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Article ID: CBB665827693

Population control, public health, and development in mid twentieth century Latin America (2018)

Carter, Eric D. (Author)

Journal of Historical Geography
Volume: 62
Pages: 96-105
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2018.03.012

URI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748817302128

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Feminism Women Rural conditions Agriculture Nutrition Public health Political ecology Population control Family planning 20th century Latin America

Despite the influence of neo-Malthusian thinking in international development and environmental policy during the mid twentieth century, this story is often told from a US-centered perspective, with population control policies seen to roll out from the world geopolitical centers to the 'Global South' via the influence of large development institutions. Latin American perspectives on the population control question are seldom considered, except to suggest that the Catholic Church provided consistent, organized opposition to the expansion of family planning services. In this paper, using an political-intellectual history approach, I explore how the population question intersected with interrelated development issues in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century: health and nutrition, food and agriculture, rural livelihoods, economic dependency, and women's rights. I focus on the relationship between public health crises and pro-natalist policies; the influences of the eugenics movement in supporting national population growth as a biopolitical strategy; anarcho-feminist thought that stressed the emancipatory potential of fertility control and new social roles for women; the Brazilian Josué de Castro's research on the causes of famine and malnutrition, which took a structuralist approach and explicitly rejected neo-Malthusian and other environmentally determinist approaches to understand the causes of poverty and hunger; and Latin American engagements with the international family planning and population control agenda in the 1960s. With this history in mind, we can trace alternative intellectual roots of political ecology's critique of neo-Malthusianism and other deterministic environment-development theories.

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