Agricultural Policies In Practically All Countries Have Focused On Output Growth. Despite This, It Has Proved Far More Difficult To Raise World Agricultural Output By A Consistent 3 Percent A Year In The Mid-1980S Than

etween 1950 and 1985, cereal production outstripped population growth, increasing from around 700 million tons to over 1,800 million tons, an annual growth rate of around 2.7 percent. This increase helped to meet escalating demands for cereals caused by population growth and rising incomes in developing countries and by growing needs for animal feed in countries of the global North. Yet regionaldifferences in performance have been large.
4. As production has increased sharply in some regions and demand in others, the pattern of world trade in foods, especially cereals, has changed radically. North America exported barely 5 million tons of foodgrains yearly before the Second World War; it exported nearly 120 million tons during the 1980s. Europe's grain deficit is very much lower now,and the bulk of North American exports are to the USSR, Asia, and Africa. Three countries - China, Japan, and the USSR - took half the world exports in the early 1980s; much of the rest went to relatively wealthy developing countries, such as Middle Eastern oil exporters. Several poor agricultural countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, have become net importers of foodgrains. Still, althoughone-fourth of sub-Saharan Africa's population relied on imported grains in 1984, that region's imports have accounted for less than 10 percent of world grain trade thus far in the 1980s.
Table 5-1

Two Decades of Agricultural Development

Per Capita
Food Production
(Index 1961-64 = 100) Per Capita
Gross Cropped Area
(Hectares) Per Hectare
Fertilizer use
(kg.)


1961-641981-84 1964 1984 1964 1984
World 100 112 0.44 0.31 29.3 85.3
North America 100 121 1.05 0.90 47.3 93.2
Western Europe 100 131 0.11 0.25 114.4 124.1
Eastern Europe and USSR 100 128 0.84 0.71 30.4 122.1
Africa 100 88 0.74 0.35 1.8 9.7
Near East* 100 107 0.53 0.35 6.9 53.6
Far East** 100 116 0.10 0.20 4.4 45.4
Latin America 100 108 0.49 0.45 11.6 11.4
CPE's of Asia*** 100 1350.17 0.10 15.5 170.3
* An FAO grouping that includes West Asia plus Egypt, Libya and Sudan
** An FAO grouping that covers South and South-East Asia excluding the centrally planned economies of Asia.
*** An FAO grouping of Centrally Planned Economies of Asia which covers China, Kampuchea, North Korea. Mongolia and Vietnam.
5. Other foods besides grains are changing the patterns of world fooddemand and production. Demand for milk and meat is growing as incomes rise in societies that prefer animal protein, and much agricultural development in the industrialized nations has been devoted to meeting these demands. In Europe, meat production more than tripled between 1950 and 1984, and milk production nearly doubled. Meat production for exports increased sharply, particularly in therangelands of Latin America and Africa. World meat exports have risen from around 2 million tons in 1950-52 to over 11 million tons in 1984.
6. To produce this milk and meat required in 1984 about 1.4 billion cattle and buffaloes, 1.6 billion sheep and goats, 800 million pigs, and a great deal of poultry - all of which weigh more than the people on the planet. Most of these animals graze or browse orare fed local plants collected for them. However, rising demands for livestock feedgrains led to sharp increases in the production of cereals such as corn, which accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total increase in grain production in North America and Europe between 1950 and 1985.
7. This unprecendented growth in food production has been achieved partly by an extension of the productionbase: larger cropped areas, more livestock, more fishing vessels, and so on. But most of it is due to a phenomenal rise in productivity. Population increases have meant a decline in the area of cropped land in most of the world in per capita terms. And as the availability of arable land has declined, planners and farmers have focused on increasing productivity. In the past 35 years this has been...