ABSTRACT
The relationship between the worlds growing population and ability to feed it at an acceptable level of nutrition is one of the most important and also one of the most controversial current global issues. In the 1980s and 1990s the developed countries in North America and the EU have deliberately limited their cereal output by persuading farmers to set aside marginal land or to grow other crops. At the same time the collapse of the communist governments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has led to a disastrous period of falling productivity as guaranteed purchases by the state have disappeared. Sub-Saharan Africa is usually quoted as the region with most remaining difficulties in its relations between population and resources. Although the disruption caused by civil wars in Africa has been an important factor in food shortages, people return to their original point made in the introduction, that poverty is fundamental.
