Word: grained
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...immediate history of the present crisis is one of lost opportunities. The production of basic food grains--corn, wheat, rice, barley, and oats--totalled one billion metric tons in 1973, enough to adequately feed four billion people if distributed equally, and the March 15, 1974 report to the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, shows that there was a world-wide surplus of grains as recently as 1972. It shows grain production recovering in the years between 1968 and 1971, making up a cumulative deficit of over 100 million metric tons, which had resulted from disastrous harvests...
Three major developments ate into the food surplus between 1970 and 1972: a loss of momentum in the Green Revolution, which leveled off food grain production in Asia; an increasing demand from Europe and Japan for food grains and protein meals to produce the greater quantities of animal products demanded by the consumers in those countries; and program cutbacks in grain production in the United States, Canada, and Australia...
...peanut crop in South Asia and parts of Africa further contributed to the shortage of protein meals. The major devaluation of the dollar made the United States a particularly cheap place to acquire needed proteins and hence acted to increase the demand for an export of feed grains and soybean meal in 1972 and 1973. The extraordinary upward movement of grain prices and, subsequently livestock prices, in America in the summer of 1973, can be explained by these world developments. This increase in prices placed enormous stresses on the economies of the poor nations of the world...
...price tripled, it was more profitable for oil companies to convert their product into gasoline for American cars than to convert it into fertilizer for India. Fertilizer capacity in that country was cut back by 40 per cent overnight. This, with an unexpected drought, and the increase of grain prices in the West, caused massive starvation. "Meanwhile," observes Senator Hatfield, "various oil producing nations are flaring 4.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas each year, ten times more than the U.S. uses annually for fertilizer production, and enough to double current world fertilizer production...
Third, we meet end the domination that our multi-national corporations now hold over the economics of the poorer nations. At the least, countries could grow grain, not cocoa, coffee, and bananas. Also, we can recognize that the industrial-agricultural practices of the West will, in the long run, inhibit the effective production of food. Not through energy-wasteful technology, not by making the Third World over in our own image, but by the redistribution of land and the intensive, organic cultivation of small farms will the problem of starvation be solved...