The delegates attending the World Food Conference have little time to lose. With starvation threatening the planet's poorest inhabitants, nearly unparalleled acts of international cooperation are needed to prevent the Malthusian nightmare from becoming a reality. Scientific and technological means exist to feed all the hungry; but the money and the will may not. Precedents are not encouraging. This year three much ballyhooed international gatherings—the U.N. special session on raw materials, the Conference on the Law of the Seas held in Caracas and the World Population Conference in Bucharest—degenerated into forums for political posturing and adjourned without taking any significant action. For the Rome conference to accomplish more than the others, the so-called less developed countries (L.D.C.s) will have to resist the temptation to blame the world's ills on the former colonial powers and the U.S.
As their first priority, the delegates must approve a program to aid those who will face starvation during the next decade. In order to have supplies on hand for immediate aid to the victims of crop failures and natural disasters, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization will propose stockpiling national grain reserves as a "system of world food security." FAO officials expect this to ensure "that minimum food supplies are always available to those needing them on reasonable commercial terms or on grant terms." Because grain stocks are now so depleted, it will probably take at least five years to accumulate the 60 to 70 million tons (enough to feed about 300 million people for one year) that the FAO estimates the food security system will require.
The FAO proposal raises several questions that are as yet unanswered: Who will contribute to the reserve? Who will finance the storage and transport of the grain and who will control it? U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, whose views are crucial because no reserve system could function without major U.S. participation, worries that the existence of the surplus stocks could hang over the commercial market and depress the prices paid to farmers for their crops. His fear is based on the Government's experience handling the enormous U.S. grain surpluses during the 1950s and 1960s. American farmers commonly—and often bitterly—complain that the Government sold some of those stocks whenever grain prices moved up, thus denying farmers a higher return for their investment and work.
If the U.S. supports the food security system, it will probably insist on ironclad limitations preventing the reserves from being used for anything but emergency relief. Moreover, the U.S. will want all nations, including the Soviet Union and China, to share in the cost of maintaining the stockpile.
Less controversial is the FAO proposal for a kind of food early warning system, a centralized method for collecting worldwide facts on the types and quantities of crops planted, exports and imports, changes in weather and expected yields. If all nations cooperate—notably including the U.S.S.R. and China, which treat agricultural information as state secrets—approaching shortages can be spotted early and food-relief missions might avoid the delays that led to thousands of deaths during last year's aid efforts in Ethiopia and the Sahel.