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

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that you can grow more food per acre with a hand-on, organic approach

I've found some stats (see my next post), and that doesn't seem to be true for wheat; somewhere like Belgium, which I suspect is very mechanised, manages seven tons per hectare, whilst somewhere like India, which I'd suspect would be more on the hands-on side, manages three.

The scary thing is that the US, noted for its amber waves of grain, is 20% less efficient per hectare than India. This is probably a matter of lack of need - sixty megatons of wheat is enough to satisfy US domestic consumption and to spare, ramping up to the efficiency of Norway and providing another sixty megatons for export would crash the market entirely.

I think it may be true that you can grow more food in an intercropping process which (at the present level of investment in agricultural robotics, which is tiny since marginal return on capital is much greater if you use the capital to hire more desperate Moldovans, and since there are obvious humanitarian problems to rendering 90% of the farmers of Bulgaria redundant on a two-year timescale) has to be harvested by hand, provided you're in a tropical climate where sweetcorn, squash and beans all grow more than one crop a year.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

If the US, by being as efficient as Norway, could grow twice as much wheat and feed the whole of Africa for essentially nothing, then all the Africans could get busy growing organic strawberries to be eaten in Britain, and hand-cranking their economies. Once they'd made some money doing this, they could start supporting wheat prices by paying for the wheat and it would all work out -- by using the spare capacity in the US system to raise the floor until they had the money to be proper consumers.