Introduction

It was not so many years ago that serious and informed observers of the international scene were predicting prolonged famine in large parts of the underdeveloped world, particularly in Asia.1 Such predictions rarely are heard today — and rightly so. Food supplies in relation to population are more satisfactory now than they were in the crisis years of the mid 1960s and, with the possible exception of Africa, there does not appear to be any secular tendency for the per capita availability of food to decline, although cyclical catastrophes can be expected to occur with distressing frequency. Our tentative and rather qualified optimism that there has been a reduction in the likelihood of acute food shortages is due in part to the presence of economic forces (e.g. an improvement in some countries in the internal terms of trade of the agricultural sector), in part to government policy decisions (e.g. a greater allocation of investment expenditure to agriculture) and in part to the development of high yielding varieties of foodgrains and the accompanying technical changes (i.e. to the ‘green revolution’).