable development.'

The event is being hosted by Christine McGafferty MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health.

The event will take place in the Attlee Suite, Portcullis House, House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1A 2LS. If you wish to attend the event, please contact Catherine Budgett-Meakin by 20 January 2007 on cbm@populationandsustainability.org or 020 8673 8963. Please bring the PDF of the invitation attached with this press release with you to ensure admission.

Notes:

1. The Population and Sustainability Network (PSN) is a network established to clarify and communicate the importance for sustainability of both population and consumption factors. For more information go to www.populationandsustainability.org

2. The Centre for Population Studies (CPS) is a research unit within the Department of Epidemiology & Population Health of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. CPS is engaged in the measurement and explanation of population trends and in the evaluation of attempts to modify them and represents the largest research group in Britain concerned with demography, reproductive health research, and related disciplines. The Centre is active in research both on Britain and other developed countries and in research on the developing world, where it has a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and South and South-East Asia.