The Emergence of New Priorities for International Population Assistance: The Years of Growing Policy and Program Discord

Abstract

A major event of the 1970s was the UN Conference on Population and Development that took place in Bucharest, Rumania, in 1974. Delegates from developing countries came prepared to do battle with the cost-benefit arguments then being put forward as a justification for family planning. Since Western economists had made the underlying calculations, the delegates sensed a threat to substitute family planning for broader development support. They expressed their concern with the sloganized argument, which gained considerable currency, that “development is the best contraceptive”—a highly distracting argument that led some family planning programs, such as Egypt’s Population Development Program (PDP), to undertake ambitious efforts to spur industrial and agricultural growth in an essentially vain bid to reduce fertility (Robinson and El-Zanaty 2005).