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53   Food From the World's Factories?
     The Washington Post, Saturday, July 15, 1967

     "The World Food Problem" is a comprehensive report by a panel
of specialists under the chairmanship of Dr. Ivan L. Bennett Jr.,
deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology in the White
House.  

     It is the most authoritative study so far of the problem to which
President Johnson referred when he said : "Next to the pursuit of
peace, the really greatest challenge to the human family is the race
between food supply and population increase.  That race tonight is
being lost".

     From a strictly technical standpoint, there is not much of a
problem.  Food is fuel for the machinery of the human body and
building blocks for its structure.  Each of us consumes about one
million calories a year, the equivalent of about 150 watts of
electricity.

     That megacalorie of energy is worth about a dollar in raw fuel --
but the human body won't burn coal or oil.  The earth's existing plant
life, operating at about 2 per cent efficiency, still traps enough
energy from sunlight to stoke 300 times the present human population.
However, we don't digest wood or seaweed, and most of this
photosynthetic product is consumed by fire or microbial decomposition
or is funneled through the food chains of other animals.

     The cheapest foods we are equipped to use are sugar and starches.
At 3 cents a pound these are about 20 times as costly per megacalorie
as raw industrial fuels, but in the present state of the world market,
agriculture is still the cheapest route to food energy.  The
industrial production of food calories might become competitive at
about 10 cents a pound, judging from the prices of related chemicals
manufactured from petroleum or natural gas.

     If overall conversion of energy and carbon into calorie nutrients
were the essential issue, the chemical industry could feed the world
at a production cost of about $100 per capita per annum.  This
estimate takes into account the protein constituents needed in human
nutrition; amino acids like lysine, tryptophan and threonine.

     Establishing such an industry would require a large investment
to handle a daily output of 10 billion pounds of concentrated
foodstuffs.  This is about ten times the present output of refined
fuel for motor vehicles in the United States alone.  If there were
a market for such an output, there is little doubt that the
industrialized countries, perhaps even the United States alone, could
meet it without any help from agriculture.

     We can rest easy about such an extreme technical solution,
however, because the problem is not primarily a technical one.
For some time we have heard urgent and realistic warnings about the
impending world shortage of food but there has been a steady decline
in world prices of food staples.

     How can we account for such a paradox?  The answer is that
hunger and effective demand are not related: malnourished people
are poor and poor people are becoming poorer because of unchecked
population growth.

     The real problem is to provide a social and economic framework
that will permit people to achieve a decent level of individual
productivity.  We have to help others break the circular chain of
poverty, unemployment, malnutrition and undereducation.

     In the exercise of our scientific leadership, we must be careful
not to make agricultural self-sufficiency an overriding goal except
as a necessary part of general economic development.  It is in the
underdeveloped, meat-poor countries that we may need to encourage
the most sophisticated industrial fabrication of special foods as
supplements to indigenous agricultural products.

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