Petanque worldwide

FIPJP, the International Petanque Federation has recently updated its membership numbers - up to 2005.
You can see the list here.

I've been keeping track of these numbers for many years, and here are some milestones.

The number of member countries increased from 18 in 1978, to 30 in '88, 44 in '98 and now stands at 70. Even taking into account that there are several small countries it is a tremendous progress.

As to distribution: France represented 93% of the overall membership of 400,000 in 1978, and peaked to 491,000 (out of a worldwide 600,000) in 1990. But then started sliding, down to 375,000. Not all, but most of the slack has meanwhile been taken up by the other, and new countries, who went from 28,000 (in '78) to 185,000 in 2005, thus now 33 % of the total.
Some countries have experienced a huge growth, about which more later.

FIPJP is headquartered in Marseille, but it's Mr Jean Amiot of the Swedish Petanque Federation who has been meticulously updating the site from the start somewhere in the mid '90's. No stories, but lots of addresses, numbers and archives.

FIPJP website