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Even though these measures would represent a rare example of international cooperation, they are mere palliatives. They can do no more than rush emergency aid to people once they have begun to hunger. In fact, such aid on a continuous basis could do more harm than good. Donated food often creates "two disincentive effects," notes the University of Chicago's D. Gale Johnson, a leading agricultural economist. It enables the recipient countries to go slow on agricultural development. It also keeps food prices so low in those countries that farmers are reluctant to bring new land under cultivation or invest in machinery, agrichemicals and modern techniques.
A more lasting remedy would be to encourage nations to adopt more efficient agricultural techniques to increase output. The Rome conference will be discussing measures to do just that. Some of the most necessary are:
CULTIVATE NEW LANDS. Man now farms only half of the earth's 7.8 billion potentially arable acres. Perhaps optimistically, FAO soil technicians reckon that the most promising unused lands are in:
> The Amazon River basin of northeast Brazil; >The savannahs of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil, where livestock could graze if plant varieties are bred that would thrive in the high-acid soil; > A broad band of 1.7 billion acres across Central Africa now infested with the debilitating tsetse fly; > Areas in Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Indonesia (notably Borneo and Sumatra) and the fertile but politically fragile Mekong River basin.
There is almost no virgin land in the world's two most populous nations, India and China. In the U.S., farmers are no longer paid to withhold any grain-producing land from cultivation and are tilling a total of 400 million acres. Even though the U.S. still has 264 million acres that could be farmed, they are now productive as pasture and timberland or are in such poor condition or location that a nearly prohibitive investment would be required to grow crops.
The obstacles are formidable. In the L.D.C.s, as well as the U.S., roads must be built to the new lands, irrigation systems installed, warehouses constructed, and the food distribution system expanded and modernized. Because much of the new land is of marginal quality, greater per-acre amounts of water, fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides would be required. Without proper weed killers, for instance, the yield of wheat, rice and corn can drop 20%.
One inexpensive and immediate step might be strict land-use policies to prevent good farm land from being taken out of production. In the U.S., 600,000 acres of fertile land are lost each year to the inroads of highways, shopping centers and housing developments. Farmers across the U.S. have been urging states to enact laws that encourage farmers not to sell their land for nonagricultural use.