English of Global Economics. Учебное пособие

Access is about a person’s relative position in the economic or social order. Only rarely does a whole country face hunger or

It was once commonplace to think that food security was best met entirely by domestic food production. Many countries dedicated themselves to increasing food production to meet their food needs from within their borders. Governments maintained stocks of food, particularly staple grains such as wheat and rice, as insurance against bad harvests or other shortfalls in supply. Food security was defined as having the wherewithal to feed a country’s people without recourse to imports. Increasingly, however, the effort to ensure national food self-suff iciency has come to be seen as counter-productive. Self-sufficiency is an unrealistic, even impossible, goal for many countries. Some countries lack the necessary natural resource base to grow all the food they need. Some countries are the result of political histories that did not respect the food production and exchange patterns that had built up over centuries.

In a sense, of course, all human communities, no matter how industrialized, live off the soil. All that differentiates an industrial society from an agricultural one is the number of the nonagricultural population that its food growers can support. In the past, the capacity of the agricultural population to sustain a non-farming population was very limited. Exact statistics are unavailable, but we can project backwards to the situation by looking at the underdeveloped regions of the world today, where the levels of technique and the productivity of agriculture resembles those of that time. Thus in India, Egypt, the Philippines, Colombia, and Mexico it takes two farm families to support one non-farm family; while in tropical Africa the productivity of agriculture is so low that it takes anywhere from two to ten people (men, women, and children) to raise enough food to supply their own needs and those of one additional — non-food-growing — adult. An Asian peasant, tilling his tiny plot with little more than a stick-plow, may be hard pressed to sustain even his own family.