Food and Population

In November 1974, 130 nations met in Rome for almost two weeks to discuss and plan a course of action for dealing with the world food problem. This World Food Conference, which arose out of a suggestion made by Secretary Kissinger late in 1973, was the first of its kind to be held directly under UN auspices. It met amidst a mounting crisis in food availability in some parts of the world, a situation widely believed likely to get worse before it gets better. The initially proposed agenda had placed principal emphasis on long-term aspects of the food problem, primarily measures to increase production in both the developed and less developed countries. In the year following Secretary Kissinger's call for the conference, however, the world food situation had deteriorated to such an extent that when it met, the conferees devoted a large part of their attention to the more immediate problem of providing emergency food relief on a scale much larger than anyone had anticipated.

In the end, the conference passed nineteen resolutions, reflecting agreement in principle on a number of important issues. However, little progress was made in developing corresponding action plans. In commenting on the outcome, A. H. Boerma, Secretary General of the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), expressed general satisfaction about the results but noted that the problem of food supply for millions of people over the next few months remained grave. In response to this widely held feeling, a subsequent meeting of the major food exporters was called and produced an accord that 7.5 million tons of grain should be provided by mid-1975 to countries in South Asia and Africa. But the sticky questions of who would pay and how the grain would be allocated were left unanswered.

At the conference there was general agreement, accepted by the principal food exporters—the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina—that the less developed countries (LDCs) would need emergency food assistance of about 10 million tons annually over the next three years. It also was agreed that present reserve stocks of food were dangerously low and should be rebuilt as rapidly as possible, but no final decision on the size was taken. The specifics of how to finance and manage both the three-year emergency aid program and the continuing world food reserve were also left hanging, although the United States and Canada made it clear that as far as reserves were concerned they would insist that they be held nationally, subject only to some elements of international coordination. This principle was accepted without serious challenge.

The conference also adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a world food information system, to be operated by the FAO, as a step toward anticipating and dealing with problems before they reached crisis dimensions. Innocuous as it may seem, this measure was regarded as a breakthrough, since many countries have been reluctant for commercial and perhaps political reasons to reveal information about food production and demand. Even the Soviet Union, one of the countries most jealous of its "secrets" in this respect, gave cautious approval to the idea. How effectively the system will function remains an open question, however. The People's Republic of China (PRC), for one, expressed reservations on the grounds that it would violate national sovereignty. Without full cooperation from the PRC and the U.S.S.R., both of them major factors in recent years in the world grain market, the program is likely to flounder.

Discussion of long-term financial assistance to increase food production in the LDCs led to a resolution to establish a special fund for this purpose, an idea pushed by a group of countries which included the major Arab oil producers. Contributions to the fund would be voluntary. The idea was received with reservations by the United States and other developed countries, which, according to some reports, would prefer that any new development assistance funds be channeled through the World Bank and other international institutions in which Western influence is strong. Perhaps reflecting this view, it was also recommended that a special consultative group be formed to provide guidance to the World Bank, to the United Nations Development Fund, and to the FAO on investment in LDC agricultural development projects. How this group would relate to the special investment fund was not clear.

To provide for carrying out its various resolutions and recommendations, the conference urged that the General Assembly of the United Nations establish a World Food Council, a senior ministerial-level group to be located in Rome and closely linked to the FAO. The council would have responsibility for coordinating the activities to be undertaken in accordance with the conference resolutions.

According to press reports, the delegates left the conference feeling that despite the tentativeness of their work they had made an encouraging beginning. Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in helping to launch the Green Revolution, had an opposite reaction, denouncing the conference's work as "nonsense" and charging that it took no effective action to prevent the imminent starvation of millions in Asia and Africa.

One of the major long-term problems, population growth in the LDCs, was hardly discussed, although its contribution to mounting pressure on the world's food supplies was recognized, and a resolution was passed urging governments and people everywhere to adopt rational population policies." There is no question but that the food situation of the poor countries is made immeasurably more difficult by their high rates of population growth, now averaging above 2.5 percent annually. Over the past two decades, food production in these countries as a group actually grew somewhat faster than in the developed countries, but the LDCs nevertheless remained haunted by scarcity because their fast growing populations literally gobbled up most of the production gains. Projections by the UN suggest that population in the LDCs will rise to about 5.1 billion by 2000, double the number in 1970. Even if these countries take much more vigorous action to control their populations than they are now doing, their numbers will rise by sheer momentum to about 4.5 billion by the end of the century. In other words, it is too late for the LDCs to make anything but a relatively small impact on their populations in the year 2000. Whether or not they act vigorously now will have a very substantial impact by 2025, however. For example, if the LDCs move decisively to achieve a net reproduction rate of 1 by the end of this century, their population in 2025 will be about 1.5 billion less than it would be if they simply maintained the existing level of effort to control population growth. Defusing the population time bomb is a long and arduous task.

The failure seriously to discuss population at the World Food Conference may in part reflect a feeling that the subject had been adequately discussed at the earlier World Population Conference, held in Bucharest in August. But it also reflects the great sensitivity shown by the poorer countries to suggestions from the rich that population control should be a major policy objective. At the World Population Conference, such suggestions were denounced by representatives of the LDCs as an effort by the developed countries to dodge their own responsibility for emerging shortages of food and raw materials. According to an Indian spokesman at the Bucharest Conference, it is the "superconsumerism" of the developed countries, not population growth in the LDCs, which is responsible for mounting resource scarcities.

Still, when the food conference turned its attention to long-term problems, it did focus on the need to match LDC population increases with increased food production. In preparation, the FAO had put together a document of almost 250 pages, well over half of which were devoted to an analysis of the obstacles to accelerated food production in the LDCs and of measures to deal with them. The relevant actions taken by the conference, however, were confined largely to the resolutions (mentioned above) to establish an Agricultural Development Fund and to stressing the importance of increased availability of irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides. This amounts to an endorsement of the Green Revolution as the solution to the food production problem in the LDCs and a call for its further spread—a course recommended despite consensus at the conference that the first bright promise of the Green Revolution has recently been tarnished by a slowdown in its rate of diffusion.

Some of the reasons for the slowdown in the Green Revolution are fairly obvious—for example, the sharp jump in the price of fertilizer, reflecting both a capacity shortage in the fertilizer industry and a rise in the price of natural gas, the base ingredient in most nitrogen fertilizers. The increased cost of oil, as well as the difficulty in some places last year of buying it at any price, also hurt those farmers dependent on petroleum-driven pumps for irrigation. But even before these energy-related problems had emerged the Green Revolution had shown signs of faltering, and the reasons are not entirely clear. Some have pointed to the unequal distribution of land and other resources between large and small farmers, a condition making it difficult for the latter to acquire the water, fertilizers, and other inputs making up the more advanced agricultural technology. Others have emphasized the uncertain quality of the "improved" seed which was made available, the lack of extension services to provide necessary technical and market information, and price policies designed to keep down the cost of food to urban populations but which discouraged farmers from making the needed investments.

Most of these non-energy-related obstacles to the spread of the Green Revolution reflect various kinds of "institutional failure" in the LDCs. The institutional structures needed to assure farmers a reliable supply of agricultural inputs at attractive prices, and economical access to markets for their increased outputs, are weak or nonexistent. This suggests that the World Food Conference resolution to establish an Agricultural Development Fund may be off target—not because more resources for investment in LDC agriculture are unneeded, but because most of these resources will be wasted unless the requisite institutional structures are put into place.