[The socio-economic framework of nutritional problems in poor and in rich countries].

The explosive increase of population in almost all the underdeveloped countries--about 1900 it was round a milliard, now it is more than two milliard and at the turn of the century more than four milliard is to be expected--has given rise to serious concern that the Third World is approaching a nutritional catastrophe such as ROBERT MALTHUS has prophesied nearly two hundred years ago for the newly developing industrial countries. The actual development of the industrial countries has proved the opposite of MALTHUS' prognosis. And in the Third World also such pessimistic fears are not appropriate. The natural potential for the production of foodstuffs in most of the developing countries is immensely great. The nutrition of the additional milliard in this century could be kept at the approximately equal per capita level by cultivation of land reserves with traditional primitive methods without an increase of yield. In order to keep from hunger the number of consumers doubling once more in the coming twenty-five years, it is essential to apply the modern methods of food production developed in the industrial countries. This would allow double or threefold and more the yield on the same area of land. The available reserves of food production in all--taking the land reserves and the still more important progress in agricultural methods together--are so great that fear of general hunger through the exhaustion of resources, even with a world population of ten milliards, must be regarded as totally unfounded and misleading. This is so, however, only when all available forces for this great task are activated and put into productive action. In the industrial countries with their at present extremely high level of nutrition, which had never before in history been reached, a great increase of food production has been achieved in comparison with the former primitive and low productive agriculture. It would, however, be an inversion of the cause and effect to believe that the improvement of the nutrition standard was caused primarily by the increase in food production. The initial stimulus derived from the increase in income, purchasing power and demand at first for more, and later for better nutrition, which came with the industrialisation. This gave the impulse to agriculture to make better use of the given great possibilities to produce progressively more food by applying the continually improving agricultural technology and higher investment. Gradually the nutritional standard of the masses in the industrial countries has reached, thanks to the high purchasing power of the masses, many times the level at the beginning of industrialisation and also the level of most developing countries. A look back into the past and the present conditions in the Third World shows that each phase of development, with its typical average income, has a certain standard of nutrition...