By
The Associated Press
MOSCOW - The Russian Cabinet yesterday rallied behind a program aimed at countering the country's sharp population decline by working to improve health, encourage women to bear more children and foster immigration.
Yet some demographers were skeptical that a government program could solve the population problem, blamed largely on the social and economic disorder following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Heavy drinking, poor nutrition and medical care, and environmental pollution plague Russia. Low birth rates have combined with a short average life span to accelerate the problem. In a major speech last year, President Vladimir Putin warned that the nation's very survival was in jeopardy.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told the Cabinet yesterday that 1999 was the worst year, with a population drop of 768,000 or 0.5 percent.
A government study prepared for the Cabinet meeting said the population, which was 145.6 million in 2000, could fall by 2.8 million by 2005, the ITAR-Tass and Interfax news agencies reported.
"The decrease of the able-bodied population of the Russian Federation is not just a social problem, it is a problem of whether our state will develop successfully or unfavorably," Kasyanov said.
"If this is not resolved, the economy will soon begin experiencing a labor shortage," Interfax quoted Kasyanov as saying.
The Cabinet tentatively approved a program aimed at stemming the decline, which was drawn up by the Ministry of Labor and Social Development. The ministry was given until June 1 to elaborate a more detailed program on improving the nation's health, increasing the birth rate and boosting immigration.
Average life expectancy for Russian men was 59.8 years in 1999, the last year for which figures are available, said Maria Shabalina, a spokeswoman for the State Statistics Committee. Life expectancy for women was 72.2 years.
Vladimir Sorokin, head of the State Statistics Committee, said population decline for the next 20 to 30 years is inevitable.
Russia today is missing "the unborn people of those millions of our fellow citizens who died as a result of World War I, the civil war, all the revolutionary events, the famine of the 1930s and so on," he said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
Murray Feshbach, an expert on Russian demography at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, forecast the population will keep dropping, partly because of an "incredible increase" in deaths from AIDS and tuberculosis, he said was expected.
Feshbach said it would be difficult for Russia to double its birth rate, which is what demographers estimated would be necessary to maintain the current population.
Some people have suggested increasing government aid to families with children, but Feshbach and Sorokin said that was unlikely to stimulate enough births.
"What they have to do is change attitudes and expectations and health services and conditions," Feshbach said.
Nor would immigration provide an easy solution, said Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Center for Demography and Human Ecology.
"I don't think the country is ready for that, either economically or even psychologically," Vishnevsky told ORT television.
