WERNER FORNOS: Thank you, Joe. You amaze me, and some of those facts I didn't tell you, so you do a terrific job researching these things. So, Pat, thank you for being co- chair of this event today and I'm delighted to be with all of you. I should mention to you that Joe did not make the mistake that the new chancellor did at the University of Alaska, Anchorage this morning when I was on campus speaking to the student body, she got very excited about the title of my book, and she said Werner's written the kind of book that once you lay it down, you never pick it up again. With that kind of promotional effort, I guess I won't be selling any books at the bookstore at 4:00 o'clock this afternoon when we have an open house and book signing ceremony.

I'm delighted to be back with you in this awesome setting. It's amazing to talk about poverty with that kind of back drop that we're looking at here and it's a little bit humbling to realize that we're now in a world of 6.4 billion people. It's not that we're sexier than any previous generation that's causing the problem, what's happened is we've conquered death as a result of medical breakthroughs, mass inoculation campaigns, sanitary improvements. We've brought down the death rate, but we haven't done an equally good job in moderating our fertility.

This is not a story today of doom and gloom, though at times you must stand back and say to yourself, what's the use of worrying about this. When I got involved in population the average family size in the world was six children per family, today we're down to less than three. And as I was sitting on the runway in Juneau for eight hours yesterday waiting for Air Alaska to finally get spare parts to make this plane run, I said, you know, people must think that I've taken leave of my senses to do 21 speeches in three days in Alaska. And with only 630,000 people, you know, why worry about it.

Well, it's because you have two United States senators who vote on the appropriations for international population issues and it's almost impossible to get through to both senators of New York in the three day period, or to even get them to answer the phone, or the senators of California. We happen to be lucky though, all four of them vote very well on this issue so you don't have to spend much time in New York or California, but I do spend a lot of time in Wyoming, Montana, Vermont, New Hampshire, many of the single member states, the single member district states to convince them in a very narrowly divided congress that this is an issue that really is of paramount importance.

And the first person to convince the United States that it is of paramount importance is an Alaskan, a senator by the name of Ernest Gruening. Ernest convinced the senate to hold emergency hearings on global population growth and its relationship for future generations' well being. He even got the secretary of state to come and testify before his committee and got the secretary of state to appoint a special assistant to the secretary, which every president has now done since the time of Dean Rusk, to worry about population concerns.

Well, when I look at the state of Alaska and to try to find someplace in the world to compare it to, I have a very difficult time because with 550,000 square miles or 11 times the size of Florida, you can't just pick a country out of the world and say this is, you know, a demographic comparison. But if you were to take Pakistan, for instance, which is about half the size of Alaska and already has 160 million people, you can see why population problems are so far away from us and why they're a vital part of United States' foreign interests and United States' foreign policy.

While we're meeting here tonight -- this afternoon, excuse me, it's already night in Washington, while we're meeting here things aren't very reassuring in the world. Our forests are declining, our top soil is eroding, our deserts are expanding, our global climate is changing and we're looking at resource shortages in the areas of food and water.

Let me just say to you that we're not going to do an environmental presentation which is what we'll do this afternoon on campus and you're all invited to, but I want to talk about the issues of the solutions to the problem of world overpopulation. In order to do that I have to set a time frame. It took all of recorded history until 1830 for the world to have the first billion people on it. By 1930 we were at 2 billion, by 1960 at 3 billion, 1975 at 4 billion, 1986 at 5 billion, 1999 at 6 billion and we're now at 6.4 billion. Last year we added 78 million people net to the population of the world.

What's deceptive about that statistics is the fact that 97 percent of the growth is occurring in the poorest countries in the world, countries already terribly torn by civil strife and social unrest and where all too many people live in brutal poverty.

And failure to give population issues the kind of high priority they deserve may see us committing the ultimate global blunder, one from which there is no recovery.

When you take a look at the threat of terrorism around the world, you need only to reflect upon the words of President Bush, Senior, Herbert Walker Bush, who was the chairman of the task force on terrorism that reported to Ronald Reagan that the seed bed of terrorism in the world was in the disillusioned faces of the under 20 year olds in the world that reside in the developing world. Half of those under 20 year olds are under 15. As a matter of fact today if you were to look at an audience and say how many of you are under 24, you would find that between the age of 15 to 24 there are 1 billion people in the world today.

So we have an enormous youth bulge out there and how well they handle that awesome responsibility of parenting, having only the number of children that they can love and take care of and see grow to responsible adulthood will mean the difference between us having a better quality of life on this planet or one where we're headed toward an environmental armageddon.

Why am I so hopeful that this is going to be a solvable situation? Not just because we've already made a major change in fertility in the world, but also because today there are some 400 million women in the world who have told credible demographic health surveys that they want no more children, most of them didn't want their last pregnancy or they want to space time in between the pregnancies to protect the life of the mother and the infant. Yet they lack the education and the means to do anything about it.

So empowering those 400 million women with the ability to make fertility decisions and regulate their family size will mean that we'll stabilize at about 8 billion people. Still a pretty heavy footprint to be added to the weight of this planet with only 25 percent of the world land, but it's better than what the United Nations is predicting which says that we're going to 9.8 before we'll stabilize.

We, those who partook of this nice luncheon today, have stabilized the world's population. The entire industrialized world today is stabilized. As a matter of fact we find 17 countries that are already on the negative population growth rate and they're very much concerned about it. I addressed the European parliament on January 14th in Geneva and every one of the European countries is scared to death of what's happening with the declining fertilities and where they're going to get workers from and their aging population.

But the headline in the New York Times that appeared shortly after that which said population bomb defused didn't look at the entire report that we had before us in Geneva. That report said that the industrialized world, or the world we belong to, will grow between now and 2050 by 55 million people. And some said well, that means we solved the population problem. I submit you to that's really coddling the comfortable and ignoring the afflicted because in that same period of time the poorest countries, those already torn by civil strife and social unrest and where people live all too often in brutal poverty, are going to add between now and the year 2050, 2.4 billion people. And when you realize that 1 billion of those people exist on less than $1 a day, you can see the kind of collision course that we're faced with between people, resources and environment and above all human rights. Because the decision on whether to have a child or not to have a child should be in the hands of all individuals and it should be one of the most sacred human rights and government should never interfere in telling people how many children to have, but giving them the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves.

Having said that let me give you four solutions to the global population problem that I think will offend no one's religion in this room, nor will it offend anybody's cultural pattern and that's how simple we can approach problems when we take the time to compromise issues.

Number one is the eradication of female illiteracy. Wherever we've seen a woman in the world achieve an eighth grade education, she has half of the number of pregnancies than her uneducated sister.

Number two is full employment opportunities with pay and especially for women. Women, as you may all realize, but don't think about often enough, do two-thirds of the world's work, they earn only one-tenth of 1 percent of the world's income and they own less than 1 percent of the world's property. But where they are able to participate in the economic cycle of a country, their decision making power within the family increases, their status in the community increases and the couple achieves their desired family size much sooner than if they were born into a society where women are still treated as just barter.

Number three is one that Rotary International has been very successful in and that's the elimination or the reduction of infant mortality. As some of you may know, Rotary has now raised enough money to inoculate every child in the world against polio and indeed our hemisphere has now been declared polio free. And what a wonderful thing to come home 30, 40 years from now and have your child come home from school and say dad, what's polio? So we are making significant progress in not only stopping infant deaths, but also making progress in health advances. But still 11 million children die under the age of one per year according to UNICEF, many of them from preventable diseases.

So reducing infant mortality to its lowest level contributes to an early achievement of desired family size by that family and also contributes to an earlier stabilization of world population.

And number four is universal access to the knowledge and the means by which to prevent unintended pregnancy from natural family planning, for those for whom it works, to modern medically approved methods of family planning. And abortion is not a method of family planning, abortion like war is a failure of society to come to grips with a much more fundamental problem and in this case that fundamental problem is the prevention of unintended pregnancy in the first place.

I spoke Tuesday at the Juneau Rotary Club and they were honoring a man who was 93 years old and he had 50 years of perfect attendance. And when I mentioned natural family planning he giggled so I had to go afterwards up to him and say, sir, what did I say that affected your funny bone? And he looked very seriously into my eyes and he said sonny, you look like you're young enough to be able to understand that natural family planning works best among sexually inactive people over 65.

We should not be so arrogant as to suggest what method a couple should use, but we should be eternally vigilant to make sure that even the poorest among us have the ability to implement that basic human right to make those decisions for themselves.

And that's really what the U.S. congress has been doing ever since 1965, providing under the foreign assistance act a very small portion of our international affairs budget, to work with the other industrialized nations and the U.N. population fund to make sure that couples around the world have access to the things that we take so for granted here in Anchorage. For instance the Agency for International Development buys a psychedelic colored condom for a penny, a cycle of oral contraceptives for 15 cents a cycle. If you go to a drugstore here in Anchorage you'll find that that cycle will cost you, if you have a medical prescription, probably somewhere between 25 and $35 a cycle. How can a couple in Tanzania surviving on 30 cents a day be able to afford that kind of western luxury.

We're not talking about transferring money. As a matter of fact of the entire 20 billion U.S. foreign assistance program, which includes $6 billion for Israel and Egypt, 1.7 billion for buying the warheads of the former Soviet Union, all of our military bases overseas, you come down to less than $2 billion in humanitarian assistance to improve the quality of life on this planet. And we rank 20th in the nation's with the industrial capability to be able to help other countries, 20th in the amount of assistance that we provide compared to the Netherlands, Denmark, other supporters of programs like this. We're not really supporters, but who I think are doing it because they realize it's a genuine self-interest to improve quality of life.

There are four issues that are going to be facing all of us in this room in the next 10 years involving population. Not all of them are going to be as contentious as a couple of them, but all will directly affect us. One is aging, the second is migration, three is urbanization and four is reproductive health for couples around the world.

The last one has, as you know, been a very divisive issue in our own political life. And with the belief that abortion dominates our political agenda, it really doesn't except in Washington, D.C., no abortion money has been allowed by the United States through any agency of the government since 1973 when the Helms' amendment passed. So the debate over whether to provide assistance is on the issue of whether we will be able to help couples in the poorest countries to regulate their fertility.

And sometimes we win and sometimes we lose on that issue. In the United States senate we happen to have 53 yes votes on this issue, including for the first time both senators from Alaska and Senator Stevens has been a champion on this cause. The first opportunity Senator Murkowski had to vote, I know she was surprised that that early this divisive issue would come into her career, but she voted to support in the national population assistance because it's in our own self- interest. And I think that as we look at the coming election cycle, the issue will be more prominently discussed and especially since the congress has already moved on providing the appropriations guidelines for this coming budget cycle and so they'll be several votes between now and the next congress comes in January on these issues.

It's in our self-interest. Slowing down population growth is a requirement that the whole world has to address because there are no acceptable humanitarian alternatives.

For all these men in the audience, I don't want you to think that this is just a women's issue because we as fathers, as husbands and as policy makers have to be involved in making sure that we have the kind of planet where gender equality is a possibility and a reality in the future.

Thank you very much for having me and I'm sure I'm going to be able to answer whatever I didn't in your questions that I'm quite happy to entertain. Thank you very much.