Applwd Geography, Vol. 15. No. 3, pp. 197-202, 1995 Copyright 0 1995 Elsewer Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved Ol43-6228/95 $10.00 + 0.00 0143-6228(95)00003-8 Demography, destiny and population policies Allan M Findlay Department of Geography, University of Dundee, Dundee DDI 4HN, UK Lars-Eric Borgegard Department of Geography, University of UmeB, S 901 87 UmeH, Sweden The paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of two recent conferences concerned with population policies, and in particular contrasts academic research on the topic with the views expressed at the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development. Four main policy conclusions are reached from synthesizing recent applied geographical work on the topic. The population policy debate If demography is destiny, then what does this make population policy? In a technologically advanced world, it is perhaps not surprising that many governments confidently create and sustain family planning and migration policies in the belief that the demographic, ethnic and, to some extent, economic future of the state can be moulded in this way. That relatively few states are truly democratic regimes leaves it open to question who is expected to benefit from such policies. Opposition to state population policies has grown increasingly intense in the 199Os, on the one hand because of the ever louder voices of groups and individuals in a postmodern era who question the homogeneous normative models of future society which state population policies usually imply, and on the other hand because of the rising popularity of theocratically based political and cultural groups which question the right of states to make policy interventions in areas defined as lying in the realms of divine destiny. State population policies therefore face the dual, but very different criticisms, first of those who wish to control their own destinies, and secondly of those who view state actions as interfering in areas of divine authority. It is in this context of conflict and contestation of values and human rights that any population policies need to be evaluated. Two very contrasting debates on population policies took place in the second and third weeks of September 1994-one in Cairo, the other in Laxon, Sweden. The first was an intergovernmental meeting of tens of thousands of delegates organized by the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the UN Population Division in an attempt to forge an international consensus between governments about the role of population policies relative to the goals of economic growth and sustainable development. Entitled ‘The International Conference on Population and Development’, the 1994 Cairo meeting was the third such intergovernmental conference on this topic (the previous ones having been 197