ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses how modernization theory, relying on certain Malthusian precepts, advanced the interests of Western capitalism during and after the Cold War. He discusses how it rationalized the advance of commercial agriculture and therefore helped to sustain policies that exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, many of the structural inequalities that were inherited from the colonial past. While rural unemployment linked to the advance of commercial agriculture can be shown to be perhaps the major cause of migration in the developing world, such movements are nonetheless still widely attributed to Malthusian pressures. Malthusian thinking has tended to discourage any substantive critique of Kenyan development policy by separating demographic from socio-economic factors. When population growth is lower and the Kenyan economy is in crisis – though the Bank would argue that point – the Bank actually tends to regard AIDS as the main impediment to sustained economic prosperity in sub-Saharan Africa.
