I've got a call here for Thomas Malthus ...

[fivemack]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2115773,00.html

has the content-free (given that it's from the Observer) title "Organic food under threat".

As far as I can see, they've just discovered that food grows on farms, that there are only finitely many farms, that each farm has only finite yield, and that the reason that farmers moved away from organic food in the first place is that a given amount of land produces a whole lot more food when sown with aggressively-bred grain, fertilised with carefully-bound phosphorus, and freed of pests with targeted insecticides. The demand for organic food in England has just reached equality with the supply, at which point it has to grow at a rate in which new farms can be brought into production, rather than at the rate by which a consumer whim can inflame.

England can't feed England even with the utmost available refinements of agricultural technology. England hasn't been able to feed England with the greatest available refinements of agricultural technology since about 1900 - ask any U-Boat commander. So I'm surprised that people are now surprised to find that England can't feed England if its inhabitants request it to do so with one fertiliser factory tied behind its back.

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Those countries probably also have people who like to eat food in them too though, also producing intensively. Pinch a load of the land for organic farming and a load for biofuels and the global food price goes up. Bad news for Africa.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

Good news for Africa surely - they can sell at a higher price than before.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

They will either become as accustomed to wealth as an Englishman, and so demand much higher prices for food than we currently enjoy (a demand that I expect to provoke the rich countries into even more savage bombings, invasions, and occupations than they currently inflict on countries that demand too much for their oil); or abandon their farms in turn as the price of food continues to be insufficient to support an English farmer; or forever stay much poorer than the English.

A fourth alternative is that the English themselves will become poor enough again that growing food once again looks like an attractive use of our labour.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

My inner socialist does not expect the current wealth differential of the world to remain constant, and does not expect there to be enough resource on the planet to bring everyone to current English levels, so on the scale of centuries expects to end up at about current Polish levels. I don't think that peasant agriculture is an attractive use of labour at that point.

However, the Gini coefficient of the world seems to be moving upwards if it's moving at all, so the world may end up oversupplied with poor peasants (and, given that the Gini coefficient for land ownership has always been enormous) poor landless peasants.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Well, broadly good news for those parts of Africa which are more than self-sufficient in food, and bad news for those which are not.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

What a good thing some of us are growing our own. I don't grow as much as I'd like to but it's a start.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I attempt to grow my own food, but for the spiritual effects of contemplating greenery and the exercise effects of vigorous weeding rather than out of any particular desire for food.

Ignoring the gastropods and the aphids, though it is clearly the height of folly to ignore either the gastropods or the aphids, I've a couple of weeks of broccoli, maybe as much as a month of potatoes, maybe as much as a week of broad beans, maybe a week of carrots or maybe much less - I think I need some kind of widget to plant carrot-seed uniformly, it's too fine to pour out of the packet at a controlled rate of one seed per five centimetres along a furrow, so I suspect I'll have a conglobulated orgy of intertwined carrots by the time things have grown - a couple of weeks of apples from the neighbour's tree, and a couple of crumbles of blackberries.

I'm not being efficient - masses of garden space left for grass, the crops are not fertilised or pesticided, and I remove the weeds between thumb and forefinger rather than with N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine. I'm not vegetarian, so I know I can't remotely hope to feed myself from the garden, and so scarcely bother to try.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Perennials are the way to go. Also, foraging. I'll be happy when I've got a solar dehydrator sorted out though.

And yeah, I wouldn't be bothering if it were only because food is expensive, although if it got expensive enough I suppose I would. I do get better value for money out of my organic strawberry patch than I ever would from supermarket organic strawberries, though.