The World Population Conference, held in Bucharest in 1974, began a once-a-decade political evaluation of the world's progress. At each of these get-togethers, the era's political schisms have been played out in debates that have touched on some of the most personal and politically charged decisions in people's lives. Thus in 1974, the gathering of more than a thousand delegates from 136 countries became an occasion for heated sniping between socialist countries of the East and capitalist countries of the West. It was also a stage upon which to battle over the ideological schisms dividing the impoverished South and the rich North.
The chief delegate of Algeria, who chaired a working group at the conference involved with drafting a World Population Plan of Action, led the developing nations' attack on the document, demanding that the plan should include redistributing the world's wealth in a so-called New International Economic Order and blaming much of the world's poverty not on overpopulation but on the West's overconsumption of resources. China's chief delegate similarly argued that "the primary way of solving the population problem lies in combating the aggression and plunder of the imperialists╔."
After days of often acrimonious debate, a compromise was delicately negotiated in which Western governments accepted that controlling population and reordering the world economy were not mutually contradictory. The plan included guarantees that no program would be imposed globally on individual nations-a principle adhered to during the following decades.
While the conference helped to spread the message that for countries to thrive economically they must stabilize their population, the plan of action drawn up in Bucharest was woefully lacking in specific programs. A disappointed Julia Henderson, still head of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1974, complained that the document "virtually amounts to no plan, no action."
The mid-1970s saw a growing realization that population programs were doomed to fail if women were not actively involved in formulating them. Yet most delegates to Bucharest were men, and Rafael Salas while grasping the critical need to strengthen the right of women to determine family size, focused heavily on building the political consensus and less on building women's capacity to decide family size.
In the years following the Bucharest conference, it was clear that family planning successes depended heavily on the religious and political peculiarities of each country. At this time, too, Africa emerged as the continent most likely to present severe population problems. In some countries, women-particularly in rural areas-saw having numerous children as a way to ease their workload and enhance their social standing. Where the infant mortality rate was still high, having more children increased the chance that some offspring would survive into adulthood. And in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, the constitution tied federal representation to the number of people living in each area.
"Each community regarded as suicidal absurdity any effort to reduce its fertility rate," says Omari Kokole, a Ugandan academic now teaching at the State University of New York in Binghamton.
So far, only a few African countries have been able to check their birth rates. Although more and more Africans have access to birth-control methods, the continent now is the fastest-growing region in the world. By the United Nations' 50th anniversary in 1995, UN demographers were warning that within a century, Africa-though least able to afford it- could have about double the population of the industrialized countries.
By the time of the second Global Population Conference, held in Mexico City in 1984, there was almost universal agreement that world population growth had to be brought under control, with or without dramatic economic reforms. "In Bucharest, there was a sense that, if we just developed everyone, you didn't need family planning programs," recalls Joseph Speidel. Speidel spent 14 years setting up population programs in the developing world for the US Agency for International Development. "By the time of the Mexico conference, that thinking had vanished," said Speidel, who had since become the head of Population Action International, an advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. "It was amazing to me. It seemed there had been substantial change."
That change left the American delegates isolated. Under the guidance of President Ronald Reagan, delegation head James L. Buckley announced that the US would freeze millions of dollars to UN and private population programs, which the Americans claimed indirectly financed abortions and subsidized coercive family planning policies. Sensitive to their powerful anti-abortion supporters a few hundred miles north of the conference hall, US delegates argued strongly for programs driven by economic development. "The Americans, "said a delegate from the conservative British government, "will be totally alone on this."
Jason L. Finkle, a University of Michigan professor who has written widely about UN population policies, noted that the US's hard-line approach had an unintended effect. "Donor countries and developing countries alike departed with a renewed commitment to strengthening population policies and programs." In retrospect, this was the real news from Mexico City.
By: Vivienne Walt, (excerpt from The Population Challenge), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones & Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
