ABSTRACT
For almost half a century now, international organisations have been preoccupied with the uncontrolled growth of the world’s population. Post-war demographic trends—a declining mortality rate with a fertility rate stable at high figures in many geographical regions—clearly seemed to indicate an accelerating increase in population growth. This led the United Nations to create a Population Council in 1946, whose role, defined in 1948, was to provide advice not only on current population trends and the interaction of demographic and socio-economic factors, but also on policy measures destined to modify the size and structure of population. The United Nations also sponsored a series of World Conferences on Population, providing a forum for international organisations to voice their concerns. The very first of these conferences, at Rome in 1954 and at Belgrade in 1965, assembled individual researchers around an essentially scientific agenda; though no policy decisions came from these meetings, they nonetheless greatly contributed to general knowledge and public awareness of demographic trends and problems. It was only after the creation, for more pragmatic purposes, of the United Nations Funds for Activities in Population Matters, that the succeeding conferences at Bucharest (1974), Mexico (1984), and Cairo (1994) became policy-oriented, with official representation from participating countries.[1]
