Bashir calls for population growth for development

President Umar Hasan al-Bashir has called on Sudanese men to take multiple wives and provide for the country’s future labour needs by reproducing, the Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported on Wednesday. Bashir told members of the National Congress ruling party that families should ease their conditions for marriage to make it affordable to the majority of the population, the report stated. Being Africa’s largest country and blessed with enormous resources, Sudan needed to double its population [which is around 30 million] in order to develop and protect those resources, he added. Bashir also encouraged the Sudanese people to ignore (unnamed) western organisations promoting birth control, saying that such policies were at odds with the country’s national interest, according to MENA. The UN’s population division has published a figure of 28.9 million for the 1999 population of Sudan, and 29.5 million for the population last year. The total fertility rate of women was estimated at 4.9 children per woman in 1995-2000, down from 6.7 children per woman back in 1970-1975, according to the UNDP’s “2001 Human Development Report”, published last month. The annual population growth rate was about 2.5 percent over 25 years to 1999, but is expected to average about 2.1 percent up to 2015 - giving a population then of some 42.4 million (almost half of that urban), the report stated. The UNDP published an income per capita of US $664 (adjusted against a base figure to allow for differences in cost of living across countries and regions) and indicated a life expectancy at birth of 55.6 years in last month’s publication. Sudan is a low human development country, ranked 138 of 162, according to a wide range of income, health, education and human progress criteria taken into account in devising the UNDP’s Human Development Index.