Cereals, the world food problem and UK self-sufficiency.

In the United States, 91% of the maize, 64% of the barley and 88% of the oat crop is fed to animals. If all the cereals fed to animals in that country were available for human beings, it would be sufficient to feed not only the people of India, as stated in a recent publication (Ulbricht, 1976a), but in fact the whole of India and China. I am citing this fact not to suggest that US cereals could be used for that purpose-clearly, a totally unrealistic i d e a 4 u t to emphasize that the world food problem is due, not to any lack of capacity to produce food, but to much more intractable problems. These include interacting factors such as climate, population, distribution, poverty and the use we make of the resources we have. It has been said recently that the ideas of Malthus were fundamentally correct (Wilson, 1977), in the sense that growth cannot continue indefinitely. What has misled us, and what still misleads today’s antidoomsters is that just in the last few centuries energy has become ever more abundant at ever less cost. Is then the era of cheap energy irrevocably over? Wilson believes that substitutes for present forms of energy are not at all likely to be cheap. In addition, he points to the current recession from which economies are not emerging as the old cyclical pattern predicted, and that there is unemployment coupled with idlation, i.e., the ‘system’ is breaking down. An increase of demand of 5% annually, which is what governments and businessmen would like to see, would mean a fourfold increase in demand in thirty years. Whatever our favourite dream about the long-term future may be, in the next few decades energy is going to be expensive and we shall not see exponential growth at 59Jyear. Feeding the rapidly growing population of the developing countries and trying to maintain some social stability in the face of the