Food fight

I read this post a bit ago & when it had rattled around in my mind for a while, I decided that the difference between the optimist & the pessimist isn't really in what they think the facts are.

 

Nor is it really in whether they each think that magic has to happen to avoid disaster.

 

Brown says:

I don’t think this current price rise is temporary. There will, of course, be fluctuations in the grain prices, but they will be around a rising trend. Grain and soybean prices, and food prices more broadly, are moving up. There is not anything in sight to reverse this trend. If the world were to have a poor grain harvest this year, there could well be chaos in world grain markets by late summer.

 

Speaking of which, consider the floods in Australia:

Heavy rain across eastern Australia, the fourth-largest wheat exporter, in recent months had already cut much of the grain quality to feed grade, according to analyst estimates.

 

From elsewhere, I have read that the Australian wheat exports are about 11% of the global exports & that up to half of it could be lost.

 

The optimist, Smil, says:

Just look at #1, China: imports less than 5% of its food and CONSUMES more food per capita than Japan!!!

Nothing has changed since I wrote that closing chapter of my 2000 feeding the world book: if China can do it, anybody (but Somalia) can [*]. Nor is India “starving.” Any food shortages are 95%+ a matter of poor or no governance, not any “extreme” climate and “gunwale inching”… Queensland does not grow wheat in any quantity, just check the wheatland map of Australia, and as always you newsie guys have exaggerated the story, both south and north of the state are open for business; no end of Australia.

 

I would say that 11% of global exports for Queensland does amount to important quantity.   It may be that China consumes more food per capita than Japan, what that mainly suggests is that China is a place where a lot of people still do strenuous manual labor.

 

Brown wrote a book entitled "Who will feed China?" in which he pointed out that as the Chinese move up in the income scale, they are likely to increase their total consumption of agricultural products, even if their per capita calorie consumption goes down, because one of the first things people do as they get more money is to eat better.

 

Smil feels that people really shouldn't eat meat when they get richer, because, well, they just shouldn't.   It would make it harder to feed everyone, so they should not do it.   But will India somehow get a good government that provides food to everyone?   Will the Chinese not eat meat because Smil thinks they should not?

 

I think the main difference between the optimist and the pessimist is how sure each is that magic will happen.  :-)

 

BTW, The blog poster starts out by saying:

Experts who repeatedly, and less sexily, note that humanity, on the whole, has always overcome shortages and found ways to produce ever more food even as mouths multiply and rising incomes move families up the food chain from grains to meats and dairy.

 

Or, you know, not always.   There is a reason we remember Malthus.