A Cornell University sociologist and the rector of the University of San Carlos, Guatemala, have ably edited this collection of background papers originally prepared for the Pan American Assembly on Population held in Cali, Colombia, during August 1965. These papers constitute the best balanced, the most carefully researched, and the most objective interpretation of Latin American demography that is readily available in English.
The first three articles employ massive statistical materials in analyzing Latin America’s population problem. In the fourth essay Frank W. Notestein chooses a contrasting philosophical approach. He disposes effectively of many of the arguments customarily used by such diverse intellectual groups as Marxists and Catholics to belittle the vital need for immediate birth limitation in Latin America. Notestein is particularly persuasive when he maintains: “The difficulty is not the size of the population. The difficulty is the rate of population growth, and the way in which growth impedes the process of modernization” (p. 93).
Essential agreement with this appraisal is implicit in the ensuing articles on housing, population growth, and economic development, on population growth and education, and on health, population, and development. Each of these essays stresses that solutions to problems of development will be much more elusive if the Latin American population continues to increase at its present rate, which is the highest in the world.
In a discussion of the Catholic Church and family planning the Colombian priest and sociologist Gustavo Pérez Ramírez presents both practical and theological reasons which he obviously hopes will induce the Church to abandon its traditional stand against birth control. At the present time, as Father Pérez and other contributors demonstrate, it is mainly the poor of Latin America who do not practice family limitation, for they have insufficient access to information and cannot afford contraceptive devices. Consequently the stand of the Church against the wide distribution of birth control information and implements helps to perpetuate lower-class poverty, as in the United States.
An article by Ramiro Delgado García and a concluding essay by Stycos stress the eagerness with which Latin American women seek the knowledge and the means of birth control. The reviewer wonders, however, if any of the contributors have adequately considered how to persuade Latin American men to face up to the population problem.
Theoretically, if the rate of population increase can be reduced, Latin American governments can invest in economically productive ventures vast sums of money which would otherwise be needed for social programs and services. To be sure, unless certain basic changes in social, political, and economic structure take place, there is no guarantee that what is saved as a result of population control will be productively invested. Although population control will not automatically solve development problems, however, there is little likelihood that effective strides can be taken toward modernization without it. That is why the present book is vitally important to anyone concerned with Latin America.
