In the two decades prior to the crisis of the 1970s, cereal output in developing countries rose by 80 percent. The “green revolution” led to large gains in productivity and harvested land areas expanded. However, in 1972, bad weather hit crops across the globe and world food production dropped for the first time in 20 years, down 33 million tonnes at a time when the world needed an extra 24 million tonnes to meet the needs of a rapidly rising population. In the following year, a new supply shock played its part in fuelling higher agricultural prices – oil prices quadrupled. This posed a real threat to the green revolution, whose success was heavily dependent on pesticides, herbicides and nitrogen-based fertilizer applications, all of which are derived from petroleum. After paying for their oil import bills, many developing countries had little left to buy the chemicals and nutrients that their high-yield, intensive farming required. In 1974, the world anxiously awaited much-needed abundant harvests in richer nations in order to replenish stocks and diffuse the growing price crisis. However, Canada, the former Soviet Union, the United States of America and much of Asia gathered poor crops in that year as a result of bad weather. At the end of that year, world cereal reserves had reached a 22-year low, equal to sufficient supplies for about 26 days, compared with 95 days in 1961. To make matters worse, the United States Government banned the exportation of 10 million tonnes of grain (mostly to the former Soviet Union), fearing that such a massive sale would compound domestic food price inflation. After peaking in 1974, prices of most foodstuffs remained consistently high up until the early 1980s. Official estimates of the number of deaths as a direct result of the world food crisis of the 1970s have not been made but, using deviations from trend mortality rates during the crisis period, unofficial estimates put the figure somewhere around 5 million people (The Oil Drum, 2009).