A Quaker view.

• Author: Cohen, Peter
• Position: Population AND ITS DISCONTENTS - Letter to the Editor

On the population issue: Quakers have had a hard time coming to consensus on this critical matter. In part this is due to our searching for precedent in the Bible or the writings of early Friends. Hopefully the approval of the following "minute" and its distribution among Friends may contribute to a greater awareness of the issue.

Friends Called to Consider World Population

In the middle of the seventeenth century, when Quakerism was founded, there were over 600 million people on Earth; now there are more than six billion. The human population is growing at the rate of 3,000 every 20 minutes, while a plant or animal species is extinguished in the same time. Directly or indirectly, rapid population growth is threatening the quality of life worldwide.

Billions of people face shortages of food and water, of medical care, education and opportunity. The poorest places are also the places with the highest rates of population growth, rates that threaten to overwhelm the Millennium Development Goals, which were unanimously adopted by the United Nations in 2000.

In the midst of this critical situation President Bush's 2005 budget request fails to allot funds for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This organization, the world's largest international source of funding for...