CHURCHVILLE, Va. -- The United Nations has another extravaganza coming your way: a global food summit.
You may remember the United Nation's big Cairo Population Conference in 1994. It raised $17 billion in international pledges to ''manage'' world population growth -- without mentioning to anybody that Third World birth rates had already dropped three-fourths of the way to stability since 1965.
Now comes the sequel, the World Food Summit, which will take place in Rome this November. Preliminary ''hearings'' are already under way in Washington and other world capitals.
Actually, a global food summit is not a bad idea.
The world population will probably reach 9 billion before it stabilizes (up from the present 5.7 billion). Since the world is getting rapidly richer (even the Third World), most people will eat more resource-costly foods such as meat, milk, fruits and vegetables. The world may need to triple its food output over the next 50 years to satisfy the demand. That's worth a serious look forward.
A World Food Summit would be worthwhile, even if it just demanded a round of applause for the progress we've made in feeding the world.
Ending famine
The high-yielding seeds of the Green Revolution and the improved pesticides coming from chemists have helped raise the food calories per Third World resident by about one-third since 1960. That has put 90-plus percent of them into food sufficiency, if not affluence. The world hasn't had a major famine since Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, which starved about 30 million Chinese during the late 1950s.
Unfortunately, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization is probably not the right organization to look objectively at the long-term future of food.
During the 1970s, the FAO all but ignored the Green Revolution, which was doubling crop yields with high-yielding seeds and fertilizers. It tried instead to organize commodity cartels that would have raised food prices for the poor. Fortunately, the cartels failed. The Green Revolution brought food production costs down, and farmers and consumers were better off.
The real food problems are emerging in Africa, but the FAO probably fears that holding an African food summit would not raise much in donations. Africa's key problem is having the worst set of thuggish, thieving governments left on the world scene.
