THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS

Monday, Nov. 11, 1974
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Against this gloomy backdrop, about 1,000 delegates from some 100 nations and a dozen international organizations are gathering in Rome this week for the World Food Conference, sponsored by the United Nations. It will be the first concerted global effort in history to confront the problem of hunger. For twelve days, the delegates will discuss both a program to provide food for the starving and a drive to mobilize technological and financial aid from the wealthy industrial and oil-exporting states to help the 100 poorest nations increase their own food output. Also certain to be discussed is the critical problem of curtailing births. This is urgently needed to avoid fulfilling the nightmare of Parson Thomas Malthus, the English economist who predicted nearly two centuries ago that population would outrun man's capacity to produce food.

At the opening of the conference, attention will focus on the keynote address of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but the delegates may likely be disappointed by what he says. He will probably make few substantive commitments. On the eve of the meeting, the U.S. still did not even have a coherent food policy. It was also uncertain whether two of the world's biggest food producers and consumers—the U.S.S.R. and China—would cooperate in any international food effort, even though the urgency of the problem is unmistakable.

Nearly half a billion people are suffering from some form of hunger; 10,000 of them die of starvation each week in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are all too familiar severe shortages of food in the sub-Saharan Sahelian countries of Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta and Niger; also in Ethiopia, northeastern Brazil, India and Bangladesh. India alone needs 8 to 10 million tons of food this year from outside sources, or else as many as 30 million people might starve.

Only slightly less serious are the situations in Honduras, Burma, Burundi, Rwanda, the Sudan and Yemen. Additionally, poor harvests threaten food supplies in Nepal, Somalia, Tanzania, Zambia and even the Philippines and Mexico. In Haiti, because of disregard for soil conservation, hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers face starvation. Whole families are often so hungry that they do not wait for mangoes to ripen; they boil the green fruit and eat it.

Some of the broader dangers were cited recently by Norman Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his development of wheat strains essential for the famed Green Revolution. "You cannot have political stability based on empty stomachs and poverty," he warned. "When I see food lines in developing countries, I know that those governments are under pressure and are in danger of falling." Shortages or high prices of food have already contributed to the toppling of governments in Ethiopia, Niger and Thailand.