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Living in the shadow of Worldwide Famine

World's Gravest Problem

Weather uncertainties in the food exporting nations could not come at a more serious juncture in human history. At a recent world food conference it was pointed out that in 25 years — or about one generation — world food production must more than double to give the rapidly increasing world population just a little improvement in food quantity, and hopefully, quality.

The same conference projected that food deficits of the developing countries by 1985 will amount to a staggering 80 to over 100 million tons annually. Such deficits, in the words of Dr. John A. Hannah, executive director of the U.N. World Food Council, are "too high to be considered manageable, physically or financially. And these shocking shortfalls will greatly increase with each weather disaster." Thus, adds Dr. Hannah: "The challenge of providing food for hungry people . . . is the greatest challenge of the last quarter of the twentieth century."

Dr. Raymond Ewell, a leading fertilizer expert from the State University of New York, goes one step further, labeling the world food crisis "the biggest, most fundamental, and most nearly insoluble problem that has ever faced the human race."

Why is this so? Simply because the world today consists almost entirely of food-deficit countries.”Important exporters at the global level," writes food expert Lester R. Brown, "can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. While scores of new food importers have emerged over the past two decades, not a single new exporter has emerged!"

If the trends of the past several years continue, writes Brown in the December 1976 issue of The Futurist, "the collective import needs of the 100-plus importing countries eventually will greatly exceed the exportable supplies from North America, particularly when the harvest is poor. Inevitably, harsh decisions will have to be made by the U.S. and Canadian governments on who gets food and who does not. . ."

Brown's prognosis sounds very similar to the conclusions reached by William and Paul Paddock in their book Famine 1975, Who Will Survive? (Published in 1967 by Little, Brown and Company, Boston. and Toronto). The Paddock brothers concluded that not all countries could possibly be helped in a future world food crisis; that those who stood a chance to survive should be helped ("the walking wounded") but that other poor, overpopulated, chronically food-short lands would simply have to be left to fend for themselves.

The world food-trade pattern has been "altered profoundly in recent decades" adds Brown. Within only one generation, virtually the entire world has come to depend on North American food exports. Asia, Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, are now all net grain importers. Much of the food imported into these regions is used to feed burgeoning urban populations. And by the year 2000 the world will be half urban — up from 29% in 1950.

"Not only are nearly all countries today food importers," explains Brown, "but a growing number now import over half of their grain supplies. Among these are Japan, Belgium, Senegal, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Lebanon, Switzerland and Algeria. Others rapidly approaching a similar degree of dependence on imported foodstuffs include Portugal, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), South Korea and Egypt. . ."

Brown's conclusion: "Overwhelming dependence by the world's cities [and nations] on imported food supplies from a single geographic region in a world of food scarcity brings with it a vulnerability to external political forces and climatic trends that is risky indeed."

 

Production Limits Reached in U.S.

The dependency factor is deeply disturbing in light of agricultural conditions under way in North America. Even aside from bad weather, other factors are not promising. For one, yields of every major crop, whether it be wheat, corn or rice, have leveled off after years of unprecedented increases. Cost-effective fertilizer usage also seems to have reached a limit. In addition, as previously noted, "soil-bank" croplands have already been put back into use, leaving little expandable land in reserve.

Then, too, environmental concerns over older broad-spectrum insecticides and pesticides have disrupted the war against insects and other pests.

Plant geneticists, furthermore, see no breakthroughs on the horizon in the form of new super-yield crop varieties. They are instead working as fast as they can — on a treadmill, as it were — just to maintain the constant flow of new-enough varieties intended only to keep ahead of all the rats, molds, mildews and insects which in themselves constantly mutate in reaction to the man-made poisons.

 

Most Critical Factor

Weather remains the single most critical factor, however, in the world food picture. Yet weather seems to have become a highly unpredictable, variable element.

According to H. James Tippett, chief of the grain section of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Statistical Reporting Service, the most confounding feature of the South Dakota drought, for example, has been the irregular pattern of rainfall. Some areas have remained bone-dry all year long but nearby areas have received adequate rainfall and are either normal or above average in production.

Although 53 of South Dakota's 67 counties have suffered major crop losses, at least 12 other counties in the western half of the state have remained untouched by the drought. In nine of those counties, production is actually up.

How similar to a rather obscure passage in one of the minor prophets of the Old Testament: "And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water . . . yet HAVE YE NOT RETURNED UNTO ME, SAITH THE LORD" (Amos 4:7-8).

 

Worst Thing That Can Happen to a Nation

Believe it or not, the moral condition of a country is directly linked to its material well-being. Is it only a coincidence that as American and many other Western societies engage more liberally in immorality, sexual perversion, "liberation" movements of every stripe, as well as top-level and governmental corruption — they also find themselves afflicted with puzzling, frustrating problems in their agricultural sectors?

There is a link. There is a God, and the moral condition of a nation can cause that God to intervene directly — for a blessing or a cursing — in the forces of nature.

The Bible contains examples of God changing weather patterns either to bless a people or to punish nations for their mounting national sins. God warned the sin-laden Israelites that, if they continued in their iniquities, he would withdraw his blessings — such as rain — from them: "Therefore the showers have been withheld, and the spring rain has not come" (Jeremiah 3:3, RSV; see also Jeremiah 14:22; Isaiah 5:6).

Continuously, God warned the ancient Israelites of the reason for protracted spells of inclement weather: "When heaven is shut up, and there is no rain, because they have sinned against thee . . ." (I Kings 8:35; see also Amos 4:6-9).

God promised His people: "If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit" (Leviticus 26:3-4).

But God also gave a prophetic warning, applicable in principle to any proud nation that forsakes God and refuses to turn from its national sins: "I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron [endless days of scorching sun], and your earth as brass [drought-hardened earth] . . . for your land shall not yield her increase" (verses 19-20).

In our resource-hungry world, America prides itself on its agricultural power on the international scene. But how quickly that "pride" could be broken by the one who ultimately controls the powerful forces of the weather.