With demand for food soaring everywhere, more and more nations have looked to the United States to make up their food deficits. An estimated 90 countries have ordered U.S. grain this year. As Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Carroll Brunthaver states: “The nations of the world are using more grain, they are buying more of what they use in the world market, and more of what they buy is coming from the United States. . . . The world’s food economy is running increasingly on U.S. [grain].”

So because of increasing domestic and foreign demand, there are no more large surpluses in the United States. This has a sobering meaning for poorer countries. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, an editorial writer for the Washington Post, points out: “Its food surpluses exhausted and its priorities changing, the United States no longer can act as international good Samaritan.” An example of what this can mean is noted by Saturday Review/​World:

“America’s surplus policy has changed drastically. During India’s famine of 1966-67, the United States dispatched enough wheat to feed more than 50 million people . . .

“But in 1973, during the Sahara drought, the United States found it could pack off only 156,000 tons of food, barely 1 percent of the earlier Indian shipments.”