Secretary Rice Remarks at Summit on Global Aging

Secretary Rice Remarks at Summit on Global Aging

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Washington, DC
March 15, 2007

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jed, for the kind introduction. Thank you very much to the panelists. I heard a little bit of the tail end of it. It sounds like it was a very interesting panel. I want to thank all of you for coming. I understand that you've have productive sessions today and those sessions will help us to meet the challenges of aging that we face across the globe.

I want to thank especially Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt who opened the session earlier today and the National Institutes on Aging, which have been a partner in this effort, an effort that has been led for the State Department by Under Secretary Dobriansky.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak to you at today's Summit on Global Aging. The event has served to sharpen two key points in all of our minds. First, despite our best efforts to ignore it, none of us are getting any younger and I want to thank everybody for reminding me of that. (Laughter.)

But second, and more seriously, the fact that none of us is getting any younger, at this particular moment in time, represents perhaps one of the most significant opportunities, but also one of the greatest challenges that most nations will face in this young century.

Global aging is an opportunity, indeed, it's a wonderful blessing, for the simple reason that humankind's most fundamental desire -- the desire to live longer and healthier lives -- is now being realized, and realized not just in wealthy nations, but also in developing nations. This means that more children of the world will have the opportunity to know their grandparents, perhaps even their great-grandparents, and to look forward to full lives in which to realize their many dreams.

Our long lives are a celebration of human achievement – but the reality of aging populations, in a majority of nations, is also creating profound challenges. And ironically, the policy implications of aging are made all the more inevitable and more challenging because few issues are so common, and because they are common and because aging is inevitable, perhaps sometimes they seem -- these policy issues -- to lack urgency. They seem, like aging itself, to be a simple fact of life: hard to cope with at times, better if not thought about too hard, and ultimately nothing to get worked up about.

But the facts tell a different story and all of us are familiar with them. We know, for example, that every five minutes this year in the United States , 23 adults are turning 65 -- and that in less than 20 years that number doubles. We know, too, that the United Nations Population Division predicts that by mid-century, across the globe, the elderly will outnumber the young for the first time in human history. And of course, we know that these trends do not apply only in developed nations. In fact, they're even more dramatic in certain parts of the world. China , for example, is expected to have 265 million citizens over the age 65 by the year 2020.

It is data like these that led one of Washington's leading think tanks to declare, and I quote, "No challenge is as certain as global aging, and none is as likely to have as large and enduring an effect -- on the size and shape of government budgets, on the future growth in living standards, and on the stability of the global economy and even the world order."

The implications of these statistics, while seemingly small now, will have much bigger implications for our future. Nations like ours need to begin thinking boldly and seriously about how we will meet the challenges of global aging -- for one of the most elemental social understandings that exists in nearly every society, especially in democratic ones, is that the young will help to care for the elderly when they become less able to care for themselves. This understanding touches on every single aspect of our national experience -- from health and retirement, to economic growth and labor markets, even to the most intimate dynamics of family life.

But we also need to realize that, in today's interdependent world, how one nation addresses a challenge like this has international implications. As today's conference suggests, aging is indeed a global issue. It will have a significant impact on the global economy, and perhaps also on international security. We must also do a lot to more integrate the issues of aging into our international discussions and our foreign policy.

Here, we still have a lot of work to do, including in the United States . I'll tell you a story. Our Government has plenty of development assistance programs geared toward children and young people and well we should. But leading up to this conference, I wanted to know whether we also had development efforts focused exclusively on the elderly, or perhaps even the relationship between the elderly and the young. There are a few. But we need to be ready to do more in this area and it is an area that development assistance professionals should explore.

The impact of global aging is enormous and complex. It is an issue that is happening now and at an accelerating pace. Nations around the world are taking notice of the challenges of aging, but too many are still wrestling with them independent of one another, when we all stand to benefit from sharing our common solutions to these common problems. One of the key goals of this summit is to begin a conversation that will stimulate dialogue, encourage collaboration, and promote national and international research that will help to provide the answers that we need.

So let us continue to learn from each other about how we are tackling the challenges of aging.

Let us do even more to share our research, and our experiences, and our best practices and our knowledge of what policies are effective. And let us never forget that aging truly is the greatest of opportunities. We have an entire generation, living longer than ever before and imparting to us wisdom and knowledge and life lessons that our ancestors could only have dreamed of having the benefit of. Aging provides an unprecedented opportunity, for us as a world to learn, to cherish and to prepare for those who have blazed paths before us. What a wonderful and humanizing experience that is. The United States is eager to work shoulder to shoulder with our international partners to address the concerns of our aging citizens. So thank you for coming out today to begin the conversation. Thank you. (Applause.)

# # #

2007/196

ENDS

© Scoop Media