Debating Overpopulation across the Americas during the Cold War

In 1952 Brazilian physician Josué de Castro, newly appointed chair of the U.N. FAO’s Executive Council, published a widely debated book entitled The Geography of Hunger. In it, he countered American conservationist William Vogt’s assertion (in the 1948 book Road to Survival) that human population growth threatened the global environment and must be drastically reduced, by coercion if necessary. De Castro countered with both optimism about the potential of new agricultural technologies to address food shortages and with a pointed critique of energy and natural resource consumption by affluent citizens of the United States and Europe. This salvo launched the Brazilian’s twenty-year effort to mobilize a counter-discourse to U.S.-driven “neo Malthusianism.” The influence of that critique was visible at an “environment forum” for NGOs held in tandem with the U.N.’s 1972 Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, at which De Castro (living in exile from Brazil’s right-wing military regime) played a prominent role. American biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb and advocate of zero population growth, presented at the forum, provoking outraged response from representatives of third-world nations. Two years later at the U.N.’s World Population Conference in Bucharest, delegates from Asia, Africa, and Latin America vigorously rejected American and European population reduction targets. They insisted that international development goals should focus on poverty mitigation and women’s empowerment, not simply population control. This paper examines the influence of Josué de Castro on global efforts to counter U.S.-driven depictions of global resource crisis that focused on overpopulation as the central problem in international development—and thus population control as the primary solution to resource scarcity. De Castro’s alternative framing centered on redressing global power imbalances that had persisted since the colonial era and curtailing resource use by the world’s wealthiest societies.