The development of population policies

UNTIL recently the tendency has been to look at African population largely in terms of crude density. From this standpoint tropical Africa was often rated as ‘underpopulated’, and even the recent and prestigious Pearson Commission, although noting the overall effect of population growth on development, stated blandly: ‘In Africa and Latin America…settlement is so sparse that it is impossible to speak of overpopulation.’ 1 Yet two years before, by synthesising a number of land-use studies and by demonstrating that, in terms of available land suitable for agriculture and pastoralism, there was pressure on rural resources, a prominent geographer had attacked, and one would have thought, had laid to rest, this argument. I do not wish to reiterate his case. 2 Instead, using his article as a base, I will attempt here to make very crude prognoses and predictions and then to look at their policy implications, both for the sector discussed by him and for other sectors of social and economic development.