773 



famine conditions are rare and mass famine unknown. Not all Ameri- 

 cans are well fed: Despite conditions of abundance, there are many 

 persons whose dietary habits predispose them to malnutrition ; others 

 who are ignorant of what constitutes an adequate diet ; and still others 

 whose poverty denies them the means to buy adequate food. But as a 

 general proposition, in the United States the pressure of population 

 on food supplies appears to have been effectively dealt with by a com- 

 bination of favorable circumstances, in which technology is an im- 

 portant element. 



Habits of thought formed by the American experience have made 

 it all too easy to assume that a facsimile of U.S. conditions (with per- 

 haps some substitutions, like irrigation to correct a deficiency of rain- 

 fall) can be readily introduced into a given country to solve the prob- 

 lem of famine. Technological factors can be systematically tabulated: 



Production technology 



Transportation technology 



Storage and preservation technology 



Urban-rural balance 



Market organization 



Agricultural credit institutions 



Managerial expertise 

 and systematically imparted to the famine-prone area. To a consider- 

 able degree, the assumption that it is enough to concentrate on these 

 factors has been reinforced by European experience. 



A.rhier'einent ar^d Maintenance of Adequate Dwt in Europe 



The ability of an expanding population in the United States to 

 feed itself was roughly paralleled in leading industrial states of 

 Western Europe. In Great Britain and Germany, this ability was 

 attained through a combination of improved agricultural techniques 

 and larfre-scale imports from overseas. For example, "German agri- 

 cultural production more than doubled and maybe even tripled in the 

 nineteenth century," while Germany's population increased propor- 

 tionatelv.* "With growing production German agriculture might have 

 been able to provide bread for her ever-larger population. But the 

 demand for higher-quality food, in the form of both finer flour and 

 more meat, which meant the rliA^ersion of grain to cattle feeding, 

 necessitated the import of foreign grain after 1871." ' 



The British similarly supplemented domestic food production with 

 imports. The people of France, on the other hand, industrialized at a 

 slower pace and, with a substantially larger portion of the population 

 living on subsistence farms, were largely able to feed themselves. In 

 the Far East, Japan supported a rapidly increasing population by 

 intensive and skillful cultivation of the land and by extensive fishing 

 operations. 



The fact that the tnore heavily industrialized countries were rela- 

 tively successful in meeting basic food needs appeared to run counter 

 to early theories of the inherent inadequacy of food to sustain popula- 



*HaJo Halborn. "A History of Modern Germanv. 1840-1945" (New York. A. A. Knonf. 

 196fi). page .^72. According to Koppel S. Pinson. the region of "Bismarckian Oernianv" in- 

 orease'1 in population from 24 million to 68 million in the 19th centurv ("Modern Ger- 

 many," New Tork, Macmillan, 1966). 



» Ibid., page 371. 



