Word: grains
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since 1950 developing countries have expanded their farm lands by 35% and their yields per acre by roughly the same percentage. Their total grain production soared 78%, compared with 64% in the industrial nations. Much of the gain came in the late 1960s through the planting of new, high-yield strains of wheat and rice. The hybrids produced more grain per plant, and their short stalks made them far less vulnerable to wind damage. The development of these seeds was hailed as the Green Revolution. Within a few years, one-third of the wheat area and one-fifth...
...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...
...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...
Much of that growing demand in both industrial and developing countries has been satisfied for the past quarter-century by surpluses harvested in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina and the U.S. Indeed, America "is the principal and residual supplier of grain to the world," explains Willard Cochrane, a University of Minnesota agricultural economist. "It is the country to which all countries come when they are short." This year, despite the recent restrictions on sales abroad, the U.S. will probably export about 41% of its crop-at least 82 million tons of wheat, soybeans, corn and sorghum, valued at about...
Even the U.S. is no longer the bottomless cornucopia that it once seemed. By October this year, miserable weather had reduced the harvest of corn by 16% and soybeans by 19%, while demands from the developing countries continue to mount. Merely to feed one pound of grain per person daily to their added population by 1985, they may have to import at least 85 million tons of grains, compared with 25 million tons now. Their import bill, figured at current prices, would top $17 billion for food alone; they would still have big requirements for imported technology, oil and manufactured...