The Population Problem; 1; Brazil: The Gathering Millions

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Series
The Population Problem
Episode Number
1
Episode
Brazil: The Gathering Millions
Producing Organization
National Educational Television and Radio Center
United States Productions
Contributing Organization
Thirteen WNET (New York, New York)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/75-54kkwphs
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Description
Episode Description
In the first of this new series of six episodes, NET's cameras go to Brazil for a study of population pressures as they exist across Latin America. Brazil is a nation under populated over enormous areas, yet a nation whose population is growing too fast for its present resources. The episode followed the migratory cycle for Brazil's peasants who leave the arid regions of the northeast to wander wherever there is hope for a brighter life.
Series Description
Five of these six episodes will examine population growth as it exists and as it is being slowed or increased in Latin America, Europe, Japan, India, and the United States. The sixth episode will take viewers into the laboratories of scientists who are on the one hand, trying to find methods of birth control satisfactory and morally acceptable to everyone and, on the other hand, are trying to unlock the riddles of barren marriages. The human race is growing faster than ever before in history. At its present rate of growth, world population will double in 35 years. Today there are well over three billion people on earth. Demographer scientists who study population say that by the year 2,000 there will be nearly seven billion if the current rate continues. This staggering projection threatens the living conditions of most of the worlds people. And the present growth rate is crippling the globes poorer nations, nations trying desperately to step into the Twentieth Century as the western world understands it. 2028Thus, population growth constitutes one of mans most awesome crises. It was a lowered death rate rather than a higher birth rate that lead to rapid population growth. For centuries man lived with a high death rate the result of war, disease, and famine. Man kept his birth rate high to insure survival. But revolutions in agriculture, industry, transportation, and education, increased food supply, the spread of public sanitation, and medical advances all lowered the death rate. The Europeans were the first to lower their birth rates to bring them into line with their lowered death rates. This demographic transition a changeover from high birth and death rates to low ones has been successfully carried out in the USSR, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, Developing nations are still striving for this goal. Through the demographers scientific eyes and the cameras documentary eyes, The Population Problem will study the seriousness of this modern and perplexing crisis. The demographic advisory committee that is working with National Educational Television for THE POPULATION PROBLEM is composed of the following members: 1. Frank Notestein (Chairman of the Committee), president of the Population Council; 2. Bernard Berelson, vice president of the Population Council; 3. Ansley J. Coale, director, Office of Population Research, Princeton University; 4. Robert Cook, President of the Population Reference Bureau; 5. Howard C. Taylor, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, College Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University; and 6. P. K. Whelpton, director of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems. THE POPULATION PROBLEM is a 1965 National Educational Television presentation. Produced for NET by United States Productions. Executive producer: Tom Hollyman. Executive producer for NET: Charles Vaughan. The series is being produced under a grant from Cordelia S. May. The 6 hour-long episodes that comprise this series were originally recorded on film, with episodes 1, 2, 5, 6 in black and white and episodes 3 and 4 in color. (Description adapted from documents in the NET Microfiche)
Description
In the first of this new series of six programs, NETs cameras go to Brazil for a study of population pressures as they exist across Latin America. Brazil is a nation under populated over enormous areas, yet a nation whose population is growing too fast for its present resources. The program followed the migratory cycle for Brazils peasants who leave the arid regions of the northeast to wander wherever there is hope for a brighter life. The program opens with the delivery of a baby in a Brazilian hospital. While the viewer watches the delivery, through narration we learn that this is her sixth child and the first one born in a hospital. The narrator then relates briefly how Brazils death rate has been dramatically lowered since World War II and points out that the birth rate remains high. He goes on to explain that the greatest effect of this growth is seen and felt in Brazils cities which are growing at the rate of five percent a year and doubling in size every 14 years. The cameras then take us to the northeast where we meet Raimundo Erme Negildo de Carvalho, a sharecropper who has worked the land for other men all his life, a sharecropper who only hopes his sons can move off somewhere to a better life. With the cameras we follow migrants to the towns of Juazeiro and Petrolina, jumping-off points for the big cities. The first stop for the migrant countryman is Salvador, a small city that has reportedly received as many as 60,000 new people in a new year. The pressure on housing is so great that newcomers build out into the sea lagoon, thus creating unusual shanty towns on stilts. A young woman migrant and her two children are followed as they leave the northeast by truck to join her husband in Rio de Janeiro. Using first person narration, she details the travails of the long truck ride. In Rio, Francisco de Assis, a construction worker who has taken the migrants journey around Brazil 11 times, introduces the viewer to the citys favelas shanty towns that crawl up the sides of the mountains that overlook Brazils most elegant city. Together with his own wife, their eight children, and his son-in-law and his five children, he lives in a two-room favela. Through the eyes of Franciscos married daughter, the viewer is introduced to life in a South American favela. Migrants unhappy with this lot in Rio gather at train depots to go to Sao Paulo, Brazils industrial city. Here many of the migrants do find work and a future, not only for themselves but for their families. But the countryman who cannot find hope even here moves back northwest toward the frontier and the state of Parana where he hopes he can find decent farm work and the opportunity to own his own small farm. The narrator concludes: In a country where much of the land is unused, the wandering poor of Brazil can find no useful decent life. Their numbers are increasing faster than the work and opportunities which they so desperately require. If another generation is to pass without any decline in the birth rate the population will have doubled 80 million new people in twenty years bringing with it even greater hardships. Brazils problem is the problem is tropical Latin America and so many rapidly growing areas of the world.
Broadcast Date
1968-09-29
Asset type
Episode
Genres
Documentary
Topics
Social Issues
Global Affairs
Media type
Moving Image
Credits
Director of Photography: Shore, Richard
Editor: Sommerschield, Bengt
Executive Producer: Hollyman, Tom
Executive Producer: Vaughan, Charles
Interviewee: de Assis, Francisco
Interviewee: Negildo, Raimundo Erme
Music: Williams, Carroll Warner
Narrator: Weber, Karl
Producer: Donald, Jonathan
Producing Organization: National Educational Television and Radio Center
Producing Organization: United States Productions
Story Editor: Blay, John S.
Writer: Donald, Jonathan
AAPB Contributor Holdings
Thirteen - New York Public Media (WNET)
Identifier: wnet_aacip_2620 (WNET Archive)
Format: 16mm film
Duration: 00:58:50?
Thirteen - New York Public Media (WNET)
Identifier: wnet_aacip_2621 (WNET Archive)
Format: 16mm film
Duration: 00:58:50?
Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive
Identifier: [request film based on title] (Indiana University)
Format: 16mm film
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Citations
Chicago: “The Population Problem; 1; Brazil: The Gathering Millions,” 1968-09-29, Thirteen WNET, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed August 12, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-54kkwphs.
MLA: “The Population Problem; 1; Brazil: The Gathering Millions.” 1968-09-29. Thirteen WNET, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. August 12, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-54kkwphs>.
APA: The Population Problem; 1; Brazil: The Gathering Millions. Boston, MA: Thirteen WNET, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-54kkwphs