The Dwindling World Food Supply

The Prediction

On the other hand, food production is limited by available farmland, water for irrigation, and so on, and so cannot grow without limit. Food production grows more and more slowly.

Therefore, it inevitably follows that as population continues to grow faster while food production grows more slowly, sooner or later population will outstrip food supply, and it just will not be possible to feed all the people. The logic is simple and irrefutable. Right?

Let's look at the facts.

The Reality

Here are the FAO's figures^2,3 for world population and food production. They have statistics available starting from 1961.

Year	Population (Millions)	Food Production (Index)
1961	3,086	49.5
1962	3,147	50.8
1963	3,210	52.1
1964	3,276	53.8
1965	3,343	54.5
1966	3,412	56.8
1967	3,482	59.0
1968	3,554	60.7
1969	3,628	60.8
1970	3,702	62.7
1971	3,777	64.6
1972	3,854	64.0
1973	3,930	67.7
1974	4,006	68.7
1975	4,081	70.5
1976	4,155	72.6
1977	4,227	73.8
1978	4,299	77.4
1979	4,373	78.3
1980	4,447	78.8
1981	4,524	81.4
1982	4,602	84.2
1983	4,682	84.4
1984	4,764	88.8
1985	4,847	90.7
1986	4,933	92.9
1987	5,021	93.3
1988	5,109	94.8
1989	5,197	98.4
1990	5,282	100.8
1991	5,366	100.8
1992	5,447	103.6
1993	5,527	104.5
1994	5,607	108.1
1995	5,687	110.6
1996	5,768	115.1
1997	n/a	116.2

It can be hard to see the trend in a maze of numbers like this, so let's try representing it as a graph.⁴

But it is absolutely dead wrong about food production. Consistently for the past 35 years, world food production has grown, not more and more slowly, but faster and faster. Indeed, food production is increasing faster than population.

Let's look at the data another way. The FAO also publishes their calculation of world food production per person.¹ Here's their data:

Year	Food per Person (index)
1961	84.7
1962	85.2
1963	85.7
1964	86.7
1965	86.1
1966	87.9
1967	89.5
1968	90.2
1969	88.5
1970	89.4
1971	90.3
1972	87.8
1973	90.9
1974	90.5
1975	91.3
1976	92.2
1977	92.2
1978	95.1
1979	94.6
1980	93.6
1981	95.0
1982	96.6
1983	95.3
1984	98.4
1985	98.9
1986	99.4
1987	98.2
1988	98.0
1989	100.0
1990	100.7
1991	99.2
1992	100.4
1993	99.9
1994	101.8
1995	102.7
1996	105.4
1997	104.9

While these numbers have their ups and downs, the general trend is clearly upward.

Note that in 1996 world food production per person was 24% more than it was in 1961 (105.4 divided by 84.7.) Understand, these figures do not say that the world produced 24% more food, but that the world produced 24% more food per person.

The Explanation

Simple. Technology. Especially since World War II, agricultural technology has been racing ahead. When we think of technology we usually think of machines, and in Western countries this has certainly been a part of it: the tractor, the combine, and so forth have greatly contributed to increasing food production. In the developing countries mechanization is still far behind the West, but other types of technology have proven even more important: fertilizers, irrigation, better weather prediction, and perhaps most important, new strains of crops that grow faster, can thrive in difficult conditions, and are more resistant to disease. Agronomists refer to the introduction of these new crops to the Third World as the "Green Revolution", and it dramatically improved the state of the world's food supply.

Whenever I point out these facts in writing or lectures, somebody invariably objects that these technologies have now "peaked", that all they accomplished was to hold off the inevitable.

This is incredibly pessimistic. Technology has been steadily advancing for thousands of years. In the last two hundred years it has been increasing at a faster and faster pace. But now, they say, it's about to stop. After thousands of years of progress, and despite the fact that the last few years have seen greater progress than at any time before in history, they are absolutely convinced that tomorrow will be the last day and there will never be another new invention, there will never be another scientific discovery, ever again. I find this very hard to believe. There is every reason to presume that technology will continue to advance in the future as it has in the past. I make no claim to know what agricultural technology will look like a hundred years from now, except to say that it will almost certainly be more advanced than it is today.

But let's suppose this pessimistic belief is true. Technology is about to stop dead. If technology will no longer allow us to increase the yield of each crop, is there any other way to increase food production?

Sure. Plant more crops.

According to the FAO⁵, the world has a total of 13.048 billion hectares of land. (A hectare is about two and a half acres.) Of this, 1.467 billion hectares are being used to grow crops, or 11%. Okay, let's concede that some of this land is unsuitable for farming. The FAO says that 4.003 billion hectares contain buildings or roads, are too barren to be used as farmland, or are of unknown usefullness (due to limitations in trying to collect data from all over the world). This leaves 9.045 billion hectares of reasonably fertile, undeveloped land. Even at that we are only using 16% of the available land.

Granted, there would be adverse consequences to using 100% of this land to grow crops. Land is needed for animals to graze, to provide habitats for wild animals, etc. But if we are presently using only 16% of the world's potential farmland, we surely have a lot of room to maneuver.

Starvation is not imminent. The average citizen of the world today is better fed that at any time in recorded history. And the situation is getting better and better every year. Chicken Little and Al Gore are wrong.

Footnotes

2. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. "Agricultural Production Indices." Statistical Database. Rev 1997. http://apps.fao.org/lim500/nph-wrap.pl?CropsPrimary&Domain=PIN (8 Nov 1997)

3. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. "Population." Statistical Database Rev 1997. http://apps.fao.org/lim500/nph-wrap.pl?Population (8 Nov 1997)

4. To put food production and population on the same graph, I have expressed population as an index also, with 1961=50 so it starts at about the same place as food production.

5. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. "Land Use." Statistical Database. Rev 1997. http://apps.fao.org/lim500/nph-wrap.pl?LandUse (8 Nov 1997) Used 1994 data, the most recent year for which they provided complete statistics.

Posted 10 Sep 2000.

Copyright 1997 by Ohio Right to Life
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