To begin with, I did not know the technical term for the phenomenon I was investigating, so I had to invent my own - "Eldryd's dilemma", after Eldrydd Parry, with whom I had discussed it. After I had been working on the problem for about a year, an American public health friend of the 1960s, Jack Bryant, said: "What you mean is demographic entrapment". He was very 'hung up' about it, but would say no more. Subsequently, it turned out to be very significant that he was, in fact, an American. See Demon 21
"Disentrapment". Whereas "entrapment" is a standard English term, with several usages in thre OED, the term "disentrapment" - getting out of the demographic trap, had to be invented. Since the OED is descriptive, not prescriptive, a new term cannot enter the OED until it is sufficiently used. It is probably now in sufficient use, to make it worth approaching it editors of the OED, to have it included.
Would disentrapment be better in French? - depiègeage? Since we English like expressing "difficult" words in another language, there may be something to be said for using the French term depiègeage. My friends in Congo preferred this to the term depiègeization, which I had been using hitherto. Depiègeagement would be less of a mouthfull .
" .. .. community .. .. ecosystem .. ..migration .. .. " Demographic entrapment is characteristically a problem of rural subsistence communities, particularly in Africa, crowded into a circumscribed area, with nowere to go. A circumscribed area has to have a boundary. This is seldom a sharp line, but is best thought of as a gradient, entrapment being tighter on one side of the gradient that on the other. The trapped area is seldom tidy and is more an irregular patchwork of varying degrees of entrapment
Carrying capacity. It is sometimes said that demographic entrapment is meaningless, because it depends on a definition of carrying capacity, and this can be interpreted in so many ways, depending particularly on the welfare level (standard of living) that is to be extracted from a particular ecosystem. This difficulty is however readily solved by considering the mere survival of a subsistence community as its welfare level. For example, maize produced in terms of tonnes per hectare is readilyconverted into carrying capacity in terms of persons per hectare.
Existing economic and technical constraints. It is easy to imagine that some major economicor technical breakthrough could make a huge difference to demographic entrapment, perhaps even enough for disentrapment. For example, some major change in terms of trade, or some new source of cheap energy, or some much more productive crop varietiey. While these improvements are greatly to be hoped for, the entrapment predicament of existing communities has to be assessed under existing economic and technical constraints.
