The United Nations Food Population Fund recently issued a new report warning that climate change pushes women into prostitution.
From GMA News:
Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.
“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection,” Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.
Although this is a tragic tale, and one with a clear-cut solution (stop climate change! Cut emissions now!) it’s not really true. The world’s poor are stuck in their permanent underclass status because they don’t have better opportunities available, and have a limited number of (sometimes unsavory) professions to choose from.
Mine Your Own Business, a great movie by filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McIlhenney, documents how environmentalists – bent on preserving the environment and what they perceive to be an indigenous way of life – have actually prevented economic development that would provide the world’s poor with real, sustainable options. In trying to maintain the “quaintness” of rural areas, they deprive the poor of the choice to improve their lot. Nobody wants to be poor – but in many cases, they don’t have the chance to become anything else. Of course, this creates a big market for development professionals to distribute aid to needy people… but I digress.
What do poor women really need? They need infrastructure to get goods to market. They need microloans to give them the seed capital to start their own businesses. They need education. They don’t need the UN lecturing them about slowing population growth rates and bureaucratic reports on population dynamics.
(PS: Check out the Heritage Foundation’s guide to 100 storylines blamed on global warming.)