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People are familiar with the circumstances that produce "world food crisis" headlines in the early 1970's: several major crop failures, problems in the Green Revolution, program cutbacks in grain production in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The U.S. dollar was devalued, causing increased demand for exports of feed grains and soybean meal. OPEC was formed, oil prices tripled, and fertilizer prices went up. The American consumer felt the pinch. Food costs more...
...poorest countries, not in the developed countries. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, "the term 'food crisis' still has meaning"--in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa "where the effects of the food crisis in 1974 were most severe." But, the Institute concludes, "for the world at large" grain is abundant, has declined in price, and is being stock-piled...
What, then, is the "world at large?" It is the world where money is available to trade cereal. The world at large does not include the "most seriously affected" nations. Grain stockpiles are increasing in "the world at large." We need not fear a sudden monumental famine--but the citizens of much of the world can't get a hold of that grain...
...fact, the media coverage in the early 1970s was sparked, not so much by the Sahelian famine along the southern rim of the Sahara, as by a huge purchase of U.S. grain by Russia. As Nick Eberstadt of Harvard's Center for Population Studies noted in the New York Review of Books, Feb. 19, 1976, "India could never have made this kind of purchase: it would have cost 3 per cent of its gross national product, almost 25 per cent of its annual government revenue...
...point is that concern about a "food crisis" of the early 1970s was not sparked by the appetites of millions in Asia and Africa, but by the huge grain purchases of the Russians and the subsequent pressure on food prices in America...