Current interest in food prospects for the developing world is based on a set of four relatively straightforward questions. Upon closer analysis, however, these questions prove to be successively more complex. The first question is quite direct: Will food production in the Third World grow more rapidly than population? The answer seems to be a clear yes. Between 1961 and 1977, the growth of Third World production of major food crops averaged 2.6 percent a year, slightly higher than the 2.5 percent annual increase in population (Leonardo Paulino, forthcoming). There is every reason to believe that Third World food production in the future will continue to exceed population growth, since the processes for accelerated agricultural growth are now in place in so many developing countries and population growth rates are generally declining. The clear exceptions are Sub-Saharan Africa and the least developed countries (these are nearly synonomous). Even with a change in agricultural policies in these countries, there will be considerable time lags before food production growth rates exceed population growth rates. The second question is more involved, and much more important with respect to its policy implications: Will ratios of food production self-sufficiency increase in the Third World? In the long run, self-sufficiency ratios in the Third World will indeed increase-but that is the long run of decades. In the short run of this decade and the next, these ratios will just as certainly decline, as rapidly accelerating growth in the demand for food in the Third World exceeds capacity to accelerate domestic production growth rates. This conclusion is reinforced by the tendency for accelerated food production growth to be associated with forces that further accelerate growth in demand. The third question is decidedly complex: Will the real price of food (defined in terms of relative shifts in the demand and supply schedules for food) shift upwards over the next two decades (as compared to the zero or slightly negative trend over the past few decades)? It is my judgment that it will. In the Third World, demand for food will clearly continue to shift more rapidly than supply. It is less certain that the forces in developing countries will overbalance the converse relationship for the developed countries. The final question is the most far-reaching: What will be the impact of these forces on the nutritional status and the degree of poverty of low-income people? Since lowincome people spend 60 to 80 percent of increments to income on food (see my 1978 article), food prices are a principal determinant of their real income and nutritional status. Increasing per capita food production and imports allow a rising number of people to eat better. Preliminary analysis of crosssection data for African countries show that as aggregate per capita food supplies rise, the proportion of malnourished children declines (see Shubh Kumar, 1981). Increased capital intensity and the dynamics of food production itself will raise real wages for much of the laboring class (see Uma Lele's and my 1981 article). But for some individuals and particularly for those in countries left out of development processes, the situation will be more difficult in the future than in the decades of the 1950's and 1960's. This, I should emphasize, is the note of pessimism in this paper.

The problem of expanding food supply has been made more complex and more dependent on technological progress by the encroachment of a burgeoning population on a limited land area. Rapid growth in the rural labor force in the low-income developing countries not only increases the problem of providing adequate employment, particularly in the face of diminishing scope for expanding the land area, but also reduces the possibility of solving poverty problems simply by a redistribution of assets and income flows. Section II reviews past trends and current levels of food production, trade, and consumption. Section III discusses a controversial issue: the extent and seriousness of food deprivation. These sections lead to the same conclusion: the choice of development strategy is decisive in determining the level at which the food equation balances. An examination of contrasting development strategies and their implications for food production (Section IV) is followed by an exploration of the emerging consensus on the complex and difficult task of implementing a unimodal pattern of accelerated agricultural development, consistent with a high rate of growth in employment and food consumption. Interacting health-, nutrition-, and family-planning programs are viewed as important claimants of organizational and other resources. The review leadsmore » to the conclusion that reduction of malnutrition and related manifestations of poverty requires a set of interacting forces, characterized as a ring, that link nutritional need, generation of effective demand for food on the part of the poor, increased employment, a strategy of development that structures demand towards goods and services that have a high employment content, production of wage goods, and an emphasis on growth in agriculture. 183 references, 4 tables.« less