"G8 leaders must invest in protecting women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and family planning. It is their human right, and it will also protect the environment, drive development, and safeguard global security." This article was published in New Europe on 2nd May 2011.

The world’s gaze is focused on rebuilding the global financial system, and later this month in Deauville, France, G8 leaders will discuss how they can make it more moral and ethical. But in the shadow of these challenges to the West’s affluence there is a ticking time bomb, which we cannot afford to neglect any longer: population dynamics, and the totally unsustainable demographic shape that the world is rapidly acquiring. A change that is happening because the human rights of half the population of the developing world are being disregarded: women are not free to decide upon the number of children they will have. A change that would not be happening if world leaders were living up to the commitments they made to reaching the Millennium Development Goals.

In my lifetime the world’s population has more than doubled, from little over 3 billion in the early 1960s to almost 7 billion now. This rocketing growth has been largely fuelled by countries in the developing world like Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, where annual population growth is over 3% and they now have 50% more people today than a decade ago. And this trend will continue, as half of Uganda’s current population is under 15, will soon be old enough to reproduce, but will have little (or no) control over whether and when they will reproduce.

The strain that these burgeoning populations place on all the available natural and human resources and services around them is far too great for the needs of all citizens to be satisfactorily met. Huge sectors of these societies are inevitably going to be brought up undernourished, uneducated, and doing more damage to the planet than it can sustainably absorb. And the cycle will repeat itself, with mass involuntary pregnancies being the result of young populations who have not been educated about their reproductive systems, with no access to family planning.

If the developed world remains inactive in the face of this exponential demographic growth, the future of humanity as a whole will be bleak. For the problems of poverty, starvation, ill health and environmental degradation across the developing world will not stop at national borders. They will put the developed countries at risk as well, breeding problems that will spill over and explode in developed countries. These include mass global migration, the threat of terrorism (caused by the anger of young men living in poverty and looking for the causes of their problems), and spiraling food prices as agricultural productivity falls. If there are too many people in the world then we will all suffer.

Solutions exist that stand to slow down demographic growth and speed up economic growth in the long term, which will do so by allowing young women their human right to decide about when they will have children. We must educate families about the positive implications of having only as many children as their resources will allow and enabling them all to be educated; we must allow women to become the masters of their reproductive health and their destinies; and we must allow women to receive an education. The crucial ingredients in a recipe that is required to enable everyone to advance: and to advance not just for a short period, but in a sustained and self-replicating way.

In Paris on 16th and 17th May at the National Assembly, Members of Parliaments from around the world who support this cause will be gathering with experts from the academic and professional communities. Ahead of the G8 Summit in Deauville we will be discussing the importance of global action to prioritise “Girls and Population: the forgotten drivers of Development”, and generating a global parliamentary call to the G8 leaders to address the issue that is at the root of all development challenges.

Rapid population growth is the result of the absence of the human right to control one’s fertility. And this in turn is the first domino in a series of other breaches of human rights, including the lack of access to food, clean drinking water and education. I therefore hereby invite members of the international community to put population at the heart of their development agendas. Empowered women and educated communities are the first step in driving population-focused development that has a substantive and sustained impact.

George Tsereteli, MP, is vice-Chairman of the National Parliament of Georgia and President of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development.