The price of food throughout the world is soaring alarmingly. From the noisy street stalls of Singapore to the air-conditioned supermarkets of North America, shoppers have been watching with helpless anger as prices are marked up.

Sounds familiar?

Our wages inch up while prices soar. As a result, many of us are cutting corners to live within our means. The cost of living is now alarmingly high.

Sound familiar?

Yes, they do. The above sentences were not written to describe today's situation. Yet, they might as well have been, for they are so eerily accurate.
The first paragraph quoted above leads a report by the news agency Reuters which was carried in the Straits Times of Aug 31 1973. The second is the opening paragraph of an article on inflation in the country in the Oct 13 1981 issue of the New Straits Times.

A March 30 1991 article in the NST says: "The country's rate of inflation exceeded three per cent last year, the first time since 1984." It quotes the government's economic report as saying this was due to domestic demand, high economic growth, the sharp hike in oil prices following the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, and rising wages.

And how about this? "Food inflation in Malaysia, mostly led by rising global food prices, will continue to affect consumers in the next year or two."

No, that sentence does not come from the NST newspaper archives. It was a report carried in the NST of May 15 this year.

From the above it is clear that the old adage, "what goes up must come down", does not apply to prices.

Another price rise phenomenon is the speed with which portions served at eateries get reduced. For instance, a ST report on March 30 1973 quotes one Ibrahim Ahmad, who visited his son's school canteen, as saying: "I was horrified to find that a bowl of mee which costs 20 cents has far less ingredients than it used to have."

A similar story unveils in the ST of Jan 11 1974: "Roti canai is still being sold at the old prices of between 20 cents and 30 cents each, but it has been reduced in size."

This, of course, continues to be the experience of consumers today.

Between 1970 and 1972, the inflation rate was about one to three per cent. In 1973, it hit 10.5 per cent before surging to 18 per cent in 1974. In 1992 it was 4.7 per cent. Bank Negara expects it to be 4.2 per cent this year.

Amid the anger over rising prices, it is important to realise that despite all the stygian predictions in the past, including during the 1991 Gulf crisis when the price of oil gushed up, "normalcy" returned to the lives of people as they adjusted and adapted.

Alarm bells about the danger of our dependence on food imports had been sounded in the past, including by University Malaya's agriculture faculty dean Dr Tan Bock Thiam in 1974. In the past, too, the government had acted to soften the blow. The NST of Nov 20 1973 quotes prime minister Tun Abdul Razak Hussein as saying the government wanted the country to be self-sufficient "as soon as possible" in food production.

That year, the government imposed heavier penalties on profiteers and placed more items under the price controlled list. In 1975, it was decided to put idle land under the plough to raise food production.

Invariably, each time a major food price rise occurs, the public is called upon to reduce consumption, cut waste and grow vegetables in the backyard. There was even a campaign, says the NST of Oct 22 1973, to get families and friends to buy food in bulk to reduce costs.

Despite the alarm bells sounded in the early seventies about the nation's dependence on food imports, despite the money poured in to wean us away from it, we are still talking about being self-sufficient in food production - 35 years on.