Sorry to interrupt your daydreaming Mick but in case you hadn't noticed down here on planet Earth we have a little energy crisis going on! Oh, and the phosphate is running out too (75% depleted). That means that ANY conventional industrial agriculture - GM or non-GM - is in serious trouble!

Only an economist can believe that resource constraints are not a problem. (Go on, put another boot into Malthus while you can - he is currently getting to his feet to show you what he means by population growth exceeding available land!) Put continued population growth together with declining energy and fertilizer resources and it does not matter how much under-utilized land there is out there. Without energy the land might as well be on the moon for all the good it will do you.

This is just another article spruiking GM and the dissolution of nationalist (food security concern) intransigence as the solution to all our ills. Just put ourselves in the loving hands of the food multinationals and we will all have full stomachs!

The planet currently produces enough food for about 9 billion
people, which is about what the UN predicts the population
will level off at
by 2050. The problem is that rich people prefer to
feed food to animals and motor vehicles than to other people.

People in Australia eat
about 2 million tonnes of cereals annually, and are
feeding about 11 million tonnes to animals. Last year even this
wasn't enough, we imported another 2 million tonnes of animal
feed (mainly soy). Of course there are many benefits to eating
animals --- plenty of work for heart surgeons and cancer
specialists and jobs for people like Mick Keogh. Oh, yes and
I forgot to mention that livestock generate more warming than
all our coal fired power stations. 3/4 of all deforestation in
Australia is down to livestock --- a similar ratio to the
Amazon.

Thanks to OLO and Mick Keogh for an informative and thoughtful article.

Colinsett,

Peak phosphate and potash are very serious worries, as there is no substitute for them.

Population growth is currently a bit player in the current high food prices, compared to rising energy costs, the diversion of land to biofuels, more animal protein being consumed in China and India, speculation, etc. Nevertheless, population growth is still running ahead of growth in grain production. Grain production per person peaked in 1984.

http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/grain_production_in_the_world_1950_1995_and_projection_for_2050

What all these articles on how we need to grow more food fail to recognise, is that most of humanity is and always has been in a Malthusian trap. Technological advances occur, then population grows to eat up any surplus. The growth spurts stop when the market for labour collapses, i.e. the ratio of usable resources to people has fallen to the point that not even child slave labour can produce enough extra to pay for itself. If they avoid social and environmental collapse, people then find ways to limit their numbers. That is why the high living standards that ordinary people enjoyed after the Black Death were not matched until the late 19th century, as explained in the lecture on the 14th century in Radio National's Thousand Years in a Day series (2000). That is the main reason why half of India's children are still malnourished, a few decades after the Green Revolution doubled or in some cases tripled the amount of grain that a plot of land could yield. That is why we should be a bit sceptical of population levelling off at 9 billion or any other number, unless people can somehow find their way out of the trap, hopefully with some help from us.

I wonder what the reaction of Geoff Russell and other vegetarians would be, as population growth continues, if they were told to give up mangoes and asparagus, because a diet of beans, cabbage, and potatoes could allow more of the world's starving to be fed. How low a standard of living are you personally prepared to accept to maximise the human population?

Sorry, I meant Michael-in-Adelaide.

Under the current economic system
there is something essential
about the quest for 'efficiencies'
to solve planetary needs
which seems to be usually overlooked

whenever an efficiency is gained
and in the last 'technological' century
there have been many
I believe 'productivity' per individual
has been calculated to have increased 50 fold

rather than being used
to produce a higher general standard of living
or some such humanitarian result
it is used to increase profit,

this has been achieved
by increasing demand,
this has been achieved
by increasing population
which has increased the demand on the planet
not lessened it

in the last hundred years
concomitant with the enormous increase in efficiency
has been an enormous increase in ecological damage
ie the efficiencies have been used
to rape the planet more effectively
and more comprehensively than ever before

my contention is that it is therefore not possible
to save the planet by efficiencies
but that a fundamental reform of the economic system
is necessary

Although almost universally painted as an unmitigated evil, it would be interesting to know how much capacity for food production would have been lost in Europe without the EU subsidies.

People too easily forget how important food security is for nations and how the experience of food shortages during WWII meant many European governments have chosen to encourage local food production, even if nominally inefficient.

Perhaps this is an example where government policies have meant increased food capacity rather than the other way round.

Jennifer: "an informative and thoughtful article".

And here am I thinking the opposite. For example I wholeheartedly agree that "underutilised capacity of ... Africa" should be put to good use. This issue has been sticking out like a sore thumb for as long as I can remember, killing many millions of Africans. In fact they have been living dieing in a Malthusian fashion since before the start of recorded history. We should probably get the Israelis and Arabs living in harmony first though, as given the short time that problem has been around we have more chance of success. Ditto for all the other international political problems he lists.

And yes, the drought was unlucky. Over the millennia people living near the capacity of the land in good times have died during the droughts. If their luck had held they would of been OK.

And then he says "re-examination of Malthus’s writings ...". Here I take it he means by reading between the lines, because on the lines Malthus message is rather simple: if, at a given technological level, the capacity of the land is X humans and you exceed X, the imbalance will be solved by the 4 horseman and the apocalypse.

We haven't actually hit X for the last two centuries because we keep improving our technology. Unfortunately the huge leaps that produced green revolution petered out some time ago, and as michael_in_adelaide pointed out some of the resources those leaps depended on are beginning to run low. Mick Keogh even hints that he sort-of accepts this when he says "A key factor in achieving future increases in global food output will be renewed public investment in agricultural research". From what I can see this is just wishful thinking. The only technology that has any hope of delivering the increases we need is GM, but to date it hasn't come close.

As for AGW policy effecting agriculture: it doesn't currently, so "fixing it" can not lead to higher feed production then we have now. If it becomes an issue fix it then, for now its just a distraction.

It's very rare that we see articles on OLO actually criticising government interference in markets as being the cause of a problem, rather than the solution. I finally figured out why.

So-called crises are constantly propping up among the politically minded. Something always needs fixing by government. Those that don't automatically see government as the solution, such as the author, also tend to be rather optomistic about the markets ability to manage them. They also tend to be more aware that any apparent crisis or downturn is generally a mere blip in an ever improving overall pricture.

Because of this, reluctance by them to get into such debates (common on OLO) is understandable. But I am glad some writers are willing to defend "[producers] and consumers ... right to produce or consume" as they choose.