Ambassador Fust,
Commissioner Nielson,
Madam Obaid,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It gives me great pleasure
to welcome you to the Palais des Nations
and the European Population Forum 2004.
This Forum is the latest in a long series
of regional meetings on population issues
and policies in UNECE countries that the
UNECE has held since the early 1980s. The
UNECE organised one of these meetings jointly
with the Council of Europe and several of
them jointly with the United Nations Population
Fund, the co-organiser of this Forum. The
most important of these meetings were the
ministerial-level European Population Conference
(EPC) held in Geneva in 1993 in preparation
for the International Conference on Population
and Development, and the Ministerial Conference
on Ageing (MCA) held in Berlin in 2002.
The Governments of Switzerland and Germany
hosted these two conferences respectively.
All the previous UNECE
population meetings were intergovernmental
events, which negotiated and adopted final
documents, the most important of which were
the 1993 EPC Recommendations and the 2002
MiCA Regional Implementation Strategy. This
Forum is a unique event insofar as it is
a high-level expert meeting attended by
experts from the executive and legislative
branches of governments, academia and research
institutions, inter-governmental and non-governmental
organisations, and the private sector. The
expert format of the event will provide
you with an opportunity for a free and constructive
exchange of views without challenging you
to negotiate and adopt a final document.
I am convinced that during
the next three days you will make the best
of the opportunity that the Forum provides
you to address old and newly emerging population
issues, globally and in the UNECE region,
and to identify requisite policy responses
consistent with opportunities and constraints
that are inherent to our societies. I do
hope that the Chair summary of the Forum,
which will be finalised soon after the Forum,
will become a useful guide for the future
work of UNECE and UNFPA in the population
field and that it will provide an important
input into a broader population debate in
Europe, in particular in its various intergovernmental
fora.
Let me now address some
of the current and prospective salient population
developments common to much of Europe along
with the challenges they pose to our societies
and their various stakeholders. Europe is
currently in a unique epoch in its population
history. Some governments and population
scholars have recently suggested that from
a demographic point of view we are at a
crossroads. I share these characterisations
to the extent that they suggest that Europe
is moving into a new demographic regime,
a regime not known to Europeans in their
recent history.
What are its characteristics?
One of them is stagnation and an imminent
decline, initially in the working-age population
and labour force and later in the total
population, in a growing number of countries.
The decline in the total population has
already started in Central and Eastern Europe
and is beginning to spread to Southern Europe.
The United Nations demographers from New
York project that the combined population
of Europe proper will be smaller by some
96 million or 13 per cent in 2050 than it
was in 2000.
Next is the acceleration of the ageing of
our populations and a faster rise in old-age
dependency. The so-called demographic bonus
of ageing, which many European countries
enjoyed during the last few decades, is
quickly dissipating. European countries
have successfully coped with ageing so far,
but the challenges of ageing will only increase.
By the middle of this century the fastest
ageing populations, such as those of Italy
and Spain, will have around 40 per cent
of their people at age 60 and above.
The key root cause of the
prospective decline and ageing, especially
where these are expected to be most pronounced,
is low or very low fertility. Mortality
decline also increasingly contributes to
ageing. The current fertility depression,
particularly in Southern, Central and Eastern
Europe, but also in parts of Western Europe,
has been caused in part by a universal tendency
of family-formation postponement, including
the postponement of having children and
parenting. It appears that a major fertility
recovery will not follow the postponement
and, according to many expert views, low
fertility is here to stay. The key question
that you would need to deal with, is why
younger people opt for a family size that
does not ensure replacement of populations.
As the demographic balance
between Europe and the developing world
shifts in favour of the latter, there are
growing migration pressures on many European
countries. Moreover, as domestic labour
will sooner or later grew scarce, there
will be a growing need to rely on foreign
workers who will, only naturally, want their
families to join them. In view of this,
immigrant populations in many European countries
are poised to increase further in absolute
and relative terms, rendering Europe increasingly
multiethnic and multiracial. In addition
to this, as pointed out in one of the background
papers, immigration is only a part of the
solution as the number of immigrants required
in an average UNECE country to maintain
the population size, labour force and support
ratio annually is increasing and is hardly
sustainable.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Future developments will
provide both constraints and opportunities
for European societies. The challenge will
be for all policymaking actors - or more
broadly, for all stakeholders - in all policy
fields to rise to the occasion and help
our societies both adapt to the oncoming
changes and influence them in a positive
manner.
The Berlin Ministerial
Conference on Ageing recently showed the
way forward - towards innovative policy
responses to demographic change and population
ageing. More importantly, the Berlin agreements
are not just yet another document adopted
by an intergovernmental conference - they
are being put into practice as we speak,
for example in Germany, France, and Italy,
some of the countries currently implementing
pension reforms. The Berlin document has
adopted a holistic approach, considered
a society of all ages, called for coherent
and mutually supportive policies, and recommended
that ageing policies be mainstreamed in
all policy fields. These include the older-persons,
economic, labour-market, educational, social-security,
health, family and gender policy fields.
As you deliberate in the
coming days on the issues on the agenda,
I hope that you will formulate some revisions
on how to mainstream family issues, such
as partnering, childbearing and parenting,
as well as how to mainstream migration management
and integration of immigrant populations
into as many policy fields as appropriate.
Lastly, I hope that you will appreciate
the fact that there are numerous categories
of stakeholders that can make a contribution
to the formulation and implementation of
policies.
In conclusion let me suggest
that many issues that you will be discussing
are difficult and sometimes controversial.
However, I trust that you will debate them
in a constructive manner.
Thank you.
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