[Cymro]

For a few years now, we've been hearing a lot about climate change, oil and food prices, and the general strain on the planet's resources - not to mention the fact that we're due for a forecast 50% worldwide population rise in the next 30 years. This is obviously not a good thing, so what the hell are we to do about it?

[Jason Vines]

Even as early as the late 18th century, Thomas Malthus warned that a skyrocketing global population would exhaust the world's food supply, condemning many people to starvation. Of course, that didn't happen; industrialization of agriculture greatly increased its output, precluding a Malthusian tragedy.

Since then, similar predictions of doom from resource shortages have set tongues wagging, but these also proved scarcely more reliable than the prognostications of carnival fortune tellers.

Each gloomy scenario rested on a flawed premise: that prevailing trends won't change in the future. Consumers and industrialists will apparently act like fish that will compulsively eat any food in their tank until it's gone.

But that's wrong; people respond to prices. Resources that are abundant vis-a-vis other ones have relatively low prices; resources scarce vis-a-vis other ones have relatively high prices. If a resource becomes scarcer and scarcer, people won't just keep paying the higher and higher prices. Even as the high prices attract producers to extracting and selling the resource, consumers and other producers will, of their own accord, try to avoid the higher prices through conserving use of the resource, finding lower-cost substitutes for the resource (which might once have cost more than the resource in question but now cost less), and inventing new technologies.

So extraordinary action would be unnecessary to save us from resource shortages. Adaptation to resource availability or lack thereof will happen on its own.

That is, unless government interference distorts price signals and forces capital into technologies that might be dead ends.

[Cymro]

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Consumers and industrialists will apparently act like fish that will compulsively eat any food in their tank until it's gone.

In terms of reproduction, that's exactly what happens.

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But that's wrong; people respond to prices.

Not in every instance, but I'll deal with that below.

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Resources that are abundant vis-a-vis other ones have relatively low prices; resources scarce vis-a-vis other ones have relatively high prices.

Precisely, and as the population rises we'll see food grow more scarce as a rule.

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If a resource becomes scarcer and scarcer, people won't just keep paying the higher and higher prices. Even as the high prices attract producers to extracting and selling the resource, consumers and other producers will, of their own accord, try to avoid the higher prices through conserving use of the resource, finding lower-cost substitutes for the resource (which might once have cost more than the resource in question but now cost less),

Exactly, and what this means in terms of food is that people will eat less, and eat less well. It will likely mean a greater dependence on staple crops like rice and maize, with other foods becoming luxury items. It'll also mean less forests and areas of untouched natural beauty as humanity maximizes use of land.

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and inventing new technologies.

And as I understand it, there's not really much more we can do in terms of food production, you're pretty much limited by the soil, the weather, and the fragility of the crop.

Now I think you've misunderstood me - I'm not worried that there'll be mass famine, what I'm concerned about is that the price factor will actually mean a great dip in quality of life for most people, and not just in terms of the food we eat, but the size of our homes and the amount of energy we can use. New technology will probably solve the energy problem, but solving the problem of food and living space will require a lot more sacrifice.

And people don't always go with the best financial option, especially when it comes to reproduction. People on low incomes, both in the West and beyond have a lot of children, regardless of the cost.

[Jason Vines]

This topic dovetails with an article I've been planning to post on the main site once the remodel is complete. Stay tuned.

[Jason Vines]

Apropos to this thread:

Norman Borlaug, the scientist who pioneered high-yield agriculture, died recently. From MSNBC:

MSNBC said:

Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution" who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.

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The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.

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Thanks to the green revolution, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 1990. In Pakistan and India, two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled over the period.

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During the 1950s and 1960s, public health improvements fueled a population boom in underdeveloped nations, leading to concerns that agricultural systems could not keep up with growing food demand. Borlaug's work often is credited with expanding agriculture at just the moment such an increase in production was most needed.

"We got this thing going quite rapidly," Borlaug told The Associated Press in a 2000 interview. "It came as a surprise that something from a Third World country like Mexico could have such an impact."

His successes in the 1960s came just as books like "The Population Bomb" were warning readers that mass starvation was inevitable.

"Three or four decades ago, when we were trying to move technology into India, Pakistan and China, they said nothing could be done to save these people, that the population had to die off," he said in 2004.

(Emphases mine.)

Last decade, The Atlantic ran a comprehensive profile of Borlaug and his achievements. Here's one small snippet:

The Atlantic said:

The trend toward harvesting more from fewer acres, often spun in the media as a shocking crisis of "vanishing farms," is perhaps the most environmentally favorable development of the modern age. Paul Waggoner, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, says, "From long before Malthus until about forty-five years ago each person took more land from nature than his parents did. For the past forty-five years people have been taking less land from nature than their parents."

In developing nations where population growth is surging, high-yield agriculture holds back the rampant deforestation of wild areas. Waggoner calculates that India's transition to high-yield farming spared the country from having to plough an additional 100 million acres of virgin land -- an area about equivalent to California. In the past five years India has been able to slow and perhaps even halt its national deforestation, a hopeful sign. This would have been impossible were India still feeding itself with traditionally cultivated indigenous crops.

The history of humanity is one of adaptation and innovation in the face of challenges. Hard-working visionaries like Borlaug have consistently proven doomsayers wrong.

Sadly, even men like Borlaug have enemies. His foes were zealous environmentalists who've forgotten the lodestar of environmentalism is the protection of human lives. From the aforementioned article in The Atlantic:

The Atlantic said:

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors of his work, have recently given Borlaug the cold shoulder. Funding institutions have also cut support for the International Maize and Wheat Center -- located in Mexico and known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT -- where Borlaug helped to develop the high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world's population now depends for sustenance. And though Borlaug's achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has ever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug's long life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.

The African continent is the main place where food production has not kept pace with population growth: its potential for a Malthusian catastrophe is great. Borlaug's initial efforts in a few African nations have yielded the same rapid increases in food production as did his initial efforts on the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Western environmental groups have campaigned against introducing high-yield farming techniques to Africa, and have persuaded image-sensitive organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to steer clear of Borlaug. So far the only prominent support for Borlaug's Africa project has come from former President Jimmy Carter, a humanist and himself a farmer, and from the late mediagenic multimillionaire Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa.

Reflecting Western priorities, the debate about whether high-yield agriculture would be good for Africa is currently phrased mostly in environmental terms, not in terms of saving lives. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug argues, high-yield farming will preserve Africa's wild habitats, which are now being depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. Opponents argue that inorganic fertilizers and controlled irrigation will bring a new environmental stress to the one continent where the chemical-based approach to food production has yet to catch on. In this debate the moral imperative of food for the world's malnourished -- whether they "should" have been born or not, they must eat -- stands in danger of being forgotten.

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Borlaug's majestic accomplishment came to be labeled the Green Revolution. Whether it was really a revolution is open to debate. As Robert Kates, a former director of the World Hunger Program, at Brown University, says, "If you plot growth in farm yields over the century, the 1960s period does not particularly stand out for overall global trends. What does stand out is the movement of yield increases from the West to the developing world, and Borlaug was one of the crucial innovators there." Touring the subcontinent in the late 1960s and encountering field after field of robust wheat, Forrest Frank Hill, a former vice-president of the Ford Foundation, told Borlaug, "Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won't be able to get permission for more of these efforts."

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NONETHELESS, by the 1980s finding fault with high-yield agriculture had become fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoil the developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projects for Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some green organizations became determined to stop him there. "The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa," says David Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management Institute.

Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too -- though it might have in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. "World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa," Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, "a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the greenies couldn't stand were sticking to me."

Borlaug's reaction to the campaign was anger. He says, "Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Perhaps, before despairing about a potential lack of availability of food, we should stop discouraging the use of one of the best techniques we have for the mass production of it.