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251
INSPECTION OF FOOD AND SUPERVISION OF FOOD PREMISES
It is a simple but fundamental truth that man must eat to live
and he works to obtain his food. Indeed, much of our knowledge
of early man is derived from our study of his search for food
which has always been one of his major pre-occupations. With the
advent of agriculture, however, his nomadic life was curtailed and
we saw the establishment of communities which, over recent years,
has certainly led to imbalance between supply and demand and
to situations where food production has failed to keep pace with
population growth or, conversely, where abundance has led to
waste.
Today, many developing countries do not produce enough food
for themselves and are not sufficiently affluent to purchase their
requirements from abroad. Their reliance on donations often
militates against their own agricultural expansion and their health
problems multiply.
All national development, social and economic, ultimately
depends upon the health of people which in turn flows from the
elimination of disease and illiteracy and an ability to advance
nutrition by improving crop growing and animal husbandry.
Obviously, better food supplies can reduce or even abolish the
effects of malnutrition and, in 1963, in order to solve world-wide
health problems the W.H.O. established a World Food Programme
in an attempt to help an estimated total of 170 millions of undernourished
mothers and children throughout the world.
Underlying the whole of this scheme is the aim to supply food
to particular deprived areas until they become self-supporting
agriculturally. Unfortunately, this often proves unsuccessful for,
under demographic pressures, populations tend to increase faster
than food production. For example, in Egypt, where only a small
proportion of the country is cultivated, the building of the Aswan
High Dam was to provide not only cheap power which, inter alia,
was to be used for synthesis of nitrogenous fertilisers but also to
ensure continuous irrigation of surrounding lands. It was hoped,
thereby, to replace the country's dependence upon Nile floodwaters
—a most unreliable policy—and so increase the country's cultivable
lands. In this instance, although the intention of advancing agricultural
output has been realised, the population has risen at an
even faster rate and the problem of malnutrition remains unresolved.
It is, of course, contended that there are untapped world
resources sufficient to support expected population growth and it
cannot be denied that such reserve capacity exists. Experience
shows, however, that there is always a "time-lag" between the
possible and the practical and the rate of population increase is