X-Message-Number: 5527
Subject: Food production and the like
Date: Tue, 02 Jan 1996 11:47:26 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <>

Peter Merel says:
> I'm not concerned with human abilities to increase industrial production
> to meet increasing needs, nor with limits on energy or mineral
> commodities - I'm quite happy to think that there are ways and means to
> keep these things ticking along. I'm only concerned that ecological
> degradation seems to be occurring at a rate that parallels human
> population increase, and that a crunch might (not will, but might) occur
> before we achieve the engineering capabilities required to correct it.

I seriously doubt it.

Lets take food production, for example. Land degradation is a smooth,
continuous process as is the increase in demand for food. When food
prices rise sufficiently, the owners of the land will have more than
sufficient incentive for land reclamation and cleanup, and as I've
noted, given the smooth nature of these processes it is unlikely to
creep up on us suddenly.

> >Have you tried looking at world food prices instead? They are a much
> >simpler indicator, being a pure supply/demand based metric.
> 
> If you can find a way to extrapolate present day food prices into 2050 or
> 2100 food prices, then I can see the value of this metric. However I rather
> doubt your ability to devise such a method.

I don't think you understand. Your feeble little attempts to plot
global food production are trivial in comparison with the quantity of
work being done by the millions of people working every day in the
trading of food commodities world wide. You are unlikely to produce
any information more accurate than that generated by the marketplace.

No, I can't extrapolate food prices to 2050, but neither can you or
anyone else, and it would be deranged to make the attempt. However,
one would expect that the thesis that we are having increasing
difficulty producing food would require increases in food prices
now. This notion appears to be put to lie by the fact that food prices
are not rising.

I cannot prove the way that a mathematician would prove something that
food shortages will not occur in the future, and indeed doubtless
temporary food shortages can and will occur just as they do
today. However, I have grave doubts that we will EVER see massive
worldwide famine again so long as war and the like do not seriously
disrupt global production and trade.

Free markets do amazing things, you know. As just one aside, note that
meat prices are far higher than prices for plant foods because farm
animals eat lots of plant foods during their growth phases. As food
prices rise in food shortage situations, people rapidly substitute
plant foods for meats, which swiftly reduces demand for food by
reducing the amount of surplus plant foods devoted to the nutrition of
meat animals. The market is a wonderful thing.

Not stockpiling food right now...

Perry


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