The Not-So-Terrifying Food Chart

I stumbled on this on the Washington Post site the other day. It’s a supposedly “terrifying chart” that shows “we’re not growing enough food to feed the world”:

Crop yields have been rising for decades, but at their current paces (solid lines) they won’t be nearly enough to meet projected demand (dotted lines). Ergo, terrifying.

I don’t know, maybe I have too much faith in the power of markets and innovation and not enough faith in the “running out of food” movement that’s been wrong for at least six decades, but I’m not feeling too scared here.

The climate change food crisis I looked for a year ago still shows no signs of arriving; world total cereal production is looking to set another record this year. From 1990 to 2010, world population ballooned from 5 billion to 7 billion, yet the number of people living in absolute poverty – a.k.a. probably not getting enough food to eat – dropped from 1.9 billion to 1.2 billion. If we weren’t “growing enough food to feed the world” right now, at least, corn prices wouldn’t be tumbling to an almost 3-year low. (It’s almost like people planted more corn because price signals work or something.)

But what about that future? I see a world whose food production has kept up almost perfectly with demand so far and no reason to doubt it can continue, “physiological limits” of plants notwithstanding. As developing countries get richer, they eat more – but they also get more productive at producing food themselves. It’s even more impressive to consider that we are feeding more and more of the world while using less land to do it; US farms are producing record yields these days even while using 20% fewer acres than they did 60 years ago.

Even if we do start reaching biological limits for increasing yields, there is still plenty of space for growing more food – even just in the US. If prices get high enough, there are millions of lawns and rooftops waiting for innovative farming methods. And have you ever heard of aquaponics? OK, but what about all the meat that increasingly rich populations want to eat? Well, if we can’t breed enough animals in healthy enough environments, prices will make us change our minds. Who knows, maybe that fake meat thing will take off.

There are all sorts of ways incentives will cause people to adapt to keep coming up with ways to keep feeding ourselves, most of which I probably haven’t even imagined. I’m not saying it won’t be hard. But it’s certainly not terrifying.