FOOD: The First Battle

FOOD The First Battle In the up-to-date comfort of a vast glass-and-marble honeycomb on the edge of Rome, the U.N.’s 77-nation Food and Agriculture Organization met last week to talk about hunger. Binay Ranjan Sen, the former Indian diplomat who had just been re-elected FAO’s director general, called for a speedup in “the fight against hunger and malnutrition,” and touched the world on one of its rawest nerves.

Not since 1798, when the Rev. Thomas Malthus gloomily concluded that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,” had Western statesmen and thinkers been so preoccupied with the physical problem of feeding the world’s people. At the Rome meeting, British Historian Arnold Toynbee apocalyptically declared: “Sooner or later food production will reach its limit. And then, if population is still increasing, famine will do the execution that was done in the past by famine, pestilence and war combined.” In Washington, NATO Secretary General Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium wanted the Western allies to do something useful about “the demand of the poor countries.” He and others saw it as more than a problem of cold-war advantage. Recently Dwight Eisenhower remarked: “I believe that the problem of the underdeveloped nations is more lasting, more important for Western civilization than the problem of Soviet-Western differences. There are 1,700,000,000 people that today are living without sufficient food, shelter, clothing and health facilities. Now they are not going to remain quiescent. They are just going to have an explosion if we don’t help.”

Acorns & Juniper Berries. With 208 babies being born every minute, the population of the world is expected to increase by about 49 million people in 1959, may well jump from the present 2.8 billion to more than 6 billion by the turn of the century. And because the first impact of modern medical techniques on a primitive society is a startling drop in the death rate, the bulk of this explosive population increase has occurred in the underdeveloped nations: the combined population of Asia, Africa and Latin America has increased by 600 million since 1936, is expected to jump another billion by 1980.

Today, two-thirds of the world’s population lives in areas that produce only one-third of the world’s food. In parts of Algeria in the weeks just before harvest, peasants and their families subsist on acorn biscuits or boiled juniper berries. In Latin America, per capita agricultural production is nearly 6% lower than it was before World War II, and in Asia it is 10% lower.

As economists are quick to point out, all this does not justify well-meant outcries about “millions of starving people,” nor is there as yet any sign that the world’s capacity to produce food is diminishing. Though FAO statistics show that between 7,000 and 9,000 people die of malnutrition every day, actual famine nowadays occurs only in isolated pockets. The annual increase in total world food production is running just ahead (about 2%) of the increase in population.

The Rice Eaters. On average, the number of calories consumed by Asians, Africans and Latin Americans has increased since World War II. What has changed is the unwillingness of poorer peoples to accept undernourishment. Said an Indonesian delegate to the FAO conference: “More Indonesians are eating rice than ever before. The result is that more Indonesians want it. People who have never had rice before have decided that they like it.”

The jargon phrase for this is “the revolution of expectations,” and it has resulted everywhere in solutions that do not solve. Poorer nations simply eat more, and either cut down on their agricultural exports or import food. Asia, excluding Red China, now imports about 10 million tons of grain a year. But the result is less foreign exchange in the coffers of most Asian nations, and less capital for needed economic development.

What can be done to break this “cycle of poverty”? Among professional students, of the food problem, the fashionable answer is that proposed in Rome last week by Arnold Toynbee: “Conscious efforts to keep the birth rate under control.” The catch in birth control, as Toynbee himself admitted, is that “the initiative is in the hands of the world’s private citizens,” and planners have so far been unable to break down what he regards as a combination of instinct, ignorance, custom and religious belief that keeps the “underprivileged” defiantly reproducing when planners wish they wouldn’t. So far the only Asian nation that has succeeded in reducing its population growth has been Japan, and to do so, the Japanese resorted, to legalized abortion.

If so much of the world is undernourished, why does the U.S. not empty all those shiny storage bins? Why don’t other nations, such as Canada and Australia, join in distributing their food surpluses freely to the world’s hungry? The U.S. last year sent India 3½ million tons of wheat. Since 1954 the U.S. has furnished such nations as Italy, Tunisia, Korea, India and Formosa with about $1.8 billion worth of food, either as gifts or in return for payment in local currencies.

This represents just about all that can be usefully given away, says a senior U.S. Agriculture Department official. He argues that most poor nations (the polite expression used to be underdeveloped countries, but now planners speak of “emerging peoples”) lack the distribution system necessary to get large quantities of free food to the people who need it—partly because their governments have not yet accepted moral responsibility for ensuring that every citizen should get an adequate diet. “And if the U.S. offered to construct such a distribution system,” adds the official drily, “I do not think such men as Nehru and his Cabinet ministers would take kindly to our giving them a lesson in morals.”

But even if all the U.S.’s anticipated food surplus for 1959 was distributed, it would amount to the equivalent of about two teacups of rice every 17 days for each of the world’s undernourished people. A food dole would alleviate but would not remedy the poverty.

The Technological Trap. For FAO’s Binay Sen, the prime answer to the world’s hunger lies not in birth rate or food giveaways but in the diffusion of advanced agricultural techniques—chemical fertilizer, better seeds, soil improvement. To persuade the conservative, generally illiterate peasants of Asia or Africa to learn and adopt such techniques will, as Sen admits, require years, perhaps decades, of effort. And agricultural technology by itself will not solve the world’s food problem. The kind of productivity which enables one U.S. farmer to feed 22 people would create economic chaos in a nation where two-thirds of the population remain farmers. Unless it is accompanied by a general increase in national prosperity, an increase in agricultural production is a delusion—as the U.S. has learned in Greece, where the work of a U.S. agricultural advisory mission has presented the country with an unsalable surplus of wheat, rice and tobacco. If the gap is not to widen, if undernourished peoples are ever to achieve Western standards, there must be a process of economic development inside the poorer countries so that increased industrialization will create a market for increased farm production.

It is here, as President Eisenhower and others have emphasized, that the West can best help. By supplying others with capital, the West may be able to help them achieve more speedily what it took Japan 90 years to accomplish—the transition from a purely agricultural nation to an industrial-and-agricultural nation whose citizens can now clearly foresee the day when they will all enjoy an adequate diet.

No injections of Western capital, however massive, will have any lasting effect unless their recipients impose upon themselves political and economic discipline. And in Asia, Africa and Latin America there is still a painful dearth of leaders with the courage or wisdom to try to impress upon their people that national prosperity cannot be a gift from outsiders, that it can only be achieved by prolonged effort and by investing the fruits of today’s self-denial in tomorrow’s production. This, though no one in Rome last week dared say it in so many words, is the first battle that must be won in Binay Sen’s fight against hunger.