Commercial and professionally controlled health care is too expensive for the poor people who may have to spend at least 40% of their earnings on prescription drugs. What they spend on medicines and doctors they cannot spend on food, so the children do not have enough to eat and get sick easily.

Health care costs are becoming too expensive both for governments and for patients. In Britain in 1995, the National Health Service accounted for 15% of government spending and 6% of the gross domestic product (GDP), equivalent to £670 per capita.

In Germany in 1996, workers were spending 14.5% of their gross wages on health insurance. National spending on hospitalizations rose 36%, and spending on doctors and dentists 29% between 1991 and 1995. The government intends to allow insurers more flexibility in determining premiums and what they will cover in an effort to reduce costs.

Many rural communities seem to use only a part of the supportive network which is potentially available to them, all requests for help being directed to bureaux, departments and agencies of various government bodies to the exclusion of private support sources. Such requests often do not receive a positive response because many villages have too small a population to fit the guidelines established for public development programmes, which must serve the needs of the whole district or nation and necessarily emphasize larger population centres. A second factor is that the public officials who are contacted tend to be those known personally to the village leadership. This does not allow for the intricacy and breadth of transaction which are necessary to deal with the public sector of any nation in the world today. As a result, residents are resigned to managing without basic facilities such as running water.

Increasing population density, urbanization, industrialization and other development schemes, are exerting ever increasing pressure on the carrying capacity of land and resources, leading in particular to a rapid rate of deforestation, expanding desertification in some countries, and the near extinction of some wildlife species. Physical factors such as earthquakes, hurricanes, monsoon rains and the immense problem of poverty in some countries accelerate the decline in environmental resources.

The unlawful introduction or removal into or from a country or place of any merchandise or person.