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Population Action Plan Workshop – planning for the future

The Population Commission held their latest Population Action Plan workshop in American Samoa at the Rex Lee Auditorium this past Friday morning. Samoa News had the chance to interview one of the workshop coordinators, DOC’s Leifiloa Tanoi Felise – who stated that “the mission and goal of this program is to raise awareness in population growth, and to find results.”

 

The workshop included various government agencies and a few private sector businesses with the purpose of listing out action plans. Felise mentioned that there were specific people sitting in specific groups to determine actions that we’ll need to take locally within the next five years.

 

According to Felise, the people that were invited to this workshop were selected based upon their leads that would facilitate “immigration, reproductive health, education, youth and gender issues, integrated planning development, as well as the environment.”

 

The Population Action Plan workshop started back in 2008 with their first Population Summit. Their second summit was held in 2013, based on the Territorial Population Policy Plan. Last Friday was the third summit to be held in American Samoa to implement the Population Action Plan.

 

Felise told Samoa News that their mission is to raise awareness regarding the dramatic increase in population on the planet. “In several years — since1985 to now — we’ve seen more than two billion people come into this world.”

 

She stated, “with the increase in population, we’ll need to increase the advancement of health care services for them, we need to provide education, we’ll need to ensure that there is food security and that there’s enough for them to eat, as well as providing them with a healthy and safe environment.”

 

Felise mentioned that “there are limited resources, so we have to be protective of our Earth. We have so many people that we’ll need to share all of these with, and American Samoa is the only US territory that actually has a population commission that is actually trying to address these issues.”

 

One of the examples that Felise used as a fear factor in population issues was the recent shortage of imported products. “We live on an island, and just recently there was the California shipping strike, and because of that, the importation of food was stopped.”

 

She added, “we were limited to certain items, and we had to look to our land for resilience – these are just some of the problems that come with the population increase.”

 

The one day workshop was held all day this past Friday with the determination to provide an action plan through the various group discussions. The outcome or results of this workshop will be presented to Governor Lolo Matalasi Moliga for his review.

 

In conclusion, Felise wanted to send out the Populations Commission’s acknowledgement to those who have supported them in making this third population summit possible. “I’d like to acknowledge some of the people we work with—the commissioners are the DYWA, the Attorney Generals Office, DOH, LBJ Hospital, DOE, DOC – and our partners, those we work with at the NGO Population Connection, as well as the U.N. Population Fund.”