Food

Abstract

Until recently there was no world food problem. There were food problems for individual villages; more often for whole districts, suffering from flood or drought; occasionally for entire countries. But for most of the time most nations were able to meet their own essential food needs. Trade in food was mainly in luxuries: such as spices, sugar, tea and coffee. Even where trade in essential foodstuffs developed — as in the grain trade from the Baltic to Western Europe, or from south-west China to the east coast — it was relatively marginal in relation to the needs of the receiving areas. Because populations were only a fraction of their levels today, most countries, even with very low yields for each acre sown, were able to feed most of their population most of the time.