Another World Food Scare?
Food's Frontier The Next Green Revolution. Richard Manning. North Point (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), New York, 2000. 233 pp. $24, C$38.95. ISBN 0-86547-593-8. Manning argues that we have reached the limits of what the Green Revolution of the 1960s can do to supply food to a still growing world population. He discusses nine ongoing projects that are experimenting with potential means of further increases in food production, including indigenous knowledge, native crops, and biotechnology.
The World Food Problem: Four Recent Empirical Studies
T HE PURPOSE of this note is to compare the methodology and projections of four recent studies of world food trends. The focus is upon food demand and supply in the developing countries. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) report, Agricultural Commodities-Projections for 1975 and 1985 [15], was an exhaustive base study. It stressed the importance of concessional food shipments and the potential for increased trade of agricultural commodities among developing countries. Since many developing countries are presently striving for some degree of self-sufficiency in food production [17, p. 22], the potential for food aid and increased food trade appears to be much less promising than depicted by FAO. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report, The Food Problem of Developing Countries [11], focused on developmental assistance. It asserted that agricultural commercialization is a capital intensive process; consequently, the capital shortages and generally unfavorable man-land ratios in the developing countries give them little potential for agricultural modernization. It argued that the comparative advantage of most underdeveloped countries in international trade is in labor-intensive manufacturing. Its focus on the necessity for a capital intensive agricultural sector ignores the labor intensive agricultural development process in both Japan and Taiwan [6, 7]. The stress on man-land ratios similarly ignores the potential of inputs such as the combination of fertilizer and fertilizer-responsive seed varieties to substitute for land. Also, the assumption that developing countries will have increasing access to the markets of developed countries to sell their manufactured goods appears implausible. The President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) report, The World Food Problem: A Report of the Panel on the World Food Supply
Trade, exchange rate, and agricultural pricing policies in Thailand
Thailand is still largely an agricultural country. In 1984, agricultural work was still the main source of earnings for more than 70 percent of the population. For much of the 25 year period covered by this report, government intervention in the prices of rice, maize, and natural rubber was extensive. For these products, intervention took the form of explicit export taxes and restrictive quotas. Sugar, on the other hand, was imported until 1960. For many years prior to that, government policy was to encourage growers and thus achieve self-sufficiency. One conclusion of this study is that the Thai sugar industry would have shrunk dramatically if the government had refrained from intervention. Intervention in the prices of rice and natural rubber had the effect of penalizing farm producers by reducing their output prices. There was, as a consequence a shift of resources towards Thailand's small industrial sector. In 1981, the Thai government lifted its quota restrictions, and liberalized its trade by eliminating its intervention in the maize, rice, sugar and natural rubber markets. Unfortunately for export growers, however, the gradual elimination of intervention was overshadowed by sharp declines in the world prices of Thailand's major agricultural exports.