The World Food Situation in Perspective

MY TASK TODAY is to set the stage for a discussion of U. S. policies and policy alternatives for food, agriculture, and trade. I shall attempt to describe the past and present and to establish a perspective from which to view the likely future world food situation. My analysis will attempt to separate the short-lived events that so often draw the greatest public attention from the persistent underlying trends that will shape world agriculture of the future. This is no easy job. What is an aberration to one man is the beginning of a new trend to another. I shall conclude by listing some of what I believe to be the most important questions and issues suggested by the analysis. In reacting to production shortfalls throughout the world in 1972, we tended to lose sight of the fact that there has been much stability in the trends for food production over the past two decades. World food production per capita trended upward during the 1954-72 period, with an annual increase of about 3/4 of 1 percent (Table 1). The drop in 1972 was the largest during this entire period. Total food production increased at about the same rate in both the developed and developing world, but the very rapid pace of population growth in the less developed regions cut the per capita increase in production to less than Y2 of 1 percent annually while the developed regions enjoyed an annual per capita increase of about 12 percent. We cannot, of course, conclude from these indices that there has been an equivalent lifting in nutrition levels everywhere or a reduction in the number of hungry people or improvement in other measures of human welfare. Still, our data indicate the world's growing potential for improving diets around the globe. Cereals comprise the most important food staple group among the high carbohydrate foods upon which most of the world's population relies for a major share of its diet. Cereals are also the major protein source, although a somewhat less important source in areas where animal products are relatively plentiful. In less developed areas, dependence on cereals for protein is especially important. But they are more than foodstuffs. According to FAO food balances for 1964-66, 48 percent of cereals produced outside Communist Asia were used for food, 38 percent for animal feed, and 14 percent for seed, starch, liquor, and other uses. We can expect the total direct food use of cereals to rise in the future as poulation grows, but use of cereal food will decline in importance to other foods as incomes rise. When we look at the total production of grain over the last two decades, we see a great difference in the performance of the developed and less developed regions. In the developed countries grain production increased more than 60 percent while planted area was nearly unchanged at something under 300 million hectares-all the increase was from higher yields. Grain production of less developed countries increased even more, almost 75 percent, but it required a '3 increase in area since yields were increasing only about Y2 as fast as in the developed regions. While the area planted to grains in both the developed and developing countries is now about equal, average grain yields in the developing countries are now only about 60 percent of those in the developed countries. Another way to look at it is that average yields in the less developed countries now equal those recorded for the developed countries in the early 1950's. Have recent events signaled a fundamental deterioration in the world food situation? Unusually poor weather in 1972 contributed to severe DON PAARLBERG is Director of Agricultural Economics, U. S. Department of Agriculture.