Botswana
Figure I.2. Annual growth rate of countries in Southern Africa and Southern Asia (2015–2020 average)
(sources: Charbit (design); Opurez, IRD-Ceped (realization)). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/charbit/demographic.zip
I.3. The double Malthusian progression
Let us move on to economy, the other term of the dialectic between population and development. Alongside China, which has now become the world’s second economic power, we have seen the emergence of the Dragons (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and the Tigers (Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines) in Southeast Asia. Several countries in the Middle East (the Gulf countries and Iran), Latin America (Venezuela) and Africa (Algeria and Libya) have used oil and gas revenues politically and economically. As for the enormous potential of mining resources in Africa, the soaring prices of raw materials and of basic foodstuffs have resulted in a much higher gross domestic product (GDP) than in Europe, between 2000 and 2015. All of a sudden, the classic parallel drawn between demographic and economic growth has lost much of its meaning and, moreover, the pithy claim that the cause of poverty is the rapid growth of the population, itself driven by a high fertility rate, has been denied by developments in recent decades. This central question is therefore: Is demography the cause of underdevelopment?
Why is this claim so widely accepted today? Here, it is appropriate to recall the theory proposed by Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798. In his view, just like animal species, England’s poor behaved completely irresponsibly: unable to control their sexual impulses, they had far too many children relative to their meager resources (Malthus 1798). Under these conditions, they had to be held responsible for their misery. In this way, the economic and social inequalities created or reinforced by the policies of 19th-century European conservative governments (Charbit 1983, 2009) were legitimized. However, Malthus fell into oblivion from the mid-19th century with the decline in fertility of industrialized countries, to the point of fearing that low birth rates would eventually lead to the demographic decline of old Europe. The situation then took a new turn from the 1950s onwards with the realization of growing demographic trends in poor countries, especially in Asia. Western scientific and political circles were alarmed at the risk of an explosion in world population. In 1968, the work of biologist Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, had a huge impact. But while Ehrlich focused on the global level and addressed the issue of natural resource reserves in particular, it quickly appeared that the problem was not so much world population but rapid population growth in “Third World” countries – to use the term of those times – namely India with its demographic mass of 543 million in 1969 out of a world total of 3,625 billion that year. In short, according to the vision of the 1960s, largely inspired by neo-Malthusian ideas, the population of the Third World was increasing too quickly in relation to resources. Why “the Third World”?
In the Ancien Régime, besides the nobility and the clergy, the rest of the French people were regarded as members of the third state (“Tiers état”). The expression “Third World” is inspired by the declaration of one of the actors of the French Revolution, Abbé Sieyès, who proclaimed: “What is the third state? Everything. What has it been up to now in the political order? Nothing. What does it aspire to? To be something”. The concept was proposed in 1957 by demographer Alfred Sauvy, founder of the National Institute of Demographic Studies, and by anthropologist Georges Balandier, professor at Sorbonne University (Balandier 1956). In their mind, the issue was not only demographic, it was also economic and political, since compared to the capitalist world and the Soviet blocks, all the poor countries made up a third group. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that from the 1960s onwards a considerable effort was made, since it was absolutely necessary to keep the population growth of poor countries under control. Private foundations (Population Council, Rockefeller Foundation), non-profit organizations (International Planned Parenthood Federation, Mary Stopes International, etc.), international institutions (the United Nations Population Fund), and later the World Bank all joined forces in order to achieve this. The methods used were generally incentive-based, sometimes coercive with total disregard of human rights, especially in the case of abortion and of male/female sterilization. The pressure exerted by Western countries soon aroused strong opposition. In Bucharest in 1974, during the first World Population Conference, an Action Plan was drawn up with the aim of reducing the growth rate in world population. Since the population of rich countries grew slowly, it was clear that this plan involved considerable effort on the part of developing
