PRI Staff
The hullabaloo in the U.S. press — mostly engineered by Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute — over the alleged inadequacy of world’s grain stocks is mostly hype.
It is true that annual world grain consumption has exceeded annual production for some years. Indeed, over the past decade, the world’s annual consumption of all grains has exceeded annual production in seven of the past 10 years.
That statistic certainly does sound ominous. People cannot be blamed for assuming that world food supplies must be in dire jeopardy. They are being misled, however.
The fact is that in each of the past 10 years world grain stocks have exceeded production shortfalls by factors ranging from 3.5 times to as much as 22 times any single year’s deficit. During this period (1986–95), the world’s year-ending grain stockpiles have always totaled more than 230 million metric tons, with stocks in seven of the 10 years well above 300 million tons. Indeed, in two of the years cited, grain stocks exceeded 400 million metric tons, a burdensome supply that bankrupted many of the world’s farmers and led to deliberate cutbacks in grain production.
Such deliberate cutbacks, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, are in fact responsible for much of the recent shortfalls.
One closing comment about Brown: Worldwatch’s president, since leaving a high position with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has been predicting worldwide famines just about every year for the past 3 decades. His many such predictions have always been flat out wrong. But for some reason the media always come back for more.
(Grain: World Markets and Trade, USDA. March 1996, p. 51 (Wheat and Coarse Grains); p. 53 (Rice)
Although it is too early to celebrate, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), in its first estimates of the 1996–97 world grain crop, predicts the harvest will break all records.
According to the USDA, coarse grain production (principally corn) will be the largest in history, while the world’s wheat crop would be the second greatest ever, exceeded only by the 1990/91 harvest. Together, the two crops are expected to yield a total harvest of 1.46 billion metric tons, more than 40 million tons greater than the current record set in the 1992/93 crop year.
Meanwhile, world rice production is predicted to set another new record. If that estimate proves to be correct, this would be the 9th consecutive year of record production and the 15th such record over the past 17 years.
Total world production of coarse grains, wheat, and rice, is expected to exceed 1.83 billion metric tons, the first time in history that production has surpassed the 1.8 billion ton level.
(Grain: World Markets and Trade, May 1996.)
A procurement study done by the U.N. Association of the U.S.A reports the expenditures for contraceptives by United Nations’ humanitarian agencies in 1994 was more than double the amount spent on similar purchases in 1993.
The hefty increase in spending for contraceptives made them the sixth most frequently purchased item (just under vehicles) by U.N. agencies. The analysis of the spending habits of 30 U.N. agencies revealed that $83 million was spent in 1994 — up from $40 million in 1993 — to buy birth-control pills, injectable contraceptives, condoms, IUDs, spermicides, and implant devices.
Due to the heavy outlays for contraceptives, more traditional humanitarian purchases such as water-purification equipment or shelters were elbowed aside and didn’t even make the top-10 list. Indeed, the U.N. humanitarian agencies spent more on contraceptives than they did on the next ranking item, computers and software.
(“Checklist for condoms,” The Washington Times, 10 June, p. A12).
