1967 | Food Availability
Food Availability
Iran, South Africa, and Turkey have record grain crops but hunger remains widespread in India.
More than 6 million tons of U.S. wheat are shipped to India under terms of the P.L. 480 of 1954. Reserves of wheat stored in U.S. grain elevators fall sharply as more than one-fourth of the export crop goes to India.
The President's Science Advisory Committee issues a three-volume 1,231-page report (The World Food Problem) that cites the pressures on food supplies of growing populations and increased affluence.
Famine—1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive? by U.S. State Department agronomist William C. Paddock and his brother Paul (a retired Foreign Service officer) observes that by 1975 today's infants and young children will be adolescents and young adults with appetites too great for world food production to satisfy. Famine is inevitable, say the Paddocks, the United States must decide which countries can be saved and which cannot, and population control must be enforced.
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D. N.Y.) and former Sen. Joseph Clark visit backward areas of the South in the spring and "discover" hunger. A medical team that has surveyed the Mississippi Delta reports to the Senate Select Subcommittee on Hunger and Human Needs that hunger and malnutrition are widespread in the region.
The Department of Agriculture returns $200 million of unused food aid funds to the Treasury.
Some 2.7 million Americans receive food stamp assistance as of Thanksgiving (see 1964; 1969).