If the cost for food goes up precipitously (e.g. lots of engineering needed to get modest amounts) then people will starve. Lots of people. That's my takeaway
The problem is that we currently have starvation due to poor distribution of food. Rich people can afford higher prices and will continue to waste (in fact, lots of rich people already eat organic), while the poor will feel the squeeze.
Food may be cheaper than ever but there are also hundreds of millions of people who can barely afford to eat.
Any plan to intentionally raise the price of food across the board will result in millions of people being at risk of malnutrition or starvation. It's not something to suggest lightly.
The best plan for the climate is to kill all humans. But I don't think that's what we want.
Food is so important, yet so cheap that farmers can not sustain themselves. When people really start starving, food costs will rise and farmers will be the new rich.
There is no overpopulation. Overpopulation of urban centers, yes, overpopulation of useable land - no.
We'll have trouble sustaining the current growth, and the way money are spent on useless and short term stuff is alarming, but that will most likely lead to another recession instead of collapse.
That's my opinion on just these matters - the article is a great piece of information that needs to be read by everyone.
As long as population increases, production from fixed resources that are dwindling should cost more.
Ag depends on labour. Right now cheap food doesn’t come from better production but from economies of scale to a certain extent but mostly by hedging and importing from poorer countries where labour is cheaper.
Such a supply chain is unstable and unreliable. We will see food shortages in places like America as imports will fall short and labour dries up. The farm workers are the most vulnerable population. Most will likely be infected during this crisis and will contribute to community spread. Because there is no one willing to work as hard as them at such low wages, ag is going to come to a screeching halt in the coming seasons.
And if they produce less food, prices will rise and they'll have more money to buy more water or Lord forbid make some investments in water sustainability.
Most people on Earth will certainly be forced to change their eating habits because of increasing prices. The more people we are, the more food must be produced. But space on Earth is limited. All prices are defined by supply and demand. If supply is low, but demand is high, prices will increase.
Everyone should have seen the film "Soylent green". It shows us our future. And i don't like this future.
I think we should try to reduce the world population to 3 or 4 billion people. This would solve a lot of problems. We also wouldn't be forced to think about food security, genetically edited or modified foods or crop losses because of climate change.
Regarding inflation of prices - if feeding everyone leads to inflation of prices then in principle we can't feed everyone. That says more about resources than it does BI, if I understand you correctly. I think if we were to do this, we would need the capital and infrastructure to handle the increased demand, maybe outside the traditional economic system so that prices didn't increase so much.
Food is ridiculously cheap to create right now to the point much of it is turned into fuel. Once it becomes more constrained, food production will increase as demand causes additional supply.
Those inefficiencies similarly become removed once demand is higher.
About 7 years ago I remember in Australia we had a couple of bad years of drought and there was a food shortage.
I remember reading in the paper that this would put the cost of food up, in some cases because we would be importing but in other cases becasue of the simple fact that when things are scarce they cost more.
What was really striking to me is that no-one was going to go hungry - we weren't going to run out of food. It would just cost more. Therefore people would naturally waste less food I suppose.
So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away.
The same goes for virtually all resources: power, water, petrol etc. what the political debate always dodges here is that in order to reduce consumption the cost has to go up which means discretionary spending power will decrease and the economy will collapse.
And the higher prices of food mean more poor people will starve to death.
Oil is not only an input in creating fertilizer, but just about everything else that goes into getting calories on to your plate.
For a great summary of all of this I'd highly recommend reading "how the world really works"
I don't agree with a lot of the predictions in this article. I was just surprised nobody had already posted it.
Price mechanisms (food being expensive) only work when there is elasticity of supply - ie when it is possible to produce more. With food it isn't. So it's not a lack of food, it's too many people. (Too many societies where women don't or can't choose their family size.) Even if you think there is a speculative conspiracy to prevent food being affordable to all 7 billion of us, do you think we can produce enough for 10 or 15 billion? I don't. Of course, I'll get called a eugenicist for stating a plain fact.
One of the commenters on the article points out that we already produce enough food to feed more than nine billion people, so the reason people go hungry isn't because there isn't enough food it's because the food isn't in the right places. The infrastructure in places like the U.S. can handle food distribution for a much larger population, but in third world countries there is obviously a problem even with the current population. So what we really should be thinking about is how to get the food to the people who need it, not how to produce more food.
I don't think we had a famine in the last half century that was caused purely by production. The beauty of a working free market is that starving people are willing to pay quite a lot for cheap food, and so it's virtually impossible to starve just by being poor. The problem was always that the food couldn't get to them. I'd bet on a half-half mix of regulatory issues and fighting.
But yeah, production issues can increase price, which will create a whole lot of issues downstream - for example even if people won't literally starve, some of them won't be able to both eat and make rent. Which will predictably piss them off, and this is how you get Arab Spring as a consequence of corn ethanol.
To some extent I agree with you but it won't be quick. Poor people will suffer the most. That ingenuity might not come for years, people would suffer before new food arrives.
I am probably unusual because I bought 90 days dried food supply for my family in an emergency. But almost all the food I have and eat normally was bought in the last month, except for a few canned goods. I think most people in the us would run out of food in a month or two at most.
This reads like a bad attempt at comedy. There is fear of global starvation and you recommend baking your own bread and a more mindful lifestyle, even including the stereotype of poor people in poor countries living in harmony with nature.
Just to be clear: rising prices doesn't mean it gets more expensive to eat. It means it's getting more expensive to eat until it is expensive enough to no longer be affordable for some people to eat.
Yes, a lot of food is also wasted, and meat production is always wasteful. It is perfectly possible to envision a world where everyone is fed even under current conditions. But its delusional to believe this crisis will easily reshuffle everything and immediately lead to that outcome.
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