The Food Potential of Developing Nations

Abstract

tural production in the United States up to that time was inadequate to keep up with the projected demands for food and a better diet to be generated by high birth rates and rapid economic growth. Within a few years, the Fifth Plate thesis had been discarded. Surpluses rather than shortages became the national concern. The threat to the American diet subsided as farm output rose more rapidly under the thrust of postwar technology and the rate of population growth and demand for food began to slow. Now we are considering the elements of population and food in the wider context of the less-developed world and the higher stakes of a potential world food shortage. As background, I will review briefly the historical experience in the population-food race, treating the less-developed free nations as a group but keeping in mind the American experience that the past is not always the key to the future. Then I will move on to considering as a case study the potential of India for feeding its own in the future. This seems fair enough, since India has one-third of the population in the less-developed free world, a high population growth rate representative of most LDC's, a diet among the poorest (roughly 10 percent below the minimum energy standard), and a disappointing food production record in recent years which required massive imports of grain under P.L. 480. Much of the food-crisis syndrome hangs on India. Most other countries are conceded a better chance. If India can make it, the world food problem will at worst be quite manageable. The Historical Experience of the LDC's The FAO measurements of population and food-output trends during the period 1953-1963 are shown in Table 1. Taking the whole 10-year period, food output in the LDC's (excluding communist Asia) rose faster than population. In fact, food output rose faster than in the developed countries (3.0 percent per year compared with 2.4 percent). Even with a high rate of population growth (2.3 percent in the LDC's compared with 1.3 percent for the developed countries), food production per capita