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The following article provides a commentary on the articles by Lush et al. and Wheeler, which are published in this section of the Bulletin, and gives some background information about the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which was held in Cairo in 1994.
In June 1999, the Twenty-first Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly reviewed the implementation of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which had been adopted in Cairo in September 1994. This represented the culmination of a series of activities to mark the fifth anniversary of what has become known as the Cairo consensus though consensus is something of a misnomer in the light of the controversies that marked the whole process. Following this introductory commentary, the articles by Lush et al. (pp. 771-777) and Wheeler (pp. 778-779) bring different perspectives to the debate on population and development, one from the point of view of the underlying philosophy, the other from a more technical and practical standpoint.
Wheeler asks whether something vital was lost in the process of reaching the Cairo consensus. He has a point. Though billed as a conference on population and development, detail about the nature and content of population policies is sketchy. The final document to emerge from the discussions at the Twenty-first Special Session of the UN General Assembly explicitly eschews making specific recommendations regarding population goals. It "does not quantify goals for population growth, structure and distribution" policies, confining itself instead to a general statement that "early stabilization of world population would make a crucial contribution to realizing the overarching objective of sustainable development"(1).
This tentative and restrained statement illustrates how much has changed since the 196(O2s when UNFPA was conceived and established with a mandate to raise awareness about the population "problem" and to assist developing countries in addressing it. At that time, the talk was of "standing room only" (2), "population bombs" (3), "demographic entrapment"(4) and scarcity of food, water and renewable resources (5). Concern about population dates back much further of course, to Malthus and his contemporaries and their analysis of the relationship between population growth and food availability. The Malthusian philosophy found a particular echo in India, which in 1952 was...