EDTORIAL FAMINE AND RECESSION The world food conference, which ended November 14 in Rome, took a frightening inventory of the beginning of famine in the world and the threat of its extension. In face of this inventory, the decision taken to establish a world stock of food reserves remains frought with so much uncertainty, and so many preconditions nowhere near being met, that there are grounds for serious doubt that the decision will ever be implemented. The attempt to cast responsibility for the looming famine on natural catastrophes or the population explosion is fundamentally deceitful. Leaving aside some very long-term predictions that are generally based on extrapolations devoid of any scientific rigor, it is a simple fact that the present world population could be well fed without exceptional effort on the basis of existing agricultural technology if world food production were planned and determined by the priority of feeding all humanity instead of by the priority of profitability. The absurd and inhuman character of the capitalist economy is more striking in the realm of food production than in any other. The big cereal-exporting countries (mainly the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina) have deliberately practiced agricultural Malthusianism, and have deliberately reduced their food production with the sole aim of "preventing a collapse of prices. In these four countries, the total land under cultivation was reduced from 120 million acres to 81 million acres between 1968 and 1970 in order to
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