World Food Crisis

Hunger, and humankind’s concern about it, goes back to biblical times, to the story of Joseph and the seven fat and lean years. In more recent times, since the eighteenth century, a number of ‘waves’ of food-population pessimism have been detected.1 One was stimulated by Thomas Malthus and his dire predictions in An Essay on Population in 1789, another by the writings of Sir William Crookes and others in the later 1890s. A third wave followed the devastation of the First World War, and a fourth with the Second World War. Then, beginning in 1965, southern Asia experienced two successive years of monsoon failure, requiring massive aid shipments and triggering new fears of impending world famine. By the end of the 1960s, the Green Revolution and its promise of improved wheat and rice yields, began to level off. At the same time, expectations were rising in the developing countries as they became independent. And booming economies and rising incomes in the more developed countries were bringing a demand for more and better food. Populations continued to expand, along with concern about the carrying capacity of planet earth. The stage was set for a sixth wave of world pessimism at the beginning of the 1970s. There was a certain irony in the fact that this new wave of crisis thinking came at a time when the world food situation had actually been improving over the previous two decades: world food production increased by more than half and production per capita had gone up by 22 per cent.