How Many Starving Millions?

“A lifetime of malnutrition and actual hunger is the lot of at least two-thirds of mankind.” This famous misstatement, which is still believed by a great many people, simply because they have heard it so often, was made by Lord Boyd Orr in 1950 on his retirement from the Director-Generalship of the Food and Agriculture Organization.

It was shown in 1954 by Dr. Bennett, Director of the Food Research Institute at Stanford University, and probably the world’s leading authority in this field, that Lord Boyd Orr could only have reached this extraordinary conclusion by confusing two columns taking ultimate targets for minimum requirements, in a table (inaccurate in any case) prepared for him by FAO.

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Colin Clark

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“A lifetime of malnutrition and actual hunger is the lot of at least two-thirds of mankind.” This famous misstatement, which is still believed by a great many people, simply because they have heard it so often, was made by Lord Boyd Orr in 1950 on his retirement from the Director-Generalship of the Food and Agriculture Organization.

It was shown in 1954 by Dr. Bennett, Director of the Food Research Institute at Stanford University, and probably the world’s leading authority in this field, that Lord Boyd Orr could only have reached this extraordinary conclusion by confusing two columns taking ultimate targets for minimum requirements, in a table (inaccurate in any case) prepared for him by FAO.