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Food, Fertilizer, and the New Global Politics of Resource Scarcity

Like the short circuits in an overloaded electrical system, a rash of"systems overloads" in such essential fields as food and fertilizer supply are resulting from man's apparent inability to adapt his institutions rapidly enough to permit a continuation of the rapid increases in output of recent years. The food and fertilizer crises of the mid-1970s, while ac celerated by such short term factors as widespread drought and the recent unprecedented economic boom, are also very much the product of major, longer term, interacting trends. Growing demand has been outrunning traditional sources of supply for a number of essential commodities, including food, fertilizer and energy, at a time when most nations, including the United States, are becoming heavily dependent on each other for continued progress. World economic and political structures have been too slow in their response. Major disrup tions and higher inflation have been a consequence. A critical issue is whether resolution of the longer term scarcity situations needs to continue in the 1974 context of "winners" and "losers." This article examines how the United States in its role as global food manager contributed significantly through its actions in 1973 and much of 1974 to the crises of the mid-1970s which brought to the world double-digit inflation, massive recession, and innumerable premature deaths, and how the World Food Conference marked a sharp turn in United States—and world—policy toward seeking a positive-sum game approach to the food and fertilizer problems—an approach by which all principal parties might gain.