Food surpluses

Since Americans enjoy the cheap food supply made possible from a huge agricultural surplus, and there seems to be no desire to reject technology and go back to a reliance on manual labor, the food surplus problem of an overweight and obese America is likely to remain for years to come. 

FAO is not a relief agency. It does not purchase or distribute food products, although it is much concerned with food deficits and food surpluses. Neither is it a research agency, though it does try to enlist the interest of scientists in its fields and coordinate their efforts in the solution of pressing problems. Finally, of course, it is not a political organization, but operates as an international extension agency on a strictly impartial basis. 

In terms of informed policy decision, it would be desirable to relate information to both the input and to the output. However, working with secondary data implies that many studies do not provide complete information. In most cases, though, data on an environmental indicator is only available on the input, the per unit of land area basis. Although in scientific terms it is deplorable that most information is not available on a per unit of output basis, this is less problematic for today s practical EU policy. Food surpluses are more of a problem in the current political environment than food scarcity and there seems to be a broad consensus to keep the amount of farmland relatively stable. Therefore, in the EU, in most cases, the policy relevant way is to apply the data on environmental indicators to the input on a the per unit of land area term. 

Although it is scientifically deplorable that more information is not available on a per unit of output basis, it is less problematic for practical EU policy in today s political environment. In a policy environment in which broad consensus seems to be that the area of land used for agriculture should not drastically change and in which food surpluses are still more of an issue than the fear of food scarcity, the best way to express environmental indicators is in terms of per unit of land. Therefore, the food security proponent s question is currently politically irrelevant. 

A full appreciation of the toll of forced resettlement in Ethiopia extends far beyond the standard reports of starvation, executions, deforestation, and failed crops. The new settlements nearly always failed their inhabitants as human communities and as units of food production. The very fact of massive resettlement nullified a precious legacy of local agricultural and pastoral knowledge and, with it, some thirty to forty thousand functioning communities, most of them in regions that had regularly produced food surpluses. 

For us, as marketers of agricultural chemicals, a key question for the Seventies is this Just where will the additional food needed to feed the world population be produced Back in the 1930 s, the less-developed nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America—considered as a group— were net exporters of grain, but in the 1940 s the food surplus of these nations shifted to a deficit, and they have since been net importers, in steadily increasing amounts. 

Massive, atmospheric-damaging eruptions of volcanoes in recorded history have caused catastrophic crop failures. These will happen again. And since the world as a whole carries little food surplus from year to year, the certainty of food supply disruptions due to volcanic activity points to the desirability of storing substantial amounts of food for emergency use. 

Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, when farming-domesticated species created food surpluses. The major agricultural products can be broadly grouped into foods, fibers, fuels, and raw materials. Specific foods include cereals (grains), vegetables, fruits, oils, meats, and spices. 

---