"Is the Arroyo government ready take the challenge to curb the burgeoning population as foreign donors of contraceptives phase out their donations?" asked Benjamin de Leon, president of the Forum for Family Planning and Development Inc.

Former Health Secretary Alberto Romualdez said the state of reproductive health in the country is "severe" with the bottom 20 percent of women still without access to modern methods of contraception.

The National Statistics Office has described the country's population growth of 2.36 percent as "explosive" or at a level where the support given by government cannot cope with population growth.

This growth rate from 1995 to 2000 was based on the last census in 2000 which placed the population at 76.5 million as of May 1, 2000.

The NSO projected in the 2000 census that the population will grow to 88.7 million this year.

Romualdez noted government was informed of the phase-out of aid from the US Agency for International Development as early as 1998.

"We had 10 years of warning....The national government should be helpful to the local government units in more material ways than simply providing them with guidelines and additional obstacles to their access to (family planning options)," he said.

The Philippines has been receiving free supply of contraceptives from the USAID for more than 30 years.

The agency, however, started to gradually lower its donation and has completely stopped providing free condoms since 2004.

By 2008 and 2009, the supply of free oral pills and injectables will also be stopped.

Dr. Honorata Catibog, head of the Family Planning Service of the Department of Health, said the safety nets that should have been put in place before the phase-out were not realized as planned.

Catibog said one of these safety nets was the LGUs' being able to identify, through "client segmentation," which residents should be prioritized in the distribution of whatever is left of the donated commodities.

De Leon asked for the release of the P180 million allotted for family planning in the General Appropriations Act of 2007.

An additional P150 million was allotted by Congress on top of the usual P30 million for the regular operations of the DOH on family planning.

The P150 million "augmentation fund," however, has never been made available.

"We would like to ask the government to allocate the budget for its intended beneficiaries. We all know that unless we find solutions to the problem of ballooning populace, all our efforts to end poverty will be put waste adding that our resources are unequally distributed to the people," said De Leon.

Romualdez said the fund is just half of the amount of aid annually given under the USAID program, which is P300 million.