THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS

For nation shall rise against nation . . . and there shall be famines and troubles; these are the beginnings of sorrows. —Mark 13:8

Nothing is older to man than his struggle for food. From the time the early hunters stalked the mammoths and the first sedentary "farmers" scratched the soil to coax scrawny grain to grow, man has battled hunger. History is replete with his failures. The Bible chronicles one famine after an other; food was in such short supply in ancient Athens that visiting ships had to share their stores with the city; Romans prayed at the threshold of Olympus for food.

Every generation in medieval Europe suffered famine. The poor ate cats, dogs and the droppings of birds; some starving mothers ate their children. In the 20th century, periods of extreme hunger drove Soviet citizens to cannibalism, and as late as 1943, floods destroyed so much of Bengal's crops that deaths from starvation reached the millions.

After World War II, however, it seemed that man at long last was winning the battle against hunger. Bumper harvests in many nations, notably the U.S., created food surpluses in the West, while the development of "miracle seeds" brought the hope that the densely populated poor countries would soon attain self-sufficiency. Then, in the past two years, this optimism turned to despair as hunger and famine began ravaging hundreds of millions of the poorest citizens in at least 40 nations. Much of the ground gained in the battle for food seemed lost as the world's harvest in 1972 was roughly 3% short of meeting demands. This year's harvest has also been disappointing, and experts now question whether man can prevent widespread starvation.

The world's reserves* of grain have reached a 22-year low, equal to about 26 days' supply, compared with a 95-day supply in 1961, according to Lester Brown, a leading U.S. food expert. Low harvests and high prices have forced the traditional surplus-producing nations to curtail the amount of food that they normally give as aid to the hungry nations. For example, unless the U.S. adopts an expanded program, American aid this year will drop 50% in some categories. Sales of food are also shrinking. Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Burma and the Common Market nations have restricted food exports. Several weeks ago, President Ford blocked the sale of some 10 million metric tons of grain to the Soviets and is permitting them to buy scarcely one-fifth of that amount. Ford feared that massive sales to the Soviet Union could inflate food prices in the U.S.