I thank the Senator for raising this matter and affording me the opportunity to address an issue of central importance to the objectives of Ireland's international development co-operation and aid programme. I am responding on behalf of the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Power, to whom I will pass on the compliment paid to him by the Senator.
Last Wednesday, the Minister of State, Deputy Power, launched the UNFPA State of the World Population report on the role of women, population and climate change. The report was launched simultaneously in 20 countries across the world and this underlines its global significance. The UNFPA produces a state of the world population report annually to further discussion on critically important topics. I am happy it has achieved its objectives in igniting the debate we are having tonight.
This year's report outlines in stark terms the negative impact climate change is having on the achievement of the millennium development goals. It outlines how water scarcity, food shortages and the consequences of unpredictable and increasingly severe weather patterns are threatening the hard-won development gains of the past decade.
This year's focus on climate change is particularly important because we begin in a few short weeks the climate change conference in Copenhagen. We hope the analysis UNFPA has provided in this report and its proposed five steps will be fully considered in the negotiations that will take place in Copenhagen.
We know that in order to achieve the millennium development goals, we must accelerate the war against hunger, make progress on reducing maternal mortality, increase primary school enrolment and the provision of employment and, most critically in the context of this discussion, ensure the preservation of natural resources.
The core priority of Ireland's aid programme is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger in the developing world, with a strong focus on the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In response to the recommendations of the Government's hunger task force, the Minister of State established the fight against global hunger and food security as a cornerstone of the aid programme and of our development policy.
Ireland is taking a strong lead internationally on the hunger crisis, highlighting the over-riding importance of the first millennium development goal to halve the proportion of people living in poverty and hunger. UNFPA has reaffirmed the close connection between gender, farming and climate change.
The hunger task force report and recommendations clearly recognise the importance of women in agriculture, in particular in food production, and the need to respond to the specific needs of women farmers in both policy and programmes. These include addressing legal systems which restrict the rights of women to land and natural resources in their own right, supporting research to improve farming technologies, developing food crops that are more productive and less labour intensive for women, addressing the issue of water management, increasing women's access to financial services and improving women's access to markets and ability to trade.
Irish Aid has fully recognised the importance of the UNFPA mandate as articulated by the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994, in reducing poverty and the achievement of the millennium development goals.
The statistics on maternal mortality in some of Irish Aid's programme countries are truly shocking. In Ethiopia, 710 in every 100,000 women will die in childbirth, rising to over 2,000 in Sierra Leone. In Ireland, that ratio is one in 100,000. Reducing maternal mortality, the essence of the fifth millennium development goal, is one of the key areas of Irish Aid's partnership with UNFPA.
The issue of population growth is discussed by UNFPA as having an important, yet complex, role in climate change. We note that the world's population could potentially reach between 8 billion and 10 billion by 2050. Even the most modest estimate suggests a dramatic increase. It has the real capacity to undermine global efforts to achieve the millennium development goals.
The report advocates the achievement of the programme of action of the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994, as a long-term mitigation strategy in the fight against global warming. We welcome the assertion that the ICPD agenda can contribute by achieving health and development objectives thereby reducing fertility, stabilising populations and in turn reducing emissions. High population growth has the potential to impact negatively on development progress, not least environmental sustainability.
The provision of voluntary family planning allows women and couples to decide freely the number and spacing of their children and lies at the heart of the UNFPA mandate. Promotion of gender equality, including most critically the education of girls, has proven to be one of the most empowering policies in stabilising high population growth rates.
In total, over the years 2005 to 2009, Ireland has contributed over €23 million to UNFPA in core funding and trust funds for reproductive health commodity security in addition to trust funds on maternal health, and on obstetric fistula and female genital mutilation and cutting issues that impact significantly on women's reproductive health.
The UN recently made significant progress towards the achievement of the goal of gender equality. We warmly welcome the recent General Assembly resolution on UN system-wide coherence and the unanimous support for the establishment of a "composite gender entity", to be headed by an Under-Secretary General. This progress in strengthening the capacity, accountability and effectiveness of the work of the United Nations on gender equality and women's empowerment which has been long awaited and is urgently needed.
