On 22 September 1991, nine months before the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, a United Nations Midwest Public Hearing on Environment and Development was held in Des Moines, Iowa.
A document from that hearing noted the pressing need to reduce the world’s population. “The immediate reduction of world population, according to the mid-1970s recommendation of the Draper Fund, must be immediately affected,” the document stated.
The document stated that one of the policies to be implemented was that “all nations [will] have quotas for population reduction on a yearly basis, which will be enforced by the [UN] Security Council by selective or total embargo of credit, items of trade including food and medicine, or by military force, when required.”
The Midwest Public Hearing was sponsored by the United Nations Associations (“UNA”) of the United States, Canada and Iowa in cooperation with the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (“UNCED”).
The purpose of the hearing was to hear grassroots testimony on issues about energy, sustainable agriculture and institutions. Testimony given at the hearing was then to be forwarded to “appropriate national leaders who will prepare the US national report that will determine US policy at the 1992 UNCED ‘Earth Summit’ Conference.”
There have been several environmental conferences over the decades. The 1992 Earth Summit, also called ECO-92 or Rio-92, was the second after the 1972 Stockholm Conference. One of the documents to come out of the Earth Summit was Agenda 21. A useful article for a concise overview of the various conferences is ‘Environmental conferences: ECO-92, Kyoto Protocol and more!’.
