The End of Cheap Food

A recent Economist article (The End of Cheap Food) predicts that:

dearer food is likely to persist for years. That is because “agflation” is underpinned by long-running changes in diet that accompany the growing wealth of emerging economies—the Chinese consumer who ate 20kg (44lb) of meat in 1985 will scoff over 50kg of the stuff this year. That in turn pushes up demand for grain: it takes 8kg of grain to produce one of beef.

Additionally, as we continue to develop biofuels, the conversion of grains into fuel for our vehicles will contribute to additional pressure on agricultural.

But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result of America’s reckless ethanol subsidies. This year biofuels will take a third of America’s (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV’s fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world’s overall grain stocks.

This is a bit hard to take having just seen King Corn a few weeks ago. We already rely on corn as a substantial player in our food supply (it feeds the cows we eat as hamburgers, it sweetens the soda we drink, it fills our bowls in the morning). I’m not especially pleased to hear that we now need to grow more of it.

It’s all well and good to pursue a policy of intensification, and who am I to argue about nature’s intended yield per acre. However, simple mathematics should make it obvious that we cannot continue along this path forever. At some point we will hit up against the laws of nature: this much energy from this much grain is required to produce this much meat with this much energy.

Human ingenuity will always find a way to delay facing reality, but it seems to me that we have been given a bit of a warning about where such a path might lead.