CHAPTER 5 FAMINE 1995? OR 2025? OR 1975? CHAPTER 5: TABLE OF CONTENTS Famines Conclusions Launcelot to Jessica about her becoming a Christian and marrying Lorenzo: "We were Christians enow before; e'en as many as could well live, one by another. This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs; if we grow all to be pork eaters we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money." Jessica to Lorenzo: "He says you are no good member of the commonwealth; for in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork". William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene v. Fraud, luxury, and pride must live, While we the benefits receive. Hunger's a dreadful plague, no doubt. Yet who digests or thrives without? Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, lines 415-418. The introduction noted that there has been a major shift in the consensus of economic scholars about population growth's effects in the past decade. But there has been no shift with respect to the subject of this chapter - the potential for food production. Rather, the overwhelming consensus of respected agricultural economists has for many decades been extremely optimistic. The public has acquired a very different impression from reading the popular press and watching television, however. A small handful of doomsters, in conjunction with willing journalists, have managed to preempt so much attention that the upbeat mainstream scientific view about food has been subverted and obscured. On the rare occasion when the press reports the outlook as positive, it treats the matter as unexpected and amazing - even though the agricultural economists have been saying it all along. For example, The world is producing more food than was ever before believed possible. Countries that a decade ago were thought incapable of feeding themselves are doing just that today. The entire world of agriculture is standing on the edge of unprecedented production explosion. It dismays the layperson to find that respected publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post consistently publish material which not only is quite wrong but opposes the mainstream scientific views. When I lived in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, I would read on the front page of the local News-Gazette about an "overpopulated" world running out of food, drawn from the New York Times wire service. Then on the News-Gazette farm page I would read of falling prices and farmers worrying about an international food glut. Journalistic schizophrenia. Food is the gut issue (pun intended) in any book on resources and population. It has been so at least since Malthus. Even people who do not worry about the effect of economic growth or population growth on other resources worry about food. Indeed, such worry is commonsensical, just as it was commonsensical for Launcelot to worry (though in jest) about the scarcity of pork if Jews converted to Christianity. But common sense notwithstanding, this worry is quite misplaced and can be very damaging. No matter how the food situation changes or how much information we have about it, no matter what the state of our knowledge about food productivity, the public view of food prospects is quite the same. To set the stage for the discussion, here are some quotations mostly from the late 1970s, when the first edition of this book was written. Though I collected a juicy crop then, I could as easily collect a crop now or from earlier eras; the ideas remain eerily the same. One after the other, official and unofficial forecasts about the future food supply were frightening. In the 1970s the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific had predicted "500 million starvation deaths in Asia between 1980 and 2025". And the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had said that "the long-term trends in the food production of developing countries remain alarmingly inadequate". A book-length survey by the staff of The New York Times had arrived at these purple- prose conclusions, "From drought-besieged Africa to the jittery Chicago grain market, from worried Government offices in Washington to the partly-filled granaries of teeming India, the long- predicted world food crisis is beginning to take shape as one of the greatest peace-time problems the world has had to face in modern times. While there have always been famines and warnings of famine, food experts generally agree that the situation now is substantially different. The problem is becoming so acute that every nation, institution, and every human being will ultimately be affected". Population/Environment Balance paid for a full-page advertisement in leading newspapers, signed by such dignitaries as author Isaac Asimov, Presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, author Malcolm Cowley, ecologist Paul Ehrlich, editor Clifton Fadiman, oilman J. Paul Getty, Time Inc. executive Henry Luce III, poet Archibald MacLeish, Nobel prize-winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Reader's Digest founder DeWitt Wallace, U.A.W. President Leonard Woodcock, and many others, saying: "The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000 and the reason for this will be its inhabitants' failure to comprehend two facts. These facts are 1. World food production cannot keep pace with the galloping growth of population. 2. "Family planning" cannot and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth". C. P. Snow used the novelist's art to dramatize the matter: "Perhaps in ten years, millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our very eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets...". And the School of Public Affairs of Princeton was offering a course on "Problems of World Hunger" based on the premise that "Hunger has never been known on such a world-wide scale as today". Similar examples of widely publicized alarming forecasts could be multiplied by the dozens. Perhaps the most influential was the opening of Paul Ehrlich's best-selling 1968 book, The Population Bomb: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death". Even schoolchildren "know" that the food situation has been worsening and that the world faces an impending crisis. If you doubt it, ask a few children of your acquaintance. A book for children puts it thus, "When man first began to farm, there were fewer than 5 million people on earth, and it took more than a million years for the population to reach that figure. But populations increase geometrically - that is, they double (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.). Food supplies, in contrast, increase only arithmetically, a much slower process (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, etc.).... If the population continues to explode, many people will starve. About half of the world's population is underfed now, with many approaching starvation". Many writers think the situation is so threatening that they call for strong measures to restrict population growth, "compulsion if voluntary methods fail," as Ehrlich puts it. Some influential people even urge "triage - letting the least fit die in order to save the more robust victims of hunger". The 1967 book by William and Paul Paddock (Famine - 1975!) applied this World-War-I medical concept to food aid, resulting in such judgments as Haiti Can't-be-saved Egypt Can't-be-saved The Gambia Walking Wounded Tunisia Should Receive Food Libya Walking Wounded India Can't-be-saved Pakistan Should Receive Food This was Ehrlich's assessment in 1972: Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food supply of the world will be necessary in the next 30 years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be alive in the year 2000 are to be adequately fed. Theoretically such an increase might be possible, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally impossible in practice. This tiny sample should be plenty to establish that frightening food forecasts have dominated the mass media. Happily, none of these terrible events has occurred. Instead, people have been increasingly better fed, and lived longer and longer lives, since those forecasts were made. The record of food production entirely contradicts the scary forecasts. The world trend in recent decades shows unmistakably an increase in food produced per person, as seen in figure 5-1. FIGURE 5-1. Per Capita Food Production in the World Progress in food production has not been steady, of course. The first draft of this material, for publication in my technical 1977 book, was written in 1971 and 1972, when food production was having its worst time in recent decades. And some countries' experiences have been tragically different from the general trend, usually because of politics and war. (More about these special cases later.) Yet there has been no year, or series of years, so bad as to support a conclusion of long-term retrogression. A person who sees figure 5-1 sometimes asks, "Where are the other data?" When I ask, "Which other data?" the questioner may reply, "The data the other folks quote to support their worried forecasts." There simply are no other data. The starting date of the series shown here is the earliest given in the basic sources, chosen by them and not by me; this should reassure you that the starting date was not chosen arbitrarily so as to rig the results. (Such rigging, however, is not unknown in these discussions, as we shall see in Chapter 7.) The data shown in figure 5-1 were published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the United Nations and were collected by the UN from individual countries. Of course the data are far less reliable than one would like; economic data usually are. But these are the only official data. Standard data that would show a worsening trend in recent decades do not exist. If you doubt it, write to the authors of frightening forecasts, to the UN, or to the USDA. Or even better, go to your local library and examine such basic reference sources as Statistical Abstract of the United States and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization's Production Yearbook. Indeed, Figure 5-1 understates the extent of the improvement in world food supply. Because it shows food production, it does not take into account the increase in the amount of food that actually reaches consumers due to lower losses over the years as a result of improvements in transportation and storage. It should also be remembered that production could immediately be enlarged if the United States were to stop paying farmers to idle their land instead of planting crops. Let's examine the very long-run price trends for food, just as we did for copper in Chapter 1. Figure 5-2a shows that the real price of wheat - the market price adjusted for inflation - has fallen over the long haul despite the great increase in demand due to both a growing world population and rising incomes. The rise in food output was so great as to cause grain to become cheaper despite the large increases in demand. More startling still, figure 5-2b shows how the price of wheat has fallen by another measure - relative to wages in the U.S. FIGURES 5-2a and 5-2b How did total output, and productivity per worker and per acre, gain so fast? Food supply increased because of agricultural knowledge resulting from research and development that was induced by the increased demand, together with the improved ability of farmers to get their produce to market on better transportation systems. (These sentences are a lightning-fast summary of forces that take many books to document well.) This all-important historical trend toward cheaper food, which probably extends back to the beginning of agriculture, implies that real prices for food will continue to drop - a fact that dismays American farmers and causes them to tractorcade to Washington. Despite the mass-media consensus that we are heading toward agricultural crisis, and though (as we saw in Chapter 3) earlier on even famous economist John Maynard Keynes entirely misunderstood the long-run economics of agriculture because he was misled by the idea of diminishing returns, the mainstream view among agricultural economists has for decades been that the trend is toward improvement in the food supplies of almost every main segment of the world's population. For example, D. Gale Johnson could say in an authoritative review (even in 1974), "[T]he increase of the food supply has at least matched the growth of population in the developing countries, taken as a group, for the past four decades. This has been a period of very rapid population growth in the developing countries.... Thus the recent achievement in expanding food supplies in the developing countries has been a significant one...there has been a long term gradual improvement in per capita food consumption over the past two centuries". And in a 1975 "compendium," the agricultural economists spoke nearly in a single voice, "The historical record lends support to the more optimistic view". The consensus of agricultural-economic projections confuted the popular doomsday beliefs with calm assessments even at the height of the poor harvests and food worries in the early 1970s. (Since then, conditions have improved even more sharply.) It is a simple fact, then, that the world food supply has been improving. But it is also a fact that people resolutely ignore this silver lining and instead try harder to find the cloud. Consider, for example, this statement from a technical article: "During the last 25 years or so the average rate of increase of world food production has steadily deteriorated...it fell from 3.1 percent in the 1950's to 2.8 percent in the 1960's and 2.2 percent in the first half of the 1970's". The apparent changes may not even have been statistically meaningful, but leave that aside. The word "deterioration" suggests that the world food situation was getting worse. But the data tell us only that the gain - the improvement - was greater in the 1950s than later. That is quite different than things getting worse. Consider also figure 5-3, taken from Business Week. At first glance it seems to show population growing faster than food. That would imply a fall in food per capita, a bad sign. But on close inspection we see that food per capita has increased, a good sign. It is thoroughly misleading to put a total figure (population) next to a per-capita figure (food per capita). Why is it done? People apparently want to believe, and want to tell others, that the world food situation is getting worse even though it is really getting better. (And journalists get more mileage out of bad-news stories.) FIGURES 5-3a and 5-3b. A Typical Misleading Diagram on Food Supply FAMINES A famine report written around 1317: Because nothing but weeds grew in the fields, and provisions in the town were all consumed, many people sickened and died of starvation. They lay in the streets surrounded by so many dead that in Erfurt the carts were halted so that the cadavers could be loaded on to them and conveyed to Schmiedistedt where sundry graves had been prepared, and here the survivors buried them. That sort of Malthusian famine happily is long gone. Yet fear of famine is rife - as it has been since the beginning of agriculture. The historical trend of famines is another important index of how well the world's food supply has been doing. Famine is difficult to define and measure operationally, however, because when nutrition is poor, many people die of diseases and not directly of starvation. Traditionally, historical research on famine simply counts as a famine an event that people living in a particular time referred to as a famine. Though that is skimpy evidence, there is no reason to believe that such accounts have been affected by a bias that would distort the long-term record. Therefore historians' studies of the occurrence of famines would seem to have considerable validity for our purposes. Johnson summarizes the incidence of famines as follows, as of the early 1970s: Both the percentage of the world's population afflicted by famine in recent decades and the absolute numbers have been relatively small compared with those occurring in those earlier periods of history of which we have reasonably reliable estimates of famine deaths. There has been a rather substantial reduction in the incidence of famine during the past century. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century perhaps 20 million to 25 million died from famine. [Despite the much larger population now] For the entire twentieth century to the present, there have been probably between 12 million and 15 million famine deaths, and many, if not the majority, were due to deliberate governmental policy, official mismanagement, or war and not to serious crop failure... While there have been some deaths due to famine in the third quarter of the 20th century, it is highly unlikely that the famine-caused deaths equal a tenth of the period 75 years earlier. There has not been a major famine, such as visited China and India in the past, during the past quarter century. There have been some near misses, such as in India in 1965-66, and the current sad situation in Africa should not be ignored because a relatively small population is involved. But the food supply has been far more secure for poor people during the past quarter century than at any other comparable period in the last two or three centuries. Since the above passage was written, evidence has come to light that perhaps 7 million Ukrainians (plus other Soviet citizens) died of famine in the early 1930s, and perhaps 30 million Chinese died of famine from 1958 to 1961. I suggest you read again the numbers in the previous sentence and try to grasp their enormity. The death rate in China jumped from around 11 per thousand in 1957 and 1958 to over 25 per thousand in 1960, and then fell immediately back to 11 or below by 1962 and thereafter, due to the fall in calories from above 2000 per person in 1957 to below 1500 in 1960; food consumption then rose again to its previous level. The evidence is overwhelming and transparent that those famines were caused by government policies - deliberate murder in the case of Stalin, and wrong-headed economics in the case of China. Most conclusive is the large increase in food produced in China immediately after policies changed toward economic freedom in agriculture, as seen in Figure 5-4. As soon as the Chinese government allowed the transformation of agriculture to essentially private enterprise at the end of the 1970s - the largest rapid social change in all of history, involving perhaps 700 million people - production soared. FIGURE 5-4 All throughout China's history, even when the population was only a fraction of what it is now, Chinese food production has struggled to just suffice. But now, production is so great that in response to agriculture failure in the Soviet Union, in 1991 China shipped grain and meat to the Soviets. More about Chinese and Soviet food production in Chapter 7. The irony of the food shipments from China to Russia, and the tragic famines of the past in China and the Soviet Union, reinforce the general conclusion that humanity need never again suffer from peacetime famine caused by natural conditions. Rather, modern famine will take place only in a society that abolishes individual farmers and puts farms under government ownership and the control of bureaucrats. Do you wonder how these optimistic trends can be reconciled with the pictures of starving children you have seen in national magazines, and with the longstanding myth that "a lifetime of malnutrition and actual hunger is the lot of at least two-thirds of mankind"? This much-quoted FAO statement was made by the FAO director in 1950, within a year of the FAO's founding and in the aftermath of World War II, on the basis of no data at all. (The claim soon became the children's-book cliche that "about half of the world's population is underfed now, with many approaching starvation"). After some research the UN reduced its estimate of people in "actual hunger" to 10-15 percent of mankind. But even this estimate was (and is) far too high. Furthermore, the term "malnutrition" is sufficiently vague that it could include the diets of any of us. Casual as the original FAO conjecture was, a large amount of study has been required to lay it to rest in a scientific cemetery. Yet even now the original statement comes back again and again in current discussion. But - "The death of a single human being from starvation is an unspeakable human tragedy." That common expression implies that even if the food supply is improving, it would be better to reduce the world's population so that no person would die from starvation. The value judgments that underlie this idea will be analyzed in Chapters 39 and 40. Here, let us note that if death from starvation is an "unspeakable human tragedy," then death from an auto accident or a fire must also be the same sort of tragedy. But what are the implications for social action? The only way to avoid all such deaths is to have no people. Surely that cannot be intended. Hence this sort of phrase, heartfelt though it may be, really tells us nothing about what should be done. Paradoxically, greater population density apparently leads to less chance of famine. A concentrated population builds better roads and transportation, and better transportation is the key factor in preventing starvation. Consider a reporter's account of the 1970s famine in the Sahel in West Africa. "Sure, the food is pouring in," observed British Red Cross liaison officer George Bolton, "but how the hell are we going to get it to the people who need it? There isn't a tarred road within a thousand miles of Juba." Bolton wasn't exaggerating. While I was in Juba, I witnessed the arrival of 5,000 gallons of cooking oil, which had been diverted from the nearby state of Rwanda. Since the rickety old ferry was not strong enough to carry the oil shipment across the White Nile so it could be distributed to the needy in the interior, the oil was promptly unloaded on the riverbank and stored in Juba. And this was not an isolated incident. I saw warehouses in Juba overflowing with millet, dried fish, cooking utensils, agricultural tools and medical supplies - all useless because nothing could be delivered to the people who needed it". The Sahel is a classic case study of food, population, and public relations. Newsweek, on September 19, 1977, asserted that "more than 100,000 West Africans perished of hunger" between 1968 and 1973 due to drought. Upon inquiry, writer Peter Gwynne informed me that the estimate came from a speech by United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. I therefore wrote to Waldheim asking for the source of the estimate. A remarkable packet of three documents came back from the UN Public Inquiries Unit: (1) Waldheim's message, saying, "Who can forget the horror of millions of men, women and children starving, with more than 100,000 dying, because of an ecological calamity that turned grazing land and farms into bleak desert?" (2) A two-page excerpt from a memo by the UN Sahelian Office, dated November 8, 1974, saying, "It is not possible to calculate the present and future impact of this tragedy, on the populations.... Although precise figures are not available indeed unobtainable...certainly there has been an extensive and tragic loss of life...". (3) One page by Helen Ware, a respected Australian expert on African demography and a visiting fellow at the University of Ibadan in March 1975, when her memo was written specifically for the UN. Ware calculated the normal death rate for the area, together with "the highest death rate in any group of nomads" during the drought. Her figures made nonsense of the other two documents. She figured that "at an absolute, and most improbable, upper limit a hundred thousand people who would not otherwise have died, succumbed to the effects of famine.... Even as a maximum [this estimate] represents an unreal limit." Ware's figures, which flatly gave the lie to the UN Secretary-General's well- publicized assessment, were on page one of a document written for, and sent out by, the UN itself well before the UN Desertification Conference was held and Waldheim's message was publicized. Apparently, it was the only calculation the UN had. But it was ignored. Later, UN press releases retreated to the more modest, but still unprovable, assertion that "tens of thousands" died. Ware's comment, "The problem with deaths in the Sahel is precisely that there was so little evidence of them - rather like the photograph of the dead cow which kept turning up in illustrations to every newspaper story". As the first edition of this book was in press (July 10, 1980) the Associated Press was crediting the UN with asserting that a forthcoming "permanent food crisis will be deeper than the 1972-74 drought, when 300,000 or more died in Ethiopia and the Sahel belt south of the Sahara". Since then even more inflated numbers have appeared. (When in 1980 I first wrote about this event in Science, I was criticized for writing in an unflattering fashion about such a great man as Kurt Waldheim. Readers said that they simply could not disbelieve a statement coming from such a credible source. Since then Waldheim has been proven an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, an army officer involved in war crimes, and a liar about his personal history. So much for his greatness and his credibility.) One might keep the Sahel-Waldheim incident in mind when reading accounts of current famines in Africa. Luckily, even the press has finally gotten the word - which the entire profession of agricultural economics has known for many decades. As Science headlined the story in 1991, "Famine: Blame Policy, Not Nature". The most influential scientific journal in the world asked, "Only one region of the world still suffers from widespread famine - Africa. Why is that?" It then breathlessly announced the finding that "the conventional wisdom holds that the answer is a combination of droughts, deforestation, and war." But "a new 4-year study" concludes that "the responsibility for pushing poor people over the edge into starvation lies largely with a network of social and political factors." This item is typical of African famines of our era: While They Starve The Government of Ethiopia has so severely restricted emergency relief operations in the country's north, a region ravaged by both drought and war, that as many as two million people are out of reach of any known system of food distribution, aid officials and Western diplomats say. Because of the restrictions, these officials say, hundreds of thousands of tons of donated food are piling up at ports and may never reach those in need. Agricultural seeds, too, are not being distributed. This means that farmers who must soon plant crops cannot do so, which could lead to even greater problems next year. The press still hasn't grasped the core of the issue. The Science story quoted just above goes on to recommend "rural public works projects", "improved seeds, fertilizers, and agricultural extension services" and the like. That is all good stuff. But the key is much simpler: economic freedom, meaning private ownership and free agricultural markets. Without that, the improved seeds and fertilizers will end up wasted, just as in the Soviet Union. CONCLUSIONS This chapter does not suggest that complacency about the food supply is in order, or that hunger is not a problem. Some people are starving. And, although not starving, most people would like to be able to purchase a more expensive diet than they now enjoy (though for many of us a more expensive diet could be a less healthy one). But as we have seen, food has tended in the long run to become cheaper decade after decade, whether measured relative to the price of labor or even relative to consumer-goods prices. page# \ultres tchar05\December 23, 1993