ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed record gains in food production. Even Africa has more than doubled its grain harvest. There are many measures of food security, from the personal to the global. Whenever stocks are falling and approach 60 days of consumption, grain markets become quite nervous. As grain prices fell from mid-century onward, personal incomes were rising almost everywhere during the century’s third quarter. From 1990 to 1993, the world economy expanded annually at just 0.9 percent, leading to a per capita decline of 0.8 percent a year. When the world rice price doubled in the fall of 1993, it was bad news for consumers in low-income, rice-importing countries. For people already spending 70 percent of their income on food, a doubling in the rice price forced them to tighten their belts when there were no notches left.
