Special Section: THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS

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The main cause of the increase in food demand is, of course, the population explosion in the poorest countries. The world is growing at the phenomenal rate of at least 200,000 people a day, or 75 million a year. Unless the rate is checked, this planet's 3.9 billion inhabitants will double in number within 35 years. India's 2.2% annual growth rate will double the country's current population of 596 million by the year 2000. The apparent inability, or unwillingness, of most poor countries to restrain their profligacy has embittered many agricultural economists. Nobel Laureate Borlaug complains that the higher yields of the miracle seeds were meant to give the underdeveloped nations some time to reduce their population growth and begin upgrading their citizens' nutrition. Instead, he says, "Our efforts to buy time have been frittered away because political leaders in developing nations have refused to come to grips with the population monster."

This was painfully clear at the World Population Conference in Bucharest last August. Advocates of population control were sometimes heckled. Ridicule was heaped upon proposals from the developed countries—led by the U.S.—that called for setting up family-planning programs in underdeveloped nations and reducing the world's birth rate from 2% now to 1.7% by 1985. Latin American delegates claimed that overpopulation was a myth invented by the rich to exploit the poor. China's representative, Huang Shu-tse, declared: "The large population of the Third World is an important condition for the fight against imperialism." No wonder that one delegate from a sparsely populated nation muttered that the conference was "more demagoguery than demography."

Affluence, as well as population, eats into the world's food supply. As standards of living in the developed nations rise, their citizens not only waste food and feed millions of tons of it to pets, but they increasingly eat their food in forms that enormously burden the earth's agriculture. People in developing countries eat roughly 400 Ibs. of grain per capita annually (barely more than the pound daily they need for survival), mostly in the form of bread or gruel; but an American consumes five times that amount, mostly in the form of grain-fed beef, pork and chicken. The industrial world's way of eating is an extremely inefficient use of resources. For every pound of beef consumed, a steer has gobbled up 20 Ibs. of grain. Harvard Nutritionist Jean Mayer notes that "the same amount of food that is feeding 210 million Americans would feed 1.5 billion Chinese on an average Chinese diet."

While meat is an important source of protein, many in the industrial West eat much more meat than is nutritionally necessary. They probably do so because they like meat's taste; it is also a status symbol of a high living standard, even in Communist countries. When the Soviets suffered a crop shortfall two years ago, they did not slaughter cattle to conserve grain (as they had done in 1963), but instead they imported 28 million tons of corn, wheat and soybeans. So long as the industrial nations continue to favor meat over direct grain consumption, says Sylvan Wittwer, Michigan State University agricultural economist, "the sky is the limit for food demand."