Thomas Malthus has been wrong for the past 100 years. Here's hoping that scientific progress continues to abate Malthus's dire predictions.
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My TEDx talk is up
If you care to watch my TEDx talk from a couple weeks back, it is now up. I'm not sure why the organizers gave it the title they did, but the talk is really about food innovation, food prices, and the poor.
The Need for Agricultural Research
Five agricultural economists published an article in the latest issue of Science on the effects of public and private R&D spending on agricultural research.
Here is the summary:
Most of the increase in global agricultural production over the past half-century has come from raising crop and livestock yields rather than through area expansion. This growth in productivity is attributed largely to investments in research and innovation (1). Since around 1990, there has been a decline in the rate of growth in yield per area harvested for several important crops (2). In parallel, the rate of growth in public spending on agricultural research and development (R&D) has also fallen, which may account for declining crop yield growth and may be contributing to rising food prices (3).
To this, I would add that a deluge of books and documentaries on food have demonized precisely those research developments responsible for yield growth. It's hard to know exactly what effect these cultural influences have had on firm and government decisions to invest in agricultural research.
However, many in the food community haven't connected the dots. Mark Bittman wrote just two days ago about hunger, saying:
It seems absurd to have to say it, but no one in this country should go hungry.
His answer for the problem was more government spending on food stamps and food banks. Yet, he has repeatedly denounced modern agricultural technologies and has called for food policies that will ultimately increase food prices.
There is the old saying that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; If you teach him how to fish, you can feed him for a lifetime. Food stamps give people fish for the day. Developments in agricultural R&D are the gifts that keep on giving.
How will we feed 9 billion people?
That's the question asked in a great video by Evan Fraser at the University of Guelph. I don't agree with all of this solutions but he provides some good food for thought on an important question that often gets overlooked in food discussions.
The Need for Food Innovation
In his recent New York Times column, Tyler Cowen echos some of the key themes in my forthcoming book. Here are a few excerpts:
THE drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world.
and:
For all its importance to human well-being, agriculture seems to be one of the lagging economic sectors of the last two decades. That means the problem of hunger is flaring up again, as the World Bank and several United Nations agencies have recently warned.and:
There is no shortage of writing — often from a locavore point of view — in support of more organic methods of farming, for both developed and developing countries. These opinions recognize that current farming methods bring serious environmental problems involving water supplies, fertilizer runoff and energy use. Yet organic farming typically involves smaller yields — 5 to 34 percent lower, as estimated in a recent study in the journal Nature, depending on the crop and the context. For all the virtues of organic approaches, it’s hard to see how global food problems can be solved by starting with a cut in yields. Claims in this area are often based on wishful thinking rather than a hard-nosed sense of what’s practical.
WHAT to do? First, put food problems higher on the agenda. In the United States, there is no general consciousness of the precarious state of global agriculture. Even in the economics profession, the field of agricultural economics is often viewed as secondary in status.
Being an agricultural economist, you probably won't be shocked to hear that I agree with the last sentence. But, it's nice to hear someone else say it. And it's nice to see a nod to my fellow agricultural economists who have been studying these types of issues for decades but whose voices often tend to get overlooked or drowned out by those pushing the latest fashionable food fads or development policies.