Showdown in Cairo

By EUGENE LINDEN

The United Nations could hardly have picked a more appropriate place for next week's International Conference on Population and Development than crowded, chaotic Cairo. Home to 14 million people, the Egyptian capital shows all too clearly the consequences of the inexorable human drive to have children. Cairo's open space per capita must be measured in square inches, and the poorest citizens build shelters on rooftops, in cemeteries and in the city dump. Cramped conditions are nothing new, of course, but even old-timers lament that population pressures are making Egyptians "bestial" to one another.

Cairo is also buffeted by all the political, cultural and religious forces that tend to interfere with effective birth-control programs. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has worked hard, with some success, to curb the country's growth rate, and the government is proud to be hosting a conference expected to attract up to 20,000 participants, including several heads of $ state. Egypt's fundamentalist Muslim sheiks take a different view, however, drawing cheers from their followers when they denounce the meeting as a "Zionist and imperialist assault against Islam."

The organizers of the conference don't see it that way, but they do admit that the purpose of the gathering is to bring about a radical shift in the world's population policies. For three years, representatives from 180 nations have been laying the groundwork at preparatory meetings, and unlike delegates to previous population negotiations, they invited substantial contributions from women's groups. The result is a tentative plan built around the idea that the key to curbing population is enhancing the status of women around the world. The plan, which has the support of the U.S., calls for channeling $17 billion annually by the year 2000 into many local programs, including those that would give women better educational opportunities, easier access to family-planning services and improved health care. Other proposals would finance campaigns urging men to shoulder more responsibility for contraception, child rearing and even housework. Says Nafis Sadik, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund and the guiding force behind the conference: "There is a strong focus on gender equality and empowering women to control their lives, especially their reproductive lives." This approach drew immediate objections from advocates of traditional family planning, who were worried that a feminist agenda would divert money away from proven birth- control methods.

Such language drew early and fervent protests from the Vatican, which sees "control their reproductive lives" as a code phrase calling not only for access to artificial birth-control methods but also for abortion on demand. When Pope John Paul II met with Sadik earlier this year, he delivered a message condemning abortion as a "heinous evil" and followed up by calling the proposed plan a "project of systematic death." Sadik maintains that the conference plan does not endorse or encourage abortion, but merely declares that the millions of abortions performed every year should be done under conditions that ensure the safety of the women.

The Vatican's opposition was predictable, but not its alliance with many Muslim leaders. Seeking support for the Pope's stand against the conference, his envoys met this summer with leaders from several Muslim countries, including Iran and Libya. The envoys got cordial receptions because the . followers of Islam, besides having rigid ideas about the role of women, generally disapprove of abortion. It's not clear how many nations will join the Catholic-Muslim opposition in Cairo, but the conference is sure to be a contentious affair. Particularly unsettling is the possibility of violent protests. Over the past two years, Muslim extremists in Egypt have stepped up efforts to overthrow Mubarak's pro-Western government, and terrorist attacks have killed more than 390 people, including five foreigners.

It will be a tragedy if dissension undermines the crucial work of the conference: to reach some agreement on how to slow down the population juggernaut. The number of humans now totals 5.7 billion, is growing by 94 million annually, and could reach 10 billion by the year 2050 unless population control -- or famine, warfare and disease -- intervenes. Already, population pressures are magnifying the human misery caused by every war, political upheaval or natural disaster, from Rwanda and Somalia to Haiti and Cuba. Relief agencies equipped to handle thousands of dislocated or starving people every few years must now cope with millions of dispossessed souls clamoring for help in several different places at once.

Optimists have argued that naturally declining birthrates could defuse the population bomb. But the world's head count has grown so large that even a modest birthrate will produce huge increases. Consider the case of China, where a draconian birth-control program has reduced the country's annual population-growth rate to 1.4%, the same as Canada's. Since China already has 1.2 billion people, however, the country grows by 17 million -- half a Canada -- each year. Lester Brown of Washington's Worldwatch Institute wonders where the food will come from to feed the 300 million Chinese who will be added during the next 30 years. He points out that by the year 2030, China could consume all the surplus grain produced in the world today merely to meet the basic needs of its population.

The implications of such grim arithmetic are not lost on anyone, not even the dissenters who are trying to derail the proceedings in Cairo. In Iran, where some officials have endorsed the Vatican's opposition to the conference, the government has for years pushed family planning. And the Vatican's own scientific advisory panel has warned that an unchecked tide of humanity poses a threat to the planet.

But that has not prevented the Catholic-Muslim alliance from objecting strenuously to the U.N.'s proposed solutions. The Pope thinks the plan embodies a vision of sexuality that favors the individual over the family. "Today," he said, "it is more urgent than ever to react against models of behavior that are the fruit of a hedonistic and permissive culture." Islamic intellectual Mustafa Mahmoud of Egypt calls the draft plan "a well- designed explosive device to blow apart ((Muslim)) religious identity."

Timothy Wirth, a U.S. Under Secretary of State and a leader of the American delegation going to Cairo, denies that the U.N. plan would impose Western values on other cultures. Argues Wirth: "Everything in the document is done within the framework of national laws, cultures and religions. The U.N. is not going to dictate what a culture can do."

The delegates to Cairo appear to have two main options: approve the essence of the draft proposal, allowing the Vatican and its supporters to file dissents, or try to find some consensus language that papers over the conflicts, which usually happens with U.N. documents. The need for consensus reduces action plans to pallid, inoffensive wish lists that quickly disappear into bureaucratic oblivion after the signing ceremonies. Such was the outcome of the Earth Summit that convened in Rio de Janeiro two years ago. But continued indecisiveness on the population issue may be a formula for disaster. Speaking in Washington recently, Nobel-laureate physicist Henry Kendall of M.I.T. observed, "If we don't control the population with justice, humanity and mercy, it will be done for us by nature -- brutally."

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With reporting by Hannah Bloch/New York, Greg Burke and Mimi Murphy/Rome and Amany Radwan/Cairo