What is the nature of the world food problem?

Abstract

From Malthus, to the alarmists of the Club of Rome era, to contemporary extremists such as Lester Brown and Dennis Avery, the world has seldom suffered a shortage of commentators on the challenge of feeding humanity. This introductory perspective takes a dispassionate (some may say optimistic) view of the present and prospective situations.

The world food problem is misnamed - rather, it is a ‘people problem’, in two senses. First, there are, not to put too fine a point on it, eventually going to be rather too many people to be fed. Whether or not they can be fed adequately depends, however, on another aspect of ‘people power’, namely, human capital in the form of people who can contribute to new knowledge and more productive means of producing additional food, which can alleviate and overcome this problem. It is thus a balance between people generally, as demanders of, and more specifically as knowledgeable contributors to supply.