Population, territory and sustainable development

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While the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean has indeed decreased in relative
terms, in absolute terms it has more or less levelled out at between 110 million and 130 million (see
figure IV.2). The most striking aspect of this trend is that, in the space of roughly 50 years, Latin America
and the Caribbean have gone from being a predominantly rural region to an urban one. The range of
different factors underlying this outcome will be analysed in this chapter.
Figure IV.2
LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: TOTAL RURAL POPULATION, 1950-2015
(Thousands)
140 000
120 000
100 000
80 000
60 000
40 000
20 000
0
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2009 2010 2015
Source: United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision [online] http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm.
Defining what is urban and what is rural is methodologically challenging because it is difficult to
align the different types of numeric, political/administrative, locational, functional and other criteria that
are involved. Researchers have heatedly debated the ways in which these terms should be defined for
quite some time. The various criteria used to define the rural population are examined in box IV.1, where
the main sources of information for population studies are also discussed. For the purposes of the analysis
presented here, the rural population will be defined as it is in population censuses, although other
measurements will also be covered.
Since 1950, the Latin American countries have transitioned, to a greater or lesser degree, from
predominantly rural societies to ones in which the great majority of the population resides in urban areas.
In 1950, more than 60% of the population lived in rural areas in 13 out of 20 Latin American countries; in
Haiti, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, the figure was over 75%. By the 2000s, that had all
changed: the rural population accounted for less than 60% of the total in all the countries of the region.
The countries with the highest percentages were Haiti (59%), Honduras (54.5%) and Guatemala (54%),
while Brazil (19%), Chile (13%), Argentina (9.5%), the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (9.5%) and
Uruguay (8.2%) were below the regional average (table IV.1).