The purpose of the World Food Day Teleconference is to broaden public knowledge and discussion of international food policy issues and to focus particularly on development strategies that can best foster long-term sustainable agriculture, hunger alleviation and improved quality of life for all.

The theme chosen for this teleconference, the third in the series, is "hunger Amidst Plenty: Policy and Practice." This theme was selected by the teleconference advisory committee on the basis of reports from the university receive sites after the 1985 program showing the areas of most interest and contrasting opinions among the viewing audience.

The issues this year will be framed by a particularly difficult time in terms of both world needs and U.S. support for international cooperation. Americans are acutely aware of, and confused by, the paradox of farm bankruptcies at home and hunger in much of the developing world. They were profoundly shocked by the TV images of starvation in Africa over the past two years, and are told by the press and national leaders that "reforms" are needed at both national and inter- national levels. At the same time, owing to the budget, debt and foreign trade crises, there is a growing feeling that development assistance policies aren't working, that they may be hurting American food producers, and that money sent abroad goes too much to the rich rather than the poor for whom it is intended.

Within the doubts about development assistance, there is a real need to know that something works; i.e., that projects "a" and "b", in countries "c" and "d", have led to food for children, escape from poverty and excitement among researchers and/or government extension workers that their work is effecting meaningful change.

Over several decades of evolving "development theory," the great majority of governments and development agencies have viewed economic growth as the answer to the hunger problem; with more jobs producing greater prosperity, individual incomes should rise faster than the cost of. food; farmers would increase production to meet rising demand, and hunger and malnutrition would diminish; at the same time, agricultural trade based on natural advantage would mean ever-expanding U.S. exports of wheat, corn, soybeans and other temperate zone products.

Recently, however, it has been found that rapid economic development in the world as a whole and even in the majority of the developing countries — whether in terms of gross product or average per capita income — has failed to arrest a steady increase in hunger and malnutrition, while constraints on trade and increased competition have severely eroded U.S. food exports. Progress either has not been fast enough relative to population growth or has not been shared equally enough among nations, regions or economic groups within national societies. In the past three decades, despite historic advances in science and technology, production of goods, international trade and the creation of a vast network of cooperative multinational institutions, tne number of undernourished people has nearly doubled.

The full record of the past, of course, is not that bleak. Despite an unprecedented increase in population, which many predicted would lead to global famine, food production has more than kept pace and there may be more food available per capita today than ever before in history. Recent studies of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reveal that while the absolute number of undernourished people continues to rise the percentage of hungry in the world population is declining. Living standards for the majority of the world's people have risen visibly. How- ever, the expectation that progress would eliminate hunger has not been realized, and the plight of the 500 million people "left behind" continues to weigh heavily on the human conscience.

Since the 1974 World Food Conference, for example, the countries of Asia together - have increased grain production by almost 4 a year, which is more than double the rate of population growth. Yet that region continues to have more than 30u million undernourished even while it has become a net exporter of rice, the main food staple.

In Africa over the same period, failures of national and international policies have brought that continent to the edge of what some experts are calling a "permanent crisis." Every year, whether of drought or plentiful rain, per capita food production has actually fallen, with a trend-line decline of more than 1 a year, while problems of land degradation and desertification have worsened steadily. Food imports continue to rise so quickly that most African government^ cannot find the foreign exchange to pay for them.

 In this period, according to World Bank studies, protectionist policies of the developed countries have added to the problem for the entire Third World and especially for Africa, in which most countries have no other export possibilities except agricultural products. These policies, according to tne Bank's World Development Report for 1986. are costing the developing (and developed) countries billions of dollars a year in lost exports.

In another recent policy study. Poverty and Hunger, the World bank proposes that future development lending should include nutritional goals — i.e., that economic development planning should incorporate programs that provide access to food for people at nutritional risk. However, it is too soon to know whether either donor governments or developing country aid recipients — even those with very high levels of undernutrition among their peoples — will adopt such an approach, meanwhile, the paradox of hunger amidst plenty continues and doubts about the usefulness of development assistance grow apace.

Most Americans, and certainly most of the viewers of past World Food Day teleconferences, believe these problems can and ought to be solved. The theme of "Hunger Amidst Plenty: Policy and Practice" was chosen to allow panelists to develop these issues from their separate vantage points.