THERE are many female only dying rooms in the world. Ten thousand women die each week from pregnancy related causes, 70,000 a year from unsafe abortions. They rank among the 120 million women who want to avoid another pregnancy but lack the information and services they need.
At least 80 million girls across 40 in the world have suffered, mutilation, many dying in shock, bleeding or infection.
Women make up two thirds of the, world's illiterates and seven out of 10 of its poor.
Having visited China on a number of occasions, I have seen the problems its people face and the way they have, since the Cultural Revolution tackled the problem of sustainability. So I know that the sad stories in the media, of children, left to die in orphanages, are only a small part of the story.
During the late 1960s, China which has some of the world's leading botanists and agronomists, came to the conclusion that although it could feed one billion people, it could not go on meeting the needs of an ever increasing population. So it instituted the controversial policy of the one child family.
The world wagged fingers of scorn and warned that there would be problems. There were and, sadly, the policy did not work for today many families are having or even three children.
However, recent surveys of students show that the majority young people agree that one per couple is the only way and the vast majority wants to delay marriage beyond the legal age. If only China had gone down the road of population concern some 25 years earlier, it have solved the problem in a equitable way and these could now be planning for two spring.
Malnutrition and rural poverty are symptoms of over population. The Return to the Dying Rooms TV programme highlights a related issue that stems from a much wider ranging culture of son preference and the inequality of the girl child.
This culture is still widespread in many countries which are storing up all sorts of problems for the future. It is already manifest in rural China where, in some areas, there are 28 single men (between the ages of 25 and 44) for every single woman. Little wonder that Blind Date type programmes top the television charts.
Recently an unlikely people the Italians emerged as a ground breaking nation with the smallest family size, the 1.2 child family. Italy's population is now falling.
The reason it was able to happen was at least in part because of a law on abortion that was passed in 1978, a law which was then looked upon as the most lenient in Europe. Four years later, legal abortion among women between the ages of 15 and 44 had risen to 19.7 per 1,000. In the next 10 years it gradually decreased to 11 per 1,000, slightly lower than in Britain.
AS WE approach the millennium and the world's population explodes past the six billion mark at the rate of 2.9 extra people every second, the real problems facing us are the following.
All the world's fish stocks are being exploited to the limit and 75 per cent of them are in decline.
Since peaking in 1990, world production of grain has fallen. Part of the reason is that crop varieties, new and old, are no longer responding to ever rising levels of fertiliser application and the soil structure is collapsing, so much so that in September 1995 there was only a paltry 49 days' supply left in the world's granaries.
That is dangerous living for governments that pride themselves on keeping food prices low, let alone the rising number of nations that survive on grain imports and handouts and it has profoundly dangerous implications for the future of the world itself.
In China, the problem once again hit critical mass as the Yellow River, which is of crucial importance for irrigation and industrialisation, dried up 610km from the sea.
When it comes to sustainability, the west has much to learn from China for, from, those willow pattern "landscapes which are not particularly well endowed with top grade agricultural soils, it has contrived to feed its 1.2 billion people adequately its chosen method is, of course, semi organic agriculture.
Until recently, 14 of China's 15 largest cities had their own firm belts or xians which, though integrated, were kept separate from industrial and other areas. Kept fertile with treated farm and human waste, they supply most of the vegetables, grain, fruit and meat required by the cities' inhabitants, thus minimising the problems of transport, the use of non renewables and sludge dumping.
Shanghai was not only the location for the Dying Rooms. It is also home to more than 14 million people. Situated at the mouth of the Chang Jiang River, soon to be tamed by the world's largest hydroelectricity scheme in the beautiful Three Gorges, in 1968 this great city was self sufficient in vegetables and produced most of its grain, and a good part of its pork and poultry, within the xian administered by the city.
Shanghai needs a sludge incinerator artificial fertiliser and the wrong of industrial development all offer to China from the west like the Chinese needed opium the time the western world tried to a hand in their development.
Yet the single issue vested interests past are there in their hordes, a new opiate sustainable development.
SUSTAINABLE development, the post Rio battle cry, the, vision of Gro Harlem Brundtland, was harpooned by the Norwegian fleets in order to at the now protected stocks of whales, and is being hijacked an excuse for getting fat cat hands the little that is left of the world's lands and the resources of sustainable ways of life.
If the western way of life is to be the role model, why are our dole so long, why are the infra of so many of our cities falling to pieces, why are there more teenagers in American prisons in American universities? And are America's national parks opened up to logging, mining, ranching and hotel chains?
She answer is unsustainability too many people demanding too much of the resources of the earth.
With the Colorado River rarely making it to the Gulf of Mexico and the population of India set to catch with that of China, both in terms numbers and in the imbalance of male female ratio, this is no time complacency. Time has run out world must not condone infanticide, sexual discrimination of any sort, or the profligate use of nonrenewable resources.
The good news is that Spain and Croatia have joined Italy as world leaders in family planning. They too have what are in effect one child families, by choice, not coercion.
Now the women of Ireland are having on average only two children. This shows a huge change in attitude for as recently as 1961, 20 per cent of births were to women with five to nine previous children. They are welcoming the opportunities offered by modern reproductive health care, including modern methods of family planning, services still not available to an estimated 350 million couples in the less developed world.
I pray the Irish people will not lose faith and will continue to work for change at home and abroad, to reject dogma and do all in their power to help build a truly sustainable Ireland.
Since I put forward these views recently in the UK, the only negative comment I received was one of pontification. 1 will continue so to do, for pontification means building bridges, bridges of hope for all our future.
