representatives from 170 nations gather in Cairo next month for the th ird International Conference on Population and Development, they will vote on th e largest population-control plan in history. It is ambitious. Not only does it call for a host of ¡°reproductive fights¡± and aim to freeze world population at 7 2 billion people by 2050; it also calls for billions of dollars in new governme nt spending on the issue-US $ 13.2 billion by the end of the century.ª¥ 

Some of the plan¡¯s provisions have already aroused opposition, most notabl y from Pope John Paul II. All this has been gleefully covered by the newspapers. Yet scant attention has been paid to many of the dubious social and economic ass umptions that underlie the plan. In particular, it is interesting to see how the se programmes are being sold in places like the Philippines, on the front lines of the population debate. For the way the proponents of population control have gone about pushing their programmes raises serious doubts about the integrity of their studies, their ultimate value to development, and the role of foreign-aid groups.ª¥ 

Although population-control measures in the Philippines never reached the coercive levels they did in India, they were not popular. This time, proponents have learned their lesson. For the past few years, they have been quietly laying the groundwork for Cairo. Rather than attack the issue head-on, it has been red efined in terms of a host of new¡°reproductive rights¡±to which the solution is invariably a government-funded initiative.ª¥  

We have just had a good taste of this in the Philippines. The National Sta tistics Office recently published the results of the 1993 National Demographic S urvey(NDS),which happens to have been funded by the U.S. Agency for Internationa l Development. It is probably mere coincidence, but the NDS report, published on the eve of the Cairo meeting, nicely supports the thrust of the Cairo Declarati on. That is, i