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.