From an October 2011 article at Human Life International World Watch, a “pro-life and pro-family” organization dedicated to monitoring “anti-life forces operat[ing] under the radar implementing their destructive agenda”:

…You would think, in an empty nation like Kazakhstan, there would be groups encouraging peo­ple to have more children, but ex­actly the opposite is the case. Fam­ily Health International and USAID distribute contraceptives by the ton, the Population Council writes long reports supporting the continued availability of abortion for any rea­son or no reason at all, and, of course, the lethal alphabet soup of the United Nations coordinates ev­erything — UNAIDS, CEDAW, UNDESA, UNDP, UNIFEM, and the omnipresent UNFPA.

Nobody could explain why all of these population control groups are necessary in a nation that has an average of only 15 people per square mile.

The answer lies in the nation’s natural resources. Kazakhstan is rich in manganese, chromium, cop­per, cobalt, gold, uranium, coal, nat­ural gas, and, of course, oil. The core principle of National Securi­ty Study Memorandum 200 of 1974 is certainly operative here: “The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. . . . Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth­rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource sup­plies and to the economic interests of the United States.”

In other words, a large popula­tion is a strong population, and the people of such a nation will want to use their own natural resources; so North America, Europe, Austra­lia, and Japan do all they can to hold down the population of Ka­zakhstan so we can get our hands on its minerals and other treasures.