An All Consuming Opportunity

As it did in 1963 and again in 1965. Russia turned to the West last week to replenish its perilously low stock of grain. The Soviets swallowed their pride and contracted to pay Canada $744 million cash for 336 million bushels of wheat over the next three years. With that and its recent deal to sell 250 mil lion bushels to Red China, wheat-rich Canada has committed to the Commu nist countries practically all its remaining grain surplus until 1970.

These sales add up to only one symptom of a profound change that has overtaken the world's food supply. With the earth's population growing twice as fast as food production, North America and Australia have become the bread basket for more than half the world. The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that per capita food output will actually decline 2% this year and that more than 3,000,000 people will die of malnutrition. This problem has created challenges and opportunities for companies with the talent to help end hunger.

Seed & Pesticides. From Manila to Maracaibo, Western capital and technology are at work today producing fertilizer, farm machinery, seed and pesticides--and teaching peasant farmers how to use them. They are also marketing new foods. In Colombia. Quaker Oats is promoting a powdered cereal that contains cottonseed flour, corn meal, sorghum and yeast to add body-strengthening vitamins and protein to diets in which their lack dwarfs and weakens millions of children each year. Minneapolis-based Archer-Daniels-Midland is shipping a protein-enriched powdered-soybean beverage to countries as far off as Korea. Corn Products Co. is working on hybrid seeds to improve corn yields in South America, recently brought out an enriched version of a familiar Brazilian baby food called Maizena. Says Executive Vice President Beverly Warner: "Unless you take 30 years to educate people, you must give them nutritional foods through things they are accustomed to."

The greatest corporate opportunity is in fertilizer--the quickest way to spur the yield from the millions of farms still tilled by horse and hand in underdeveloped countries. In Taiwan. Mobil Oil and Allied Chemical have teamed with a local firm to build a $20 million urea-and-ammonia plant. Esso Chemical Co. is investing $200 million in fertilizer factories in 13 areas as disparate as Aruba and Malaysia. In the Philippines, Esso built a fertilizer plant and sent teams of native salesmen out into the paddies to show suspicious farmers how much more money they could earn by using agricultural chemicals. Last week a three-man Indian government delegation headed by Agriculture Secretary B. Sivaraman came to Washington to seek American capital to expand India's lagging state-run fertilizer industry.

In related fields, International Harvester and Bombay's Mahindra are building a tractor plant in India, and De Kalb (Ill.) Agricultural Association, Inc., is about to expand its Punjab seed farm. American Cyanamid is teaching livestock raising in Thailand, Venezuela and 18 other countries. Caterpillar Tractor this month began a land-development demonstration in which it will clear 250 acres of Costa Rican rain forest, build five miles of access roads for farms big enough (25 acres) to feed more than their own occupants.

Vanishing Surpluses. For the short run, U.S. officials believe that the West can export enough food, chemicals and machines to keep famine at bay in most of the world. That job, however, will not be as easy as it once might have been. The U.S.'s glut of farm crops has declined sharply. The wheat surplus, for example, has fallen 54% in three years, to 550 million bu., which is less than the one-year domestic supply that the Government considers to be the strategic minimum. In a fundamental economic shift, President Johnson recently asked American farmers to plant 15% more wheat acreage this fall, largely to help feed the hungry nations. Last week he ordered Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman to consider putting still more idle farm land back into production next year. Said Freeman: "There is no more surplus of wheat."

In the long run, Freeman and other experts agree, widespread starvation will be averted only if the developing countries learn to feed themselves. That feat is perfectly possible, but somebody will first have to persuade a lot of socialist governments to give both their own farmers and foreign private companies more economic freedom and incentive to produce. Says World Bank President George Woods: "The technology is known; the capital is available. All that is missing is ingenuity, imagination and cooperation."

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