At the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) at Cairo in 1994, consensus was reached on a new agenda for population and development. The ICPD was a triumph for those seeking an end to the great debate that had plagued the population field since the first World Population Conference at Bucharest in 1974; a debate between advocates of development who believed that development is the best contraceptive and, therefore, a necessary precondition to sustained fertility decline and those who asserted that family planning services must be implemented to meet the high demand for fertility control which they believed existed. A notably wide gulf remained between these two essentially academic positions. The practical result was ambivalence and ambiguity in many countries about which approach to take. The ICPD took giant strides toward resolving this conflict by placing the population problem squarely in the development context and focussing attention on individual needs instead of demographic targets.