Excerpt from World Food Needs and Availabilities, 1987/88: Winter Update This report presents two alternative measures of the overall food import requirements (commercial plus concessional) and the additional food needs of each country for and The status quo and nutrition based assessments are based on two different sets of normative judgments and assumptions regarding the role of additional food and the considerations that might govern its use. The basic assumption underlying the status quo assessment is that additional food would be needed to prevent national food supplies, and hence total consumption, from falling below recent levels. Meeting status quo food needs would in principle stabilize national per capita use by filling shortfalls in domestic production and import capacity. The nutrition-based assessment addresses the continuing problem of undernourishment in many of the developing countries. The assumption is that additional foo'd would be needed to close the gap between national food availabilities and an internationally accepted minimum nutritional standard. The nutrition-based estimates thus provide an aggregate measure of the nutritional gap, net of recipient countries' capacity to import food commercially. Calculation of zero nutrition-based food needs does not mean all citizens have a nutritionally adequate diet. In developing countries, poor nutrition is frequently the consequence of poor income distribution. Status quo food needs assessments are stabilized by the method of estimating annual base period per capita food use. While the base moves forward annually, it does not fluctuate as sharply as would a simple average. Base period food use is calculated as the mean of the most recent 4 years that deviate less than one standard deviation from the mean of the most recent 8 years of record. The method is explained in the Methodological Notes section of this report. The most current available weather, crop production, and financial data were employed in updating assessments. With new or changed crop information, production and additional food needs estimates change, sometimes sharply. The supplementary reports issued through the year provide users with assessments based on current weather and crop information. The assessments are based on projected agricultural production, trade and general economic trends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.