World Food Security and Non-Aligned Countries *

Abstract

An important factor of international economic relations today is that the developed market economy countries produce much more food than they need for their own consumption while the developing nations have to import food-grains at heavy cost from the former to feed their growing population. The cereal imports of all developing countries in 1978/79—1979/80 amounted to 86.2 million tonnes. Of this only 9.2 million tonnes was received in food aid from the developed countries;¹ the rest had to be paid for. Food imports thus imposed a big strain on the external payments account of the developing countries.

That, however, is not the only or even the major problem in the distribution of world food supplies between the developed North and the poor South. Because of their poverty, the average daily energy in-take per person in the latter group of countries in 1974–76 was 2180 Kcal compared to 3315 Kcal in the former. Out of the total population of 2259 million (excluding China) in developing countries, 435 million or over 19 per cent were undernourished.² At the root of the low levels of food consumption and undernourishment in these countries, lay the poor performance of agriculture. As against 5.4 tonnes per hectare in the developed countries, the average yield of paddy in the developing countries in 1974–76 was 1.9 tonnes and that of wheat 1.9 and 1.3 tonnes respectively.³ The close association between under development, backward agriculture and under-nourishment of a large section of the population needs to be noted.