ABSTRACT
In a world plagued by hunger and famine, the existence of food surpluses could be interpreted as, at best, paradoxical or, at worst, morally indefensible. Looking in brief at the meaning of food surplus, in one sense achieving a level of food production surplus to domestic demand is a laudable achievement, such a surplus can form the basis of both international trade, with its economic advantages to participants, and food aid, with its humanitarian benefits. In an ideal economy of mobile resources, land, labour and capital would be reallocated from the farm sector into other productive sectors, so as to maintain a market equilibrium between the supply and demand for food. The structural food surpluses of developed countries, between the 1960s and the 1990s, could well be viewed as a transitory feature of productivist agriculture and its associated intervention by the state.
