The Challenges of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa: Strategies, Policies and Politics. A Case of Botswana

The population, poverty and development debate is an old age phenomenon. The discussions have centred on the population size, fertility trends and levels in developing countries that are viewed as the primary causes of the global problems today. This view begun with Malthus in the seventeenth century. In his great essay of 1798, Malthus argued that, whereas population growth is geometric, the growth of food supplies takes place at an arithmetic rate. This implies that in time, population growth will exceed that of food supplies thus leading to starvation. In his eyes, the poor had far too many children (Crook, 1997:3-80). Ross argues that Malthus and his contemporaries "were preoccupied with the question of property relations" at the time. The landlords and industrialists were not concerned about general misery and an end to mankind that would supposedly be brought about overpopulation, but felt threatened by the poor who begun to demand land which they felt was appropriated from them in the first place (Ross, 1998:73-78)). Hartmann submits that the World Bank "has slightly altered the previous Malthusian line of causality. While it now maintains that poverty, not the sheer weight of human numbers, is responsible for hunger and environmental depletion, it blames much of poverty on the economic consequences of population growth, thus continuing to hold the poor responsible for their own misery" (Hartmann, 1995:30-31).