The world stood on the brink of starvation and, warned doomsday forecasts in the 1960s, the battle to feed all of humanity was already lost. Famine was common in some of the most populated countries. Predictions of Malthusian catastrophe made the bestseller lists, with Paul R. Ehrlich writing in The Population Bomb that by the 1970s and 1980s the victims would number in the hundreds of millions.

But human ingenuity saved the day. A massive programme of investment in agricultural research and infrastructure - avidly supported by the US out of a cold-war-fuelled fear that hungry countries could fall into the arms of the Soviet Union - led to an explosion in farm productivity. Nations that never dreamt of being able to feed themselves were transformed into net exporters of food.