In the last two decades, there has been a backlash within global population and reproductive health policies. While the vocabulary of individual reproductive rights established at the UN Cairo conference 1994 has remained ever-present, there has been a discursive and financial shift once again toward more explicitly neo-Malthusian approaches and stand-alone family planning. Moreover, a return to formerly discredited long-acting reversible contraception is evident in major public-private partnerships. Drawing on policy papers, interviews and statistical data, we researched this shift in the aftermath of the “Family Planning 2020” conference 2012 in London, where multilateral population agencies, national development ministries, philanthrocapitalist foundations and Big Pharma met in order to expand and transform antinatalist policies within the Global South. And we found considerable interplay between a reoriented development policy under the name of ‘population dynamics’ and the interests of pharmaceutical companies in conquering and expanding contraceptive markets. While antinatalism had never disappeared as the main frame of the Cairo agenda, the aim of avoiding a maximum number of births, especially in sub-Saharan African countries, has once again become a more explicit target, driven both by simplistic crisis narratives and market-oriented interests.

Introduction

In 2011, the media applauded the German government for its successful development policy with regard to Rwanda's health sector. It had helped to reduce the birth rate from 6 to 4.5 children per woman, and had contributed to increasing the rate of users of modern contraceptives from 10 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2010 (Haefliger 2011). Rwanda was considered a “model country” for tackling the problem—“Africa's population is exploding”—and its effects—“hunger, poverty, environmental destruction” (Knaup 2011). While the rhetoric of international development agencies is expressed in less sensationalist terms than that of the media, neo-Malthusian rationales of population policy are officially back on the agenda, not only as the hidden background behind ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ (SRHR), but as a more explicit field of action in international development cooperation. One important new actor within this field is the family planning initiative FP2020, recently renamed FP2030. Created at the London Summit on Family Planning in 2012, FP2020/30 is a public-private partnership (PPP) that includes pharmaceutical firms, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments and multinational agencies and aims to address ‘population dynamics’.