Peasant Strategies for Dealing with Population Pressure: The Case of Haiti

Today, it is a commonplace to point out that there exists a strong connection between the rate of population growth and the standard of living in agricultural societies throughout the world. Nobody would question that observation. The correlation has been known at least since the time of Mal thus. Where opinions may differ is to the direction of the cause-effect relationship. One school of thought contends that it is improvements in the standard of living which allow the population to grow. This is the more traditional,Malthusianinspired view which for a long time has been the dominating one. During the post-war period, however, and especially during the last twenty-five years, another strand of thought has gradually emerged which holds that the chain of causation runs the other way. The growth of the population is in some sense autonomous" and the standard of living changes, ceteris paribus, as a result of the changing pressure of the population on the natural resources. A common point of departure for the second view has been to note that population growth,especially in the Third World,has often been caused by falling death rates e.g. as a result of progress in preventive medicine. 1