We Will Have Enough Food If Markets Are Just Allowed To Work

See Get the fertiliser out. We can feed the world by Matt Ridley of "The Rational Optimist." Excerpts:

"Oxfam’s chief executive, Dame Barbara Stocking, claimed this week in a BBC interview that there will “absolutely not be enough food” to feed the world’s population in a few decades’ time.

Such certainty about the future is remarkable, so I downloaded Oxfam’s new “report” with interest. Once I got past the fundraising banners, I found a series of assertions that there is a food crisis caused by failures of government “to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest, which means that companies, interest groups and elites are able to plunder resources and to redirect flows of finance, knowledge, and food”. Oxfam is calling for “a new global governance” — effectively the nationalisation of the world food system.

In the short term, yes, food prices have shot up. Why? The biggest reason — which Oxfam acknowledges in passing — is the lunatic policy of taking 5 per cent of the entire world’s grain crop and turning it into motor fuel. In a year of poor harvests such as 2010 that was enough to tip millions into malnutrition and poverty. Add in the pernicious tariff barriers we Europeans raise against African food and, yes, it is the fault of government, but doing too much regulating, correcting and protecting, not too little.

In the long run, even after this year’s price spike, according to data compiled by Daniel Sumner, of the University of California Davis, maize and wheat prices are in real terms only about half what they were in the 1940s and 25 per cent below what they averaged in the 1960s. Relative to wages, they have fallen even farther. By far the most significant reason for this long-term decline in food prices is that those beastly plundering capitalists have been inventing things like fertilisers, tractors, pesticides and new varieties to increase yields and cut costs."

"The truth is that over the past 60 years the world’s farmers have trebled the yield of the big three cereals (rice, wheat and maize), which provide 60 per cent of human calories, without ploughing a single net extra acre. (Incidentally, yields are probably 10 per cent higher simply because of increased carbon dioxide in the air.) In some places, food prices have been so low that land has come out of agriculture and back into forest. Malnutrition and hunger persist, yes, but mass famine now happens chiefly in countries with too much government, such as North Korea and Zimbabwe."