those used for food production, include particular land areas and the appurtenant natural forces influencing the production of foodstuffs.

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Although the physical supply of land-space and situation-is fixed and cannot be changed by man, the economic supply that serving human needs- is flexible and changes in response to the need of the products and services derived from it. Thus the economic supply of land producing foodstuffs is continually changing in response to different quantities and kinds of food demanded by man. Through land reclamation and technological and transport improvements the economic supply is increased. Through deterioration, abandonment, and shifts to other uses it is decreased.

varies from that of the meager subsistence of the Central African primitive tillers to the high standard of the prosperous Corn Belt farmers.

Available

Rough estimates show about 4 billion acres of arable land, roughly 12 percent of all land, upon which the world must depend for food. This is scarcely 2 acres for each of the world's 2 billion people. In some countries there is less than 1 acre per person despite the estimate of certain nutritionists that 2/2 acres of fairly productive land are needed to produce an adequate diet for one person. The quality and productiveness of food-producing lands vary greatly from one region to another. Only about one-fourth of the world's arable land is first-class and it is unequally distributed. The influence of physical forces land use does not fit into any upon type of national pattern. This influence is reflected in the density and growth of population among the several nations.

Economic Determinants

Physical forces set the ultimate limits of food production but economic factors are fundamental in determining land use within these limits. Because national and international policies have not permitted the observance of essential economic determinants, the world's land resources are not now geared to providing adequate and healthful diets for all of the people. This indictment is doubly significant in light of the availability of modern methods of production, transporta

plane, the transport truck, the oceangoing vessel, and the new methods of food processing and preservation will have a tremendous effect in overcoming distances and in bringing remote lands of the world into economical reach of the world's leading markets.

Comparative Costs

Production of foodstuffs should gravitate to those areas where they can be produced with the least cost. This is a common-sense rule of maximizing production with the least effort. The Hot Springs Conference recognized this principle when the representatives of the United Nations agreed that "The inherent, natural and economic advantages of any area should determine the farming systems adopted and the commodities produced in that area." One of the acid tests of the success of this and food conferences yet to be held, is the degree to which this principle is applied.

If the interchange of products were unimpeded by such obstacles as tariffs, embargoes, monopolies, and cartels, the entire world would benefit, for each country or area would be able to specialize in the product in which it can attain the lowest cost of production consistent with quality of product and an adequate level of living. If some areas are superior to others in the production of many products, the less productive areas should be permitted to produce the product that involves the least disadvantage. In this way each area throughout the world would tend to produce those products for which its ratio of advantage is greatest. In turn, each nation would import those products

for which its ratio of disadvantage is greatest. Only by all nations working together and giving full recognition to these fundamental laws of land utilization can universal freedom from want of food ever be established.

Social Problems

The core of land-distribution problems, both among and within nations, is seeded with maladjustments in access to the use of products of the land. Struggle for possession and control of land resources has always been an influential cause of war among nations and revolution within nations.

Since control over land, frequently in the form of ownership, has in practice become almost tantamount to the enjoyment of the produce of land, individuals as well as nations without this control are in various degrees denied the use of land and its products. Among nations, these exclusions have taken the forms of immigration restrictions, tariffs, cartels, embargoes, and other restraints of international trade and migration. Within nations and their colonial possessions these exclusions have been molded into the law and

custom of caste and race discriminations as well as in credit, marketing, freehold, leasehold, and laborer arrangements among citizens in the occupancy and use of land and its products.

Germany developed its lack of access to land resources into an argument for aggression. Lebensraum became the keynote of this argument. Italy used similar excuses for its conquests in Africa. Japan used them in regard to Manchuria. But at the same moment that the so-called have-not countries were crying for more land resources, they were frantically increasing their population through various kinds of birth incentives. Their past arguments were obviously spurious but they may serve as a warning of the dynamic character of land-resource maladjustments among nations.

Explosive

Of all the social issues from which wars and revolutions spring, few are more universal and explosive than those arising out of the use and control of land. Contrary to Marxian teaching, the world's revolutions have been bred and born in

Motivations

-WILLIAM HAZLITT