Latin American World Model (LAWM). A third world voice to face limits to growth (1971-1979).

GRONDONA, ANA

Workshop; Decolonising the ?Long Boom?: New Histories of the Global South, 1945-1990; 2023

University of Oxford y Gakushuin University

The Bariloche Foundation was born on March 28, 1963, as an initiative of a group of scientists who had been involved in the National Atomic Energy Commission. In 1971 a group of BF scientist witnessed, in Río de Janeiro, the presentation of the report Limits to Growth produced at the request of the Club of Rome. The report mathematically demonstrated that, if current population and economic growth patterns continued, the Earth would reach objective physical limits that would unleash an ecological disaster. Denis Meadows' computer simulation (based on the system dynamics technique deployed by Prof. Forrester) gave scientific weight to these catastrophic projections. The proposed solutions were population control for undeveloped countries and growth containment for developed ones.Fundación Bariloche's scientist were outraged. Their first critique was that model predicted a "technological apocalypse" in the far future without considering that the conditions of current profound inequality. In successive documents, they stressed that rather than physical limits the problems were social and political. They also emphasized the unequal responsibility of developed and underdeveloped countries in global pollution and resource depletion. Rich countries and privileged minorities in poor countries were to blame for uncontrolled consumerism. Based on this critique, BF launched the Latin American World Model (LAWM). It was built around the premise of a fairer social and political organization that guaranteed the global satisfaction of human needs (prioritizing those that had the most direct impact on the increase in life expectancy at birth). The model mathematically proved that, if other criteria of social and international organization were adopted, this feasible utopia could become true at the beginning of the 21st century.The paper is organized in three sections. In the first one, I briefly present the history of the Latin American World Model and Bariloche Foundation (BF) and the global intellectual context from which they emerged. In the second section, I describe the model's intense international dissemination strategy. Next, I analyze the place of enunciation undertaken by BF in the international debate on development, its potentialities and short comes. Finally, I reflect upon some paradoxes regarding the ways in which the LAWM fell into oblivion, but also but also silently prefigured some contemporary experiences, such as, for example the Kyoto Protocol. .