Agricultural Productivity in relation to Population 
COLIN CLARK 
‘ 
; LIFETIME Of malnutrition and actual hunger is the lot of 
at least two thirds of mankind.’ This extraordinary 
misstatement, which is in fact based on an arithmetical 
error, is believed by almost everyone, because they have heard 
it so often. It was first made in 1950 by Lord Boyd Orr!, who 
had just retired from the post of Director General of FAO (Food 
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). A 
search for the evidence on which this statement is supposed to 
have been based was undertaken by M. K. Bennett?, Director 
of the Food Research Institute at Stanford University and a 
recognized world authority in this field. 
The text of FAO’s Second World Food Survey, which was not 
published until 1952, but which appears to have contained the 
material on which Lord Boyd Orr was working, included a 
statistical table for which neither sources nor methods of com- 
pilation were given. This table purported to show average 
calorie requirements per head of all the nations in the world, and 
compared these with supposed data of calorie supplies—data 
which, for most of the countries in question, have not since been 
republished, because of serious doubts about their accuracy. 
“One cannot escape the inference”, Bennett writes, that 
Boyd Orr had completely misunderstood the nature of the 
statistics (Inaccurate in any case) which had been placed before 
him; and had taken as supposed minimum requirements, below 
which people would actually suffer hunger, a set of figures of 
“targets”? for production at some time in the future, which 
targets FAO itself had already abandoned. 
FAO was once sardonically described by The Economist (23 
August 1952) as “a permanent institution devoted to proving 
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