Food: Gaining Against Hunger

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Although 500 million of the world's 3.5 billion people still go to bed hun gry, agricultural technology has shown that food production can indeed keep ahead of population growth. Last week the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization reported that world farm output increased in 1968 by about 3% v. a population growth of 2%.

The ten-year trend shows a slowly in creasing amount of food per person.

Only Latin America fell behind seriously last year; drought caused a drop of 2% in food output, while population increased by 2%. Developing countries in Africa increased farm production by 2%, while population went up an estimated 2.5%. By contrast, the food-shy developing countries in Asia, where ancient methods of farming are gradually giving way to more efficient cultivation of high-yield strains of rice and wheat, increased their food pro duction by 5% for the second year in a row. The biggest gains were made by Malaysia (11%) and Thailand (8%). In the Western world, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Western Europe continued to accumulate huge surpluses of vital foodstuffs.