Jorgen Nielsen, a member of the Liberal Democratic Group, stated that a 30-per cent expansion of the area given over to agriculture in the Third World was possible. But this was impeded by "innumerable factors of a human, technical, financial and political nature which are holding up the expansion and modernisation of agricultural production."

His German socialist colleague, Katharina Focke, was more cutting: "The European Community's food aid policy is still dictated by political interests rather than any intention to promote development," she said.

Frances Moore-Lappe, the author and campaigner who helped set up the "Rome Declaration Group" as an alternative to FAO's World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, argued that food aidincreases the Third World's dependency on foreign aid and aggravates the imbalance between food production and export crops.

A recent report of the World Food Council, established by the UNO in 1974, links the "political sensitivity of food issues" with "the high and growing concentration of international grain supplies in one geographical region, i.e., North America" and "the dangers to world food security from possible climate, logistical and political factors." These are seen good enough reasons to call for the development of alternative sources of supply to the Third World countries.

Some experts like Moore-Lappe argue that there is enough food to go around comfortably, right now. The world's grain production suffices, she says, to give each human being a daily calorie intake equivalent to that of the average North American. Other sources, like Population Concern, come up with different arithmetic: an even distribution of the world's food production would yield a per capita intake of more than 1,600calories and 59 grams of protein and this is, according to FAO, what an average body requires daily while at rest.

The latest study of the International Wheat Council says Third World demand for wheat, rice and coarse grains like barley could rise by 55 per cent by the turn of the century. Its import needs may double. But world prices, depressed now by the current surplus, are likely to rise. But the auguries are scarcely good. The European Parliament president, Lord Plumb of Britain, talks of the "paradoxical problems of plenty."

At GATT, the 95-nation world trade body, USA is campaigning for freer trade in food and an end to subsidies for farmers. But the Europeans who argue against the US scheme fear that it could mean more farmers without work.

In reply, the USA has proposed phasing out all subsidies to farmers by year 2000 - an argument that freeing trade in food was one answer, especially benefiting Third World farmers. Hugh Corbett, director of London's Trade Policy Research Centre, explainedthat subsidies created surpluses which were dumped in world markets. "And if you are dumping food in Africa under the label of food aid, the effect is to push the price down and lead farmers to shift to, say growing livestock, which eat up all the grass. And then you get famine," he said.

The so-called Cairns Group of major farm nations, among them Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada and Indonesia, have welcomed the US plan. "The US proposal is a concrete starting point for our negotiations," pointed out Leppoldo Tettamanti, Argentine ambassador to GATT. He emphasised that in the long run the prime need for Third World countries is to substantially hike agricultural production.

Increasing agricultural production invariably raises the issue of availability of land - a question on which expert opinions vary. Optimists reckon that for each person on the planet there are about 3.7 hectares of cultivable land, plus another hectare divided between pasture and forest.

And, they say, less than half a hectareper person is actually under cultivation. But some experts, basing their calculations on a study made by a US presidential advisory committee, say that at best there are 3,200 million hectares of cultivable land, of which only half are being used. They add that even if agricultural productivity does not increase, population growth would exhaust the available land by 2010.

The seriousness of the problem does not end here, but stretches into the vital question of the extend of undernourishment. The vast majority of the undernourished live in Asia; over a third of India's population consumes less than 75 per cent of the calories they need. One in every three children in sub-Saharan Africa is under- nourished and four per cent are on the verge of starvation. Widespread undernourishment has long co-existed with sufficiency or near- sufficiency of food supply on a global scale.

An irrational system of distribution is normally blamed for this situation. It is already a cliche that one third of the world'spopulation consumes half the world's food. Extreme and widespread undernourishment is associated with famine, which is linked to persistent long-term poverty. But rich people do not starve.

The idea of famines wiping out whole societies, as though the bad weather did not hit all in equal measure, is far-fetched and can usually be traced to sensationalist history writing rather than a real record of what happened. Recent exponents of the linkage between poverty and famines have dispelled some of the myths surrounding this historical view of famine as nature's leveller, striking out indiscriminately at classes and societies that meteorological chance causes it to alight on.

At the height of the recent crisis, Africa is still growing most of the food it consumes. Even in famine there is always some food. Who has ever seen a starving military officer or merchant, let alone aid worker? It is a question of who has access to that food.

Another question which is debated by experts is whether machines do abetter job than men in increasing agricultural output. Japan, with two workers per hectare, is a good indicator of what manpower can achieve: India lags behind with only half as many people on the land. China feeds its population with only half the cultivated acreage of India.

Again, manpower, not high technology, is the key. In fact, technology need not mean costly machines and industrial inputs. The techniquest of crop handling, pest control and storage, all adaptable to large unaided manpower, could cut back the phenomenal losses suffered every year in Third World food production. The FAO illustrates this with the 10 per cent annual loss in Third World grain output, which amounts to about 100 million tonnes. A staggering figure indeed.

Third World Network Features