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WHAT IF INDIA DOESN'T MAKE IT


	As everyone knows, the poorer countries are in a race
involving population growth, population control programs, development
of food production and starvation.  Since food production fluctuates
from year to year in all countries, if famine comes, it will probably
take the form of a crisis, in which several bad crop years in a row
lead to famine conditions.  Before modern transportation, such famines
occurred occasionally with great loss of life, though not with such
a loss of life as to constitute a substantial reduction in population.
The worst famine in history, according to \F1Encyclopedia Britannica\F0,
happened in Bengal in 1769, and 10,000,000 people died.  India as a whole
had a population of about 170,000,000 at the time, but the afflicted area
clearly lost a larger fraction of its population.

	Although some of the considerations of this section apply to other
countries, we shall concentrate our consideration on India specifically
for the following reasons: (1) It is large enough so that a famine relief
can strain world food supplies including those of the United States. (2)
It has a tradition of being rescued in food crises by outside aid.  (3)
It has a democratic government that is limited in what it can bring itself
to do in order to avert crisis or deal with it.

	Somewhat arbitrarily, we shall define a major Indian food crisis
as one in which food rationing would have to be introduced in the
United States in order to prevent more than two million people dying
directly of starvation in a few months in India.
Some of the considerations of this section might not apply until
the second major Indian food crisis.