THE STRUGGLE TO END HUNGER

ONE of the greatest peacetime armadas ever assembled--600 ships from 50 donor nations--has borne 1,000,000 tons a month of mostly U.S. grain to drought-tormented India this year. Despite alarming predictions that millions of people might starve to death in that land, famine has been fended off. The massive U.S. effort, plus surprisingly effective distribution of rationed wheat and rice through India's bullock-and-leather-bucket economy, proved the apocalyptic prophets wrong.

Yet neither India nor other needy nations dare rely on largesse much longer. With world population in the past five years growing twice as fast, at 2% a year, as food output, man's struggle against hunger has reached a historic turning point. It has already forced dozens of ill-fed countries to start reshaping their pride-twisted economies. It has upset old notions of geopolitics. Most dramatic of all, it has virtually eaten up the perennial overproduction of U.S. agriculture, whose bounty now feeds one out of every 20 persons in Africa, Latin America and non-Communist Asia. The State Department last week told U.S. embassies to discourage requests for wheat because the nation must cut back such aid shipments by 25% this year.

The Grain Drain

In the twelve years since the U.S. began dumping its awkward farm surpluses overseas on semi-giveaway terms, so much of the glut has disappeared that now the nation must try to expand farm output after 33 years of curbing it. Twice this year, Washington has increased its price supports for dairy products, and it is now asking farmers to plant 10% more rice, 15% more wheat. For lack of grain to store, Cargill, Inc. last month closed its largest elevator in Buffalo. With India consuming a quarter of the U.S. wheat crop this year, as against a fifth last year and an eighth five years ago, U.S. wheat stocks now stand at a 14-year low of just over 15 million metric tons, not enough for adequate protection against a domestic crop failure. The supply of soybeans, the dull yellow seed that goes into everything from vegetable oil to paint and constitutes the world's cheapest source of protein, equals just four months' consumption. Five years ago, Government warehouses were jammed with butter and cheese; now they hold none. Washington has had to go into the market to buy dried milk for its program of free school lunches for 50 million children in 52 foreign countries.

The U.S. shift from surplus toward scarcity leaves the nation with abundant food of every kind, but at prices rising swiftly enough to cause wrath among consumers in Manhattan, pandemonium on the grain market in Chicago, and smiles on farmers' faces from Keokuk to Calexico. Cash receipts by farmers are expected to rise 14% this year above their 1964 level, to a record $44.5 billion, and their net incomes will jump 16% to more than $15 billion. The change calls into question assumptions of many years' standing. For instance, does the U.S. still need crop-area controls and subsidies on such avidly sought foodstuffs as wheat? As things stand now, even though the market price of wheat has climbed 26.5% in a year to $1.91 1/2, farmers are holding near-record amounts off the market in expectation of still higher prices--and Government wheat subsidies are helping to finance that gamble. The need for soil banking is also diminishing; 10 million of the 56 million acres of idle farm land, which costs taxpayers an irksome $1.6 billion a year, will be put to use to reach the new grain goals.

So far, man's ability to improve his environment has thwarted the 168-year-old Malthusian hypothesis that the human race is doomed to starve because population will outstrip food supply. Enriched by the 19th century industrial revolution that Malthus failed to foresee, Europe turned abroad for food. The U.S. began mechanizing its farming well over a century ago. Since then, compounding its prowess with irrigation, hybrid seeds, pesticides, continually improved fertilizers, and now even computers, the nation has marched to its present-day high farm productivity. Yet even without these benefits, the countries now called "underdeveloped" were able to feed themselves until World War II, and to export as much as 11 million tons of grain a year to Europe. Then postwar population pressures forced them to begin importing food, and now they bring in 25 million tons a year.

Now they are frighteningly short of self-sufficiency. Half a billion people--almost a seventh of the earth's 3.28 billion inhabitants--are "belly hungry," as an official of the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization puts it. For another billion only a shade better off, poorly balanced diets smother their lives in lethargy, chronic illness and early death. Protein and vitamin deficiencies condemn millions of their children to such widespread, dwarfing diseases as kwashiorkor, which produces skin sores, swollen limbs and resentful apathy, and marasmus, which bloats bellies, shrivels limbs to the girth of the bones, and enfeebles brains to the point where schooling is useless. Imprisoned in poverty by ignorance and malnutrition, such virus fodder can contribute little to the development of their nations. Almost all of them live in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where farming is mostly mired in Babylonian technology.

In bejungled Brazil, which imports even some of its beans from Mexico, two-thirds of the population suffers from nutritional deficiency; the northeastern "Brazilian bulge" is one of the worst-fed areas of the world. In Africa's Bechuanaland, the population of 600,000 has subsisted on handouts from the FAO for five years of drought--a curse now spreading to Morocco and western Algeria. In fertile Nigeria, a food shortage has boosted prices 40% in six months, forcing the new regime to forbid the export of such African staples as yams, cassava flour (made from a high-calorie but protein-short root), corn and rice to neighboring countries.

The High Cost of India

By any measure, India bears the most burdensome load of food problems--as elsewhere, mostly self-inflicted. The country is 75% illiterate, riven by language differences, hobbled by its caste system. Millions of impoverished peasants are at the mercy of the annual monsoon to water their crops, but the government has yet to survey many areas for underground sources of water. Though the seas around the subcontinent teem with protein-rich fish, which keep the Japanese healthy, religious taboos prevent orthodox Hindus from eating them. Farms average a mere two acres, precluding their mechanization. Why don't farmers pool their holdings in cooperatives, share the tools they so desperately need? Explains Punjab Farmer Kewal Singh: "Everyone suspects everyone else of being dishonest."

India loses a third of its harvest to insects, rats and rot, and high cost prevents big-scale food canning. From what should be fertile basins, India gets rice yields only a third of Egypt's, acre for acre, and grain production half that of the U.S. Misled by the example of Soviet industrialization, India for years concentrated on creating a socialistic state dominated by government-owned industries, diverting its own meager resources and $6.5 billions of U.S. economic assistance to do so. U.S. wheat helped to keep food prices low for industrial workers, but this cut farmers' incentive and prevented them from buying factory goods. At last, India's planners have realized that industry and agriculture must develop together if either is to thrive.

Now India's government has made overcoming its food deficit the first order of business, and Roger Revelle, director of Harvard's Center for Population Studies, believes that remedies can take root: better irrigation, more fertilizer plants, higher-yielding seeds, pest control. Equally vital are a farm-credit system, roads and storehouses (so that farmers need not dump their crops on the market at harvest time, when prices dip), and crop insurance to overcome the penniless farmers' reluctance to try new methods.

Prospects & Proposals

Though India escaped famine this year, the pangs of world hunger are going to grow worse. Since DDT and antibiotics cut their death rates by one-third in the 1940s, backward countries have seen their once slow gait of population growth change to a gallop. Fully 80% of the post-World War II population spurt has occurred in the countries least able to support it. It took from the dawn of time until 1800 for the earth's population to reach 1 billion but only 130 years after that to reach 2 billion, and only 36 years more to reach the present 3.28 billion. Enough girls have already been born, FORTUNE points out, to be the mothers of sufficient children to raise the population to 7.4 billion by the year 2000--but birth control should cut that figure down a lot. So should reduced child mortality--by giving peasants less need to rely on sheer number of offspring as insurance that some will survive to care for them in their old age. In any case, most of the added people will live in regions already seething with the pressures of deprivation.

"Unless the hungry nations learn to feed themselves," warns Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, "there will be world famine in less than 20 years. More human lives hang in the balance than have been lost in all the wars of history." President Johnson warns that "one new element in today's world is the threat of mass starvation." Agrees FAO Director-General Binay Rajan Sen: "Either we take the fullest measures both to raise productivity and stabilize population growth, or we face a disaster of unprecedented magnitude."

The threat of famine is real, but barring an improbable collapse of U.S. agriculture, it is not imminent. And the means for avoiding famine lie well within man's technology, if not necessarily within his politics. "If there should be a famine, it will be the result of ill-advised government action--in the U.S. and abroad," says Stanford Professor Karl Brandt, former director of its Food Research Institute. Plant Pathologist J. George Harrar, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, holds that "we know enough today to transform the food production of the world. There is no longer any excuse for human starvation."

The gathering crisis has at least exposed the defects of the U.S.'s twelve-year-old $15 billion Food for Peace giveaway, Public Law 480. Even that program's first coordinator, Don Paarlberg, now a Purdue professor of agricultural economics, castigates it. "All that free food depresses foreign markets, discourages their farmers, makes them victims of food imperialism," says he. "It's not good for them, and it's not good for us." In effect, the bill was so explicitly designed to let the U.S. get rid of surpluses that it neglected to encourage foreign agriculture. Many developing countries--notably India, Egypt and Indonesia--used U.S. food as a crutch to let them spend money on prestige projects such as airlines, steel mills and monumental public works.

Acknowledging the old mistakes, the Administration's $6.6 billion Food for Freedom bill, recently passed by the House of Representatives and expected to clear the Senate without major difficulty, calls for a fundamental shift in U.S. food-aid policy. It still proposes to keep the world from starving by expanding food shipments abroad and drops the requirement of the expiring law that such aid must come from U.S. surpluses. But the bill would require countries receiving food to build up their own agricultural output through selfhelp. And it quite bluntly advocates that they take birth-control measures, too.

A few years ago, such a proviso might have raised cries of a Western plot against the growth of colored races. Hunger's pressures have helped to calm that fallacious fear. Even in the most unlikely region, Roman Catholic South America, resistance to birth control has dwindled. "Religion is getting out of the way;" says University of Chicago Economist Theodore W. Schultz.

If the short-range solution to hunger overseas is more U.S. food, the long-range answer must be the export of technology, along with capital and brains to see that it is applied wisely. The rest of the world needs to catch up with the mechanization and efficiency of U.S. farms. Half the world's tractors operate in North America. California rice growers have gone so far as to plant, fertilize and spray their crops entirely from planes. A single U.S. farm worker now feeds 37 people, nearly twice as many as he did only a decade ago. And despite rising prices, U.S. consumers get off with spending the world's smallest share of their aftertax income for food: 19% (v. 29% in Britain, 45% in Italy, 80% in India).

American-backed research has already begun that immense catch-up task. Mexico was able to convert its wheat deficit into a small surplus at least partly because the Rockefeller Foundation helped Mexican scientists to develop new high-yielding varieties, which are stubby enough not to topple over of their own weight (as native wheat did) when heavily fertilized. Transplanted, the Mexican wheat is now doubling yields in West Pakistan, undergoing tests in India. In 1962, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations jointly set up an International Rice Research Institute near Manila. Already, its 20 scientists--half Americans, half Asians--have crossbred new strains of rice that have raised crop output in Pakistan and elsewhere.

The next task is research on tropical farming. Only 7.6% of the earth's land surface is cultivated today, because the rest is mostly too hot, cold, dry, wet or steep. Man's food supply is adequate only in the cool temperate zone, where grow most of the grains and soybeans that supply 60% of human energy. Crops in tropical rain forests are still grown as the Mayan Indians grew them 20 centuries ago: by burning off a tract, tilling it three years, then abandoning it.

Vital as research is, victory over hunger also demands that backward countries scale new heights of social, political and economic organization. As the U.S. example shows, it takes vast amounts of capital--$30,500 per U.S. farm worker v. $19,600 for an industrial worker. Some experts figure that developing countries must invest $80 billion before 1980 just to feed their growing populations at today's unhappy level. Beyond that, there is a need for chains of agricultural-research centers and schools abroad, partly staffed by an army of young U.S. technicians--one Congressman would call them the "bread and butter corps." Incentives that boost farm output by rewarding it must replace stifling state controls. The old Danish proverb applies: "When the mayor is a baker, the breads are always small."

Protein from Petroleum

For the 25-year future, scientists are already busy with new ways to feed the hungry planet. Los Angeles' Rand Corp. feels confident that fish will be herded like cattle and raised in offshore pens, that kelp, seaweed, plankton and microscopic sea plants will be grown by divers living for months at a time in undersea bunkhouses. Oilmen have lately discovered how to derive a high-grade, edible protein from petroleum. The U.S. Army has figured out how to irradiate meats to preserve them for three years--a development of vast potential for refrigeration-shy countries. Would people eat such stuff? Happily, entrenched habits can be changed. In India's rice-shy Kerala state, people are learning to down wheat they once spurned.

The food-rich West has enough conventional resources to stave off starvation on less fortunate continents long enough for existing farm technology--plus increasing birth control--to restore the balance between food and people. What then? Says Harvard's Revelle: "One cannot go to India without feeling that the average Indian is a prisoner of biology and environment. The problem of development is giving these human beings the freedom they need. They will use it very well." America's fabulous farm underpinnings have conferred that freedom--and power--on its people. With carrot and stick, the U.S. now offers the underdeveloped world a chance--perhaps its last--to borrow U.S. techniques and reach for the same nourishing reward.

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