The World Food Prospect

Abstract

Abstract The global supply of food is now acting as a constraint on both population and economic growth. The worldwide scarcity of food in recent years has ked to soaring food prices. These in turn have contributed to rising death rates in the lowest income countries and, through efforts to check inflation, a global slowdown in economic growth. Thus, food has become not only a limit to future world growth but a very visible indicator of declining human welfare. In this paper the author demonstrates how the agricultural and nutritional advances of the last quarter century have ended on a resounding downbeat characterized by a falling fish catch, falling grain yields, increased infant mortality, falling food reserves, and price instability. Then he examines the way in which overpopulation, affluence inefficiency and political expediency have led virtually the entire world to heavy dependence on the North American breadbasket. Faced as we are with restraints on increased production—limited land, water, fuel, fertilizer, technology, capital, as well as ecological deterioration—one can only conclude that a vigorous global effort will be required to reverse the troublesome trends emerging during the seventies.