On Growth Two

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48. Addeke H. Boerma

Addeke H. Boerma was born April 3, 1912, in Anloo in the Netherlands. In 1938 he joined the staff of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture. Following World War Two he became director-general ad interim for food supplies. Soon he represented first the Netherlands, and later all of Europe at the FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. From 1951 to 1958 he was director of the Economic Department of FAO, and in 1967 he became director-general of FAO, with headquarters in Rome. It was in his study in the Italian capital that this conversation took place. The author has included one Dutchman in this series, partly to honor his native Holland, but more because Mr. Boerma deals with the food situation for all of mankind.

For the last few years you have been warning people, whenever they were willing to listen - at the European Council, at the EEC in Brussels, and at the United Nations in New York - stressing that the world food situation is becoming increasingly serious. You have hardly been listened to. Perhaps today people may begin to react.

It is unavoidable that reactions to remarks concerning the world food situation should be slow. To begin with, the rich countries have no idea what this suffering owing to a large-scale lack of food actually means. It hardly happens in their own countries today, although in most of the poorer areas of the rich countries themselves there are still people to be found who do not get enough to eat. Their incomes are too small to pay for enough food.

Public opinion in the world is not sufficiently informed about the

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desperate food situation in many countries and no one seems to pay attention to it. It has always been taken for granted that there will be enough food. As soon as there is a shortage anywhere, people start hoarding and then prices are forced upward. In the developed countries people can still cope with the situation. Nevertheless, the world food situation does not at all seem to concern people as it should. Usually, measures are taken when they finally hear on radio or see on television what is happening.

This reminds me of a Dutch television film showing vultures eating human corpses. The film was made for the purpose of collecting money for Bangladesh, and the result was astonishing, for it raised ten million dollars in a single night.

We now see the same thing happening in the famine-stricken Sahel region of Africa. As soon as television started showing pictures in which these people were seen to be actually starving, the world began to be impressed. When large numbers of people are dying, the world begins to worry. That is how people are. When someone like me speaks from a general point of view and warns that things may become even worse, the world quietly waits until the emergency has actually arisen. As long as there is no real crisis, even the most serious warnings fail to make any impression.

You have just mentioned an extremely useful aspect of television if it were used properly.

Indeed. I believe it was C.P. Snow who once said that the world will only become aware of a real emergency situation when people can actually be seen to be dying on the screen.

From the last few days of the Second World War, I remember American and British bombers dropping loaves of bread over the starving regions of the Netherlands. In the Sahel region of Africa an emergency situation now exists. Why has it not been possible for countries which have thousands of warplanes standing idle to use them in sending food to the regions of Africa which are waging war against famine?

I am afraid that one would not be able to organize this. At least, not at the moment. Not with the mentality which prevails. It has only been possible for the FAO to obtain planes to a very limited extent in order to relieve the famine-stricken regions of Africa. These aircraft have been very useful. But the cost of sending planes is booked against a certain account by every Minister of Defense of the countries concerned and they now say that there is simply no more money available. One could say that this is a very remark-

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able situation indeed when we see how much money and how many planes are being made available for the war in Vietnam or are being sent to Israel.

This lunacy was emphatically pointed out to me by the former Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant.

Exactly. So when one thinks of this one sometimes becomes rather cynical. The only possible conclusion is that the moral values of people have shifted somehow. Only after overcoming tremendous difficulties were we able to obtain the use of the minimum number of planes needed by the FAO. We have by no means achieved all that we set out to achieve. This year the situation is even worse in some countries than it was in 1973. In Niger, for instance, the situation at the moment is very difficult.

This may well explain the recent thirty-second military coup in Africa which took place in that country.

Possibly. It is always hard to say exactly what the reasons may be for any coup, but certainly, when prolonged problems such as famines occur in a country, the germs for radical solutions are already present. Niger is at present one of the Sahel countries facing the greatest problems. After that nation, Mali and Chad are facing important problems.

Have you ever been bold enough to say, Enough! The situation is too serious. I am going to the President of the United States, who in his capacity as commander in chief has more planes available than some one hundred member states of the United Nations combined, so that at last something effective would be done?

In practice it is hard to achieve results through such a démarche. One should always go through normal channels.

Yes, but you are the director-general of the FAO and there are hundreds of thousands of human lives involved. This is a war situation!

One has to be careful in taking drastic steps. One should always prepare oneself thoroughly for such steps, particularly as far as the logistics are concerned. For this is where the problem lies. Naturally, food could easily be flown from America to the Sahel although the amounts of food that are needed might even be too large for air transport. This means that we partly depend on shipping space. Also, large numbers of trucks would be needed to transport the supplies from the ports to the distribution centers. All this takes a lot of time. Moreover, the enormous costs involved in this kind of transport

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is easily overlooked. Therefore, let me say this: We have urged many governments to make planes available to us but we did not get the numbers which we would have liked to have had.

Actually, it is disastrous that an organization such as the FAO is still without executive power.

We are not yet a supranational organization, nor is this something we can expect to become. At the moment people are not yet prepared to hand over power to an international organization such as ours. The FAO derives its power from the combined members, who arrive at certain decisions at separate moments.

At one time you proposed the setting up of a World Food Bank, an emergency food supply scheme.

That is what the Dutch government suggested during the World Food Congress of 1970 in The Hague. The aim was to create a world food reserve which would be financed internationally, meaning that all countries would contribute money or goods to be used for the entire planet. Actually, a similar proposal was put forward by the FAO as early as in 1964. The Dutch simply reactivated this scheme. Nothing ever came of it, because it was impossible to reach agreement on the question of communal financing, in other words how much each country should contribute. This plan for a communal world food reserve has therefore remained pure theory. The difference from what I have proposed is that each country accept the responsibility for its own food reserve so that each country pays for its own food reserve, which is also created by the same country. In doing so, a number of national food reserves would be created which might be coordinated on an international level.

Is all this to be fed into computers so that we always know how much food is available?

Indeed. The object would be, let us say, for the richer countries to create not only reserves to cover the requirements of their own peoples or the requirements that are needed by them as exporters of food, but also to create some extra reserves which would be available to help famine-stricken parts of the world. In this connection the poor countries would try to create their own reserves from their own production. In doing so, these countries would most probably have to be helped. Although India managed some years ago to create its own food reserve amounting to nine million tons.

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How do you view food aid to poorer countries?

In creating their own food reserves the poorer countries might either receive direct gifts from the rich countries or else assistance might be given them in the form of financing these reserves. This financial aid could, for instance, be granted by the World Bank or the IMF. The point is that all these activities involved in creating such reserves should be coordinated. We should all decide together how much food there is at any one time and how much is actually needed to ensure that there will be no further great shortages in the future. Shortages cannot be prevented. After all, a particular country may have a bad harvest one year, so that when there is only a small food reserve in such a country, it will be depleted almost at once. This country will then have to be helped by others. The object is therefore to create by means of a combination of measures an actual world food reserve which is not financed internationally, but the financing of which is shared by the countries themselves, and in which it would only be natural for the rich countries to contribute more than the poorer countries.

In 1974, figures were published from which it appears that mankind only has sufficient food reserves to cover a period of twenty-seven days at present.

It is indeed true that when the present harvests will be brought in, there will be only a large enough food reserve to cover a period of about three weeks. This means that the stocks in the United States have gone down very considerably, even to a minimum level. These food reserves should therefore not be allowed to drop any lower than they are at the moment. Nor is there a surplus of food in the world which might be mobilized if anything unforeseen should happen. Naturally, there will be new harvests. At the FAO, we have a department which registers the harvest expectations in all countries. It looks as if these expectations are, as things stand now, in the early summer of 1974, very favorable indeed, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union, from which we receive no direct information. However, a recent publication in Moscow stated that their spring sowing of cereals had remained below expectation, so it is probable that the Soviet harvest also might remain below expectation. Since the Soviet Union produces about seventy percent of its harvest in the spring, it means that this information is very important. But we at the FAO do not know its full significance. Accurate details about the Soviet Union are not known. For the time being we can only go by the news given through Izvestia. Prospects in the United States and Canada are still favorable for 1974, which is not to say that things cannot go wrong somewhere else in the world. When there is a bad monsoon in Asia it probably means a lot less rice will be grown. As the rice production

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in Asia is hardly in step with consumption, and the reserves are also very low in that part of the world, shortages of rice will therefore have to be compensated for by supplying wheat. This wheat can only come from the United States or Canada, or possibly from Australia, where some reserves are still available.

What would happen if there were a failure in the United States?

In principles, the result would be the same as if a failure of the harvest occurred elsewhere. The difference being however, that the United States is the only supplier of food reserves to the world at the moment. So if this kind of disaster should happen in America, things would definitely go wrong. Particularly if, at the same time, a similar failure of the harvest should occur somewhere else in the world at the same time as in the United States. After all, this is quite possible. As things are at the moment, the US will have a surplus of ten million tons of cereals in 1974.

Professor Jean Meyer of Harvard has estimated that 210 million Americans are presently using as much food as would be needed by one and a half thousand million Chinese when keeping to an average diet.

In the luxury society of the West far more meat is eaten in proportion to cereals. Because meat is very costly in relation to energy, which means in relation to the basis, cereals - large quantities of cereals - are needed for producing all this meat. The result is that in a country like the USA, where large amounts of meat are eaten, relatively large amounts of cereals are used for feeding cattle, which, in turn, produce meat. If the same amount of cereals were to go directly to the consumers, far more people could, of course, be fed.

According to the available figures, the Americans use 2,200 pounds of cereals per person per year, of which 140 pounds are used for producing bread and foodstuffs. The Chinese have 400 pounds per person per year available, of which 360 pounds are used for producing primary foodstuffs.

In the rich countries far too many proteins are eaten compared to other areas. After all, people in industrialized countries prefer to eat meat. Against this, we use far too few carbohydrates. In China the main food supply consists first of all of carbohydrates, to which proteins are added. This can be called a healthy diet. In the rich countries, the average diet is far too rich in protein, which means that it is wasted. This surplus of protein is produced with the help of cereals, so that these urgently needed cereals are withdrawn from the world food production.

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Have you any hope that we might ever be able to end this what I might call insanity in which certain parts of the planet are using food in wasteful and unreasonable quantities whereas other regions go on starving? How much do the domestic animals alone consume in the rich countries?

I must honestly tell you that I do not know. I do not know to what extent public opinion in the rich countries might be educated.

Don't Christians always talk of loving thy neighbor? Where is their solidarity?

I'll tell you again, the necessary solidarity may only start dawning on people when they see with their own eyes their fellow men dying on their television screens. Possibly, people will only then realize what is actually going on. At the moment the famines are still too far away from their immediate environment. An accident at the corner of the street where they live - this is what still impresses them first of all. When they read about it in a newspaper, it is already less hard to bear for them, and when they hear that a disaster is affecting Asia they hardly seem to care. After all, that is human nature. That is what we are up against. It is a good thing these matters are now published on a large scale, but I do not expect any great changes even from this publicity in the short run. Politically speaking, it would be impossible to bring about a kind of distribution of food at the moment if no more serious developments would occur. If such a decision would be possible, we would first of all have to limit the use of cereals as cattle fodder. Here an enormous saving could be made. This would automatically lead to a saving in the use of meat and poultry.

This brings me to a question about China. You were there last year. What were your impressions?

I was impressed by the fact that after all 700 to 750 million people are being fed without any indications of famine.¹ Moreover, it has been possible for them to create a national food reserve. This occurs in the People's Republic of China is close collaboration between the government and the people. So it is impossible for us to say that there might be people who are dissatisfied about this. On the contrary. They all seem to work together. China is, of course, a country where different political norms are used than in practically any other country in the world. One might therefore wonder if the same could not be done in other countries. However, in my opinion this is doubtful, for I do not believe that people in other countries could easily be persuaded to share their poverty as is done in China, and which has at least led to a situation in which nobody has entirely been reduced to poverty. No

1 The United Nations was giving the figure of 800 million for the population of China when the secretary-general of the FAO spoke to the author.

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one in China is excluded any longer from the possibility of buying food. No one dies of starvation now. However, this has only been possible to achieve because poverty and prosperity are being fairly shared by the entire population.

The way in which the Chinese population has been brainwashed into this unique but very necessary feeling of solidarity possibly may not be sympathetic to us living in the rich countries. But is not the final result the most important point for everyone?

Yes, it is. Naturally, we shall have to wait and see how long this development will last and whether it is possible to preserve this mentality.

Madame Gandhi stressed in a conversation I had with her, that as a responsible leader of the government she would not impose birth control, but that she would ask the people to please have fewer babies. China may have used other methods, but can we say that there is more order and prosperity for the common man in the People's Republic of China than in India?

I do not have the impression that results in China have been achieved by using too much force, at least judging the situation from the outside. One sees very little dissatisfaction or opposition. At least, this is the situation at the moment, and the impression prevails that China's domestic security is greater than it ever was before. The individual in China now has a better and safer position in society, and no comparison can be made with the situation as it used to be. It seems to me that in view of the general mentality of the population, it would be extremely difficult to have similar results in India. I may be mistaken, but I believe that also in this respect too many Western influences have already penetrated into Indian culture.

Professor Sladkovsky told me in Moscow that, for instance, only thirty percent of the agricultural land in India is effectively irrigated, whereas in China the same figure is seventy-seven percent. How can developing countries make more land suitable for agriculture without having funds available?

In China an effective use has been made of the enormous number of people who are available there and who have been used in constructing, for instance, irrigation works.

This brings us back to the point of feelings of solidarity.

Indeed. This feeling of mutual cooperation plays an important part here.

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But in China a certain amount of force undoubtedly has been used. This force was accepted because people realized that what was done was in the interest of the community as a whole. In China it has been possible to retain very useful people who would otherwise perhaps have been unemployed. What struck me during my visit to the People's Republic was that no one was without work. At least, this was my impression.

In India the number of unemployed is estimated to have reached sixty million.

India has enormous masses of unemployed. That is one of their greatest problems. How could these people be usefully employed in the production process? Efforts have been made to employ them in certain agricultural development projects and to pay them with food supplies. But there simply is not enough food available in India to effectuate this on any large scale. This is not only a very serious problem for India, or Indonesia, or for other countries that have great population surpluses. In my opinion it is the key problem in Asia and in most other developing countries.

Families in the rich countries spend an average of twenty percent of their income on food. In Indonesia it is sixty percent. There are still many countries where people have to spend eighty percent of their income on food.

Indeed, a useful standard for ascertaining the standard of living is the percentage of income that is spent on food.

What has really been the effect of the Green Revolution? Is it going to solve the problems?

Technically speaking, the Green Revolution still has many possibilities to offer. At the moment there are special difficulties in this sector because together with the improvement in cereals there also have to be sufficient fertilizers, insecticides, and water available. Since 1973, these factors have been linked with the energy crisis. As you know, there is already a shortage of fertilizer all over the world. This is not only the result of the oil shortages. For we have had a period in which there was a surplus of fertilizer and in which production had to be restricted, particularly in the developed countries. At present, no immediate attempt is being made at increasing production again. In the meantime, the price of fertilizer has risen substantially so that it has become more and more difficult, particularly for poor peasants, to buy it. In most of the developing countries it is today even impossible to obtain any at all. In India there is a shortage of one million tons.

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Naturally, this must have a serious bearing on food production in India. President Boumédiene recently pointed out at the conference of raw material-producing countries in New York in April, 1974, that ninety percent of the world fertilizer production rests in the hands of the rich countries.

This has to be changed. I do not expect a great deal from increasing the production of fertilizer in the rich countries. It is in the developing countries themselves that its production will have to be increased quickly. In this connection I am thinking in the first place of those developing countries that have the feedstock available themselves, which means the raw material for producing fertilizer.

The Arabian Gulf states, for example? If only one quarter of the natural gas which is now lost above ground in the oilfields of Saudi Arabia could be utilized, this nation by itself would be able to supply the whole world with the fertilizer it needs.

Investments should be made in fertilizer-producing industries in those countries where valuable raw materials are now literally going up in thin air. In this way the Arab countries would, in the long run, supply the markets in the developing countries with the fertilizer they so urgently need.

Time once described you as a cautiously analytical person, in any case not an alarmist. But coming back to the first part of our conversation: As far as the food situation is concerned, the world is in a state of war. Is it not time that you changed from being a cautious analyst to raising alarm, which might have a greater chance of success than has been the result of the many warnings you have issued so far?

I believe that I have sufficiently discussed the subject of what I think of the world food situation. At the same time one should be careful and avoid giving the impression that there is no hope at all. For I do believe that in the field of supplying the world with food, a tremendous amount may still be expected from our technology. We have hardly started to put the most sophisticated technology to work in the developing countries. I mean, apart from the so-called Green Revolution, which mainly concentrates on introducing better-quality seeds. Even in the developing countries there still is a great deal of wastage, for instance of water. This is the result of bad management, which could be improved upon considerably. All this will take time and requires a great deal of investment. In this respect, far more could be undertaken and achieved than is being done at the moment, for instance, in agricultural research. There should be much more cooperation in this

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field, both regionally and internationally. In the FAO we are, in cooperation with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program, working via bilateral programs on promoting research on a worldwide scale in which the emphasis lays, naturally, on the developing countries. We have collected as much as twenty-five million dollars for this purpose. With this money, research stations are financed, for instance, for maize research in Mexico or for rice in the Philippines. More money is now also available for wheat research.

Rice research for Indonesia?

No. No financing is going to that country in this connection at the moment. We are selecting the research institutes with a great deal of care and our projects are taking place wherever, in our opinion, they are most urgently needed at the moment. We have, for instance, founded a new institute in Hyderabad for studying the so-called drought zones. There will also be an institute somewhere in the Middle East for the ecological area which will cover the whole of the Mediterranean. An institute in Peru is engaged in the research of potatoes. I should like to stress that a shortage of food is not only a technical problem, but that it is also a social and economic problem. These questions are extremely complicated and they are mutually dependent. On the other hand, far more money will have to be invested in the earlier-mentioned research organized on a worldwide scale, because this is how we shall be able to discover how to use our technology in order to fight against the prevailing food shortage, at least on a technical level.