Georg Borgstrom

Population Growth, Nutrition and Food Supply

The world food scene is dominated by four powerful forces: the population growth, the accelerating affluence in the industrialized countries, the rapidly increasing armies of the destitute in the developing countries, and the unrestraint urban growth. The lack of historical and biological perspectives has led to two basic fallacies in the evaluation of the world food problems. Historically Europeans were able to temporarily resolve their food and population problems through emigration. In biological terms all people living now could get an adequate diet if feed crops were not substituted for food crops. It is shown that such metaphors as triage, lifeboat operations and the abuse of the commons are misleading and that they distract from the real nature and magnitude of the world food crisis.

Future prospects of animal production of fats and protein

Present trends in the global animal production of fats and protein are reviewed. The dominance of the West and the temperate latitudes is underlined, and the uniqueness of China and Japan are analyzed. The global disparities are based primarily on the ample soil resources in the West allowing for extensive production of feed crops, led by oilseeds. A second major input is fish protein, half the catches of fish from the oceans being converted into meal and oil. This kind of secondary or even tertiary production is unlikely to be copied under the parsimonious conditions of the poor world. The relative roles of oilseed and fish proteins are analyzed. Future trends are discussed on the basis of the FAO projections presented in the Indicative World Plan.

Agriculture and World Feeding Alternatives

Food production is rarely analysed from the ecological point of view, while even more rarely are the constraints placed in clear focus. Yet these matters have to be moved to the centre-stage of the current debate around the food issue.

Aquatic protein in Latin America.

Data from the selected countries in Table I illustrate the large discrepancies in protein production that exist among Latin American countries, even within the same region.

FOOD, FEED, AND ENERGY*

The statement that the energy encased in food represents a very small and diminishing fraction of the energy consumed in fuel and electricity is frequently encountered. However, in most instances the food energy itself has been computed incorrectly. When measured on the basis of the caloric content within the food as eaten, food does in relative terms rate rather low in energy, particularly in developed countries. This is a misleading figure as it does not recognize the calories expended in producing the animal products. TABLE 1 illustrates this. The difference in calorie intake per capita per day between the United States and India is not, as generally assumed, 1310, but rather 9182 calories. This in itself reflects an awesome discrepancy which illuminates a much overlooked aspect of the food-and-people issue. It is not sufficient to count heads, not to add up calories in the food eaten. In any kind of valid comparison, the nutritional standard is a factor that must be considered in both these procedures of appraisal. In addition, this example illustrates how much less it takes to keep an East Indian going than an American. Such data also open up entirely new vistas on basic economic relationships, such as personal income, salaries, and expenditures. This paper expands the scope of such comparisons by bringing into focus a far more comprehensive energy evaluation of daily food which includes most of the calories required to raise that food. Judged in such a manner, each hectare involved in the production of food or feed in modern agriculture receives an input of energy which frequently surpasses the energy which crops capture through photosynthesis, a relationship which seriously questions the basic energy economy of such agriculture. Everyone knows that cars and airplanes are run by fuel, but how many realize that more than one-third of the human family maintain themselves through food gained by an extra input of fuel, mostly of fossil origin!

WORLD PRIORITIES—ENERGY RESOURCES AND ARRANGEMENTS: GROUP REPORT 2

It can be said that energy use is a prime component of the high standard of living to which all people aspire. Thus, the improvement of man’s material well-being has been accompanied by a rapid rise in the rate at which he uses energy. In the past, abundant supplies of readily accessible fossil fuels have been available at low cost and these have flowed relatively freely across national boundaries. Thus, our use of energy has grown exponentially; in the post-World War I1 period this growth has exhibited a doubling time of about 14 years. Although this growth has occurred throughout most of the world, it has not lessened the vast inequality in energy use between rich and poor regions. The United States, with 6 percent of the world’s population, uses 33 percent of the world’s ‘energy; the per capita consumption in the energy-poor countries is only about 1 percent of that in the United States. We identify the major elements of the energy situation in the present and near-term future to be: (1) In regions of the highest use, the absolute magnitude of growth has outstripped the capacity of the fossil-fuel industry to keep pace with that growth. For a variety of reasons the number of refineries built in recent years has been insufficient. (2) Our growing awareness of the adverse environmental impact of fossil energy sources has introduced an additional impedence into the nations’ planned programs of energy expansion. (3) From the large spectrum of technological possibilities only one new energy technology has been developed since World War 11-nuclear energy -and the rate of its development and introduction into the energy economy has been slower than had earlier been anticipated, because of both technical and environmental problems. (4) Recent international events have included both sharp increases in * Chairperson. t Rapporteur.