Overpopulation or land maldistribution? Cold War development discourse viewed from Brazil

• In Event: Science, Technology, and Medicine in Latin America: New Directions in Historical Research

Abstract

This paper centers on the career and writing of Northeast Brazilian doctor and social scientist Josué de Castro. His influential critique of global poverty, The Geography of Hunger (first published in 1946), was translated into over twenty languages. From the 1940s-1960s, de Castro served on numerous committees established to understand and address malnutrition in Brazil and other Latin American nations, and he was appointed President of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in the mid 1950s. De Castro countered overpopulation concerns emanating from development organizations in the global north with an analysis of land distribution and the global food economy that highlighted the mutable social structures underlying entrenched poverty. As an influential Latin American intellectual, both at home and abroad, and a Catholic, he asserted that Cold War-era concerns about over-fecundity in the third world were misplaced—and ideologically suspect. De Castro advocated an alternative economic development program focused on more equitable land distribution to encourage small farming and food sufficiency among the developing world’s poor. This paper examines de Castro’s position in relation to his geographic location and philosophical influences. I contrast his political views and intellectual influences with those of Rockefeller Foundation board members who helped to make population control a central objective of mid-twentieth century economic development efforts. The paper concludes with a consideration of de Castro’s influence on global development discourse during the Cold War, and his relevance to later scholars such as Brazilian economist Celso Furtado and Indian-born nobel laureate Amartya Sen.

Author

• Eve E Buckley, University of Delaware