Most countries emphatically agreed, and in addition blasted the attempts of outside countries, particularly the superpowers, to regulate their populations. President Nicolae Ceauseseu of Rumania, the host country, said that every government "has the sovereign right to promote those demographic policies and measures that it considers most suitable and consonant with its national interests, without any outside interference."

Antonio Carillo Flores, a Mexican lawyer and secretary general of the conference noted that while many countries want to reduce their birth rates. "it is also understandable that several nations in Europe. Africa and Latin America, where the objectives and situations are different, look at the problem in a different way."

The Washington delegation appeared at the world's first international population conference with a declaration containing all the outworn calculations, theories and warnings of neo-Malthusianism and wanted them included in the final draft declaration that is to be approved at the coming United Nations General Assembly this fall.

But the developing countries — which outnumber the industrialized by better than two to one — easily succeeded in reversing the original draft statement.

Instead of discussing "overpopulation" and its alleged dire consequences for humankind, the revised text stands virtually neutral on whether there is over or underpopulation in the world.

Instead it stresses the importance of the economic and social development of a country as primary in implementing any population policy. As Ali Oubouzar of the Algerian delegation put it: "The underdeveloped countries want to restore the paramountey of development over the matter of negatively influencing fertility rates."

Virtually all the U.S. proposals were rejected. Instead of calling on all countries to adhere to a single birth control plan, the document says: "Countries which consider their birth rates detrimental to their national purpose are invited to consider selling quantitative goals." But the declaration stresses. "Nothing herein should interfere with the sovereignty of any government to adopt such quantitative goals."

The conference rejected outright the U.S. statement that there is "overpopulation." For this clearly implies placing the burden of action on the third world countries, whose population in the last few decades have been expanding rapidly — after centuries of imperialist and colonialist plunder and decimation. Instead, the declaration puts much of the blame for the world's problems on the industrialized countries which consume a disproportionate amount of the world's resources.

"Recognizing that per capital use of world resources is much higher in the more developed than in the developing countries, the developed countries are urged to adopt appropriate policies in population consumption and investment, bearing in mind the need for fundamental improvement in international equity." the declaration said.