Your Excellency, Mr Toshitami Kaibara, Governor of Hyogo Prefecture, Mr Kazutos hi Sasayama, Mayor of Kobe, The Honorable Taro Nakayama, Chairman of Japan Parl ia-mentarians Federation for Population (JPFP), Mr Fukusaburo Maeda, Chariman, The Asian Population and Development Association, Mr V.T.Palan, Regional Direct or of the East and South East Asia and Oceania Region, International Planned Pa renthood Federa-tion (IPPF), my parliamentary colleagues, Iadies and gentlemen.

I very much appreciate for giving your precious time to come together to consid er matters that are of keen concern to us all.

Let me start by saying how overwhelmed with admiration I am at the unimaginable ef-forts that must have been exerted to achieve the miraculous reconstruction o f Kobe. The earthquake that struck the city was on such a scale that it left th e inhabitants helpless. In the face of such a disaster, human beings can only a spire to do his utmost to minimize the damage and hope that nature will be spar ing in its violence. In fact, human beings can only somehow strive to overcome such a tragedy and fmd new strength to get on with his life.

No human being can live beyond the limitations of his mother earth. We share ou r fate with that of our planet. Among our most pressing challenges we must remi nd ourselves that the production of food essential to our very survival is decr easing. While there will be, by certain estimates, a sufficient supply of food for the next twenty years or so, it is feared that the supply will not keep up with the world's population that continues to grow. To ensure that the future i s one of hope, we parliamentarians must grapple seriously with this issue.

It was with this perspective, as you will remember, that the AFPPD called on li ke-minded parliamentarians from all over the world who were committed to solvin g the problems of population and development to attend a meeting in Geneva on t he eve of the World Food Summit in Rome called the "International Meeting of Pa rliamentarians on Food Security, Population and Development." The Declaration a dopted at our meeting was distributed at the Summit and personally introduced b y our colleague, the Honorable Takao Fujimoto, Minister of Agriculture, Forestr y and Fisheries of Japan.

The theme for this year's APDA meeting is "Population, Water Resources and Deve lop-ment". My country Japan has always been endowed with water whose benefits o ur forefa-