I see food production as a kind of race. On the one hand you have GM, low tillage and the eat local movement. On the other hand you have oil depletion, climate change and population growth. I'm not confident the pluses can overcome the minuses. High prices are little use to farmers if they can't grow a crop. Until recently conditions seemed to go relatively well for the food industry. Now it looks like major resources will have to be diverted to keep it going. Because food was readily available for most we could preoccupy ourselves with sport and entertainment. If nothing else we could be entering an era of back-to-basics.

Max, your article is rendered worthless by its multitude of inaccuracies and untrue statements. For example,

1) It is obvious that you have never read Limits to Growth or you would understand how incomplete is the description in Wikipedia. Limits to Growth laid out a number of scenarios based on different initial assumptions of resource availability etc. Their predictions covered the 100 year period from 1970 to 2070. It is not true to say that "These were dire predictions that never eventuated". In fact, now that we are 30 years into the 100 year time period outlined by Limits to Growth we can see that their business-as-usual scenario is SPOT ON in its prediction of the current situation. By this scenario we are headed for a food and population crash by mid-century.

2) You perpetuate the myth (pushed by the GM multinationals) that we can engineer crops for greater productivity through GM. Crops today are only more productive because we have bred them to devote more of their energy production to grain production while we use oil-fuelled agriculture to do the tasks for them that they would normally do for themselves - we now take care of the plant spacing, the nutrient supply, the pest resistance. GM may help with stress and pest resistance somewhat, but there will be an energy penalty for this. When we no longer have the oil for industrial scale agriculture, most GM crops will be as useless as their conventional counterparts. Then there is the developing phosphate shortage (75% of world reserves now depleted) which will critically restrict agricultural productivity.

3) You "put aside" any discussion of oil in food production but that is like ignoring the role of oxygen in breathing. How will we produce more crops on more land with less oil. Ridiculous!

This is the dodgy-looking organisation that the author, Max Rheese, is "Executive Director" of:

http://www.aefweb.info/index.php

This is more facile optimism from someone connected with an apparently climate change denialist source. For a more sober view, see my recent paper to a Manning Clark House conference at ANU in Canberra, ‘Human Political Scenarios On A_Warming Planet’, see MCH Homepage http://www.manningclark.org.au/ .
The cost and availability of oil for tractor fuel (petrol and diesel),for irrigation pumps and sprays, and for fertiliser manufacture and transport, is a crucial factor in maintaining the present level of food output - let alone increasing it.
Tony Kevin

Aw phoowey, poowey and doggy-doowey.

How can anyone possibly talk about population growth and sustainability and come up with the conclusion that;

“There is a solid foundation for entertaining an optimistic outlook that the world can sustainably feed itself into the foreseeable future.”

The foreseeable future doesn’t stop at 2050.

For goodness sake Max, you’ve got to get away from the notion of increasing this, increase that and increasing every other goddam thing, in order to pander to an unaddressed continuously increasing population….oh, and expecting the environmental impact and the average quality of life to actually improve at the same time. MMMMmmmmmm.

Talk about the absolute opposite of sustainability!!

Rather than being happy with a slowly reducing rate of population growth (we’ve still got a rapidly increasing global population, with no end in sight), how about advocating maximised efforts to stabilise and then reduce population, as quickly as is possible in a humane manner? Don’t you think that this is a rather, slightly, just possibly essential element of real sustainability, as opposed to the blind acceptance of continuous growth…..until it crashes?

Let’s address both sides of the equation Max; increasing food production/distribution/efficient usage AND working towards at least stabilising if not reducing the demand. We need to do the latter with AT LEAST as much effort as the former.

Without adequate supply of now obviously dwindling fish protein and fish-meal feed supplement and guano fertilizer from the increasingly devastated world ocean environment, can anyone point to data establishing argiculture can sustain world food supply?

Where is such data? Does such scientific evidence exist or not?

ABC Radio National's Bush Telegraph programme on 20 June had an interview about approaching "Peak Phosphate". You can hear it by going to:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bushtelegraph/default.htm

Bit of a spanner in the fantastic food future delusion eh?