CHAPTER SIX WHAT ARE THE LIMITS ON FOOD PRODUCTION?CHAPTER SIX: TABLE OF CONTENTS The Long-Run Outlook Food From Fish Why is the Food Outlook Made to Seem Gloomy? Conclusions Afternote: Monocropping As we saw in chapter 5, the cost of food has been declining in recent decades - which means that world food supplies have grown faster than human population, despite the well-publicized dire predictions. What about the future? The Short-Run Outlook It is not necessary or useful to discuss whether there is an "ultimate" limit to the supply of any natural resource, including food (as discussed in chapter 3). We know for sure that the world can produce vastly more food than it now does, especially in such low-income countries as India and Bangladesh, even with conventional methods. If India were to produce only at the high present productivity of Japan and Taiwan (which have much less land and a shorter growing season), and if Bangladesh were to produce only at the rate of Holland (which has similar flooding problems and a much shorter growing season), food production would increase dramatically in India and Bangladesh (see figure 6-1). Figure 6-1 [Yields] More generally, with present technology and without moving toward the much higher yields found under experimental conditions, the world can more than feed any foreseeable population increase. There are a host of already well-proven techniques that could boost production immediately, including better storage facilities that would cut the perhaps 15-25 percent loss to pests and rot every year; improved production devices such as vacuums that suck up bugs instead of killing them with pesticides; and the host of individually-small innovations that one can read about every month in farm magazines. Widespread adoption adds up to steady improvement, and yields seem to be accelerating rather than tapering off. An example of the long-term increases in productivity is shown in Figure 6-2. FIGURE 6-2 [long term grain yields - Corn, etc. Grantham] Of course an increase in consumption imposes costs in the short run. But in the long run, population pressure reduces costs as well as improves the food supply in accord with the general theory, which I'll repeat again: More people, and increased income, cause problems of increased scarcity of resources in the short run. Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices present opportunity, and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to search for solutions. Many fail, at cost to themselves. But in a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. That is, prices end up lower than before the increased scarcity occurred, which is the long-run history of food supply. Some people wonder whether we can be sure that food production will increase, and whether it would be "safer" to restrict population growth until the increase is realized. But food production increases only in response to demand; farmers will not grow more food until the demand warrants it - either the number of mouths in a subsistence household, or the price in the market. Furthermore, one can predict with great confidence the average yields a few years hence in such countries as the U.S. by looking at the record yields for the present year; historically, the average catches up to the record yields in about xx years. The records for corn reported by Herman Warsaw, a farmer in Central Illinois, are routinely xx percent of the average, and the average then equals his yield about xx years later (see figure 6-3). FIGURE 6-3 The twin keys to this advancement in the agriculturally- productive countries are two-fold: 1) The existence of new knowledge, and educated people to take advantage of it. 2) Economic freedom. The ability of the world to increase production when there is a profitable opportunity to do so is amazing. The Long-Run Outlook In addition to the already-proven methods of raising output, there are many promising scientific discoveries at the research stage. In the first edition a decade ago, these methods included such innovations as a) orbiting giant mirrors that would reflect sunlight onto the night side of the earth and thereby increase growing time, increase harvest time, and prevent crop freezes, b) meat substitutes made of soybeans that produce the nutrition and enjoyment of meat with much less resource input, and c) hydroponic farming as described in the next paragraph. Such ideas may seem like unrealistic science fiction. But we should remember that tractors and wheeled irrigation pipes, which are making enormous contributions today, seemed quite unrealistic a hundred or fifty years ago. Furthermore, nowadays we have the capacity to estimate the chances of successful new developments much more accurately than we did in the past. When scientists predict that a process will be commercially successful within a given number of years, the likelihood of it being so is rather good. Some radical improvements for the long run have already been well-tested, and are not just a desperate last resort. In the environs of Washington, D.C., where I now live, there are a dozen or so small farms that raise vegetables hydroponically and sell them through supermarkets at premium prices because of their high quality. And this is commercially viable without subsidies from the government or from other divisions of a large firm. That is, this is not futuristic stuff, but right-now technology. You can read the names of the firms on the produce at the local supermarket. In fact, hydroponics is sufficiently practical that at least one supermarket has built a 10,000 square foot vegetable garden inside its store to provide the freshest possible vegetables to its customers. If the scarcity of farmland - as measured by the price of farmland - were to increase greatly, the potential production by hydroponic farming is enormous. In the brief time since the first edition, the capacity of food- factory production has expanded to a degree almost beyond belief. On a space of perhaps 36 square meters - that is, a "plot" six meters or 18 feet on each side - with the use of artificial light, enough food can be raised to supply the calories for a single person, day in and day out. (A less conservative estimate is that a plot ten feet square will suffice. That is, an average bedroom in an ordinary U.S. house, 20 feet by 20 feet, would contain enough area to feed a family of four.) You might think that though this is possible in a laboratory, practical development might be far in the future, or might never become practical - the way people think of fusion energy now. But farming at almost this level of land efficiency is already in commercial operation. In DeKalb, Illinois, Noel Davis's PhytoFarm produces food - mainly lettuce and other garden vegetables - in a factory measuring 200 feet by 250 feet - 50,000 square feet, one acre, 0.4 hectares, 1/640 of a square mile - at a rate of a ton of food per day, enough to completely feed 500 or 1000 people. This is not substantially below the experimental laboratory rates stated above. And PhytoFarm now does this without government subsidies. As a bonus, PhytoFarm produce is more attractive to chefs than other produce. It is unbruised, looks good, tastes good, and is more consistent day after day than crops grown in fields, especially in months when the produce must be brought from long distances. Energy for artificial light is the key raw material in state-of- the-art hydroponics. Even at present electricity costs, PhytoFarm is profitable, and its food prices are affordable at ordinary American incomes. With improved power production from nuclear fission - or from fusion - costs will certainly drop in the future. But let's go even further. With only a minor boost from artificial light - perhaps by a quarter of the total energy used by the plants - greenhouse tomato production in New Jersey is sufficiently profitable that only about a fiftieth of an acre is sufficient to feed a person fully. This is about a tenth as efficient as PhytoFarm, but still would allow food for the entire U.S. population to be produced on about a hundredth of present arable land, which is itself only a fraction of total U.S. land area. And if grain were raised instead of lettuce and tomatoes - which are now more profitable - much less space would be needed to supply the necessary nutrition. This illustration makes irrelevant the assertion of some biologists that our food supplies are limited by the amount of sunlight falling on green plants. They claim that 40 percent of the sunlight's "net primary production" is "used, co-opted, or foregone as a direct result of human activity" such as logging, farming, or paving over land in urban areas. Those calculations seem to suggest that humans are already at the margin of existence, since we must share the remaining 60% of the sun's "net primary production" with millions of other species. But as we have seen, not only can humans get by with very little agricultural space, if needed, but sunlight is not an ultimate constraint, because of the availability of nuclear or even non-nuclear power to make light. Right now, green plants capture less than one percent of the solar energy that strikes the earth's surface. If we indeed "co-opt" 40% of that 1%, we could give it all back to the plants and still draw plenty of "natural" energy from sources like solar cells, wind, ocean currents, and other reservoirs of the untapped 99%. To dramatize the findings a bit (and without worrying about the exact arithmetic because it does not matter), we can imagine the matter thusly: At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side - about the area of Massachusetts and Vermont combined, and less than a tenth of Texas. This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present (give or take a factor of four; for illustrative purposes greater exactitude is unnecessary). And if for some reason that seems like too much space, you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high, which should present no more problems that a ten- story office building. You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high, like the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower. Then the surface area needed would be no more than the space within the corporate limits of Austin, Texas, to pick the first alphabetically among the many U.S. cities large enough. PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs. Does this surprise you? It hasn't been front-page news, but the capacity to feed people with an ever smaller small land surface has been developing rapidly for decades. In 1967 Colin Clark estimated that the minimum space necessary to feed a person was 27 square kilometers, a then-optimistic figure that had not been proven in commercial practice or even large-scale experiment. Now a quarter of a century later there is commercial demonstration of land needs only a fifth or a tenth that large. It is most unlikely that this process of improvement will not continue in the future. Only two hundred years ago, half of the diet of Sauk and Mesquakie Native Americans came from hunting, and "It took 7,000 acres to support one human." Phytofarm's one acre, which supports 500 or 1,000 people, represents an increase in productivity per acre a million times over compared with the Native Americans. (See figure 6-4) FIGURE 6-4 [diagram] Nor is this any "ultimate" limit. Rather, these gains are just the result of research over the past few decades, and there is no reason to think that future research in the next century or the next 7 billion years could not greatly multiply productivity. It is likely that before the world gets to 500 billion people, or even to 10 billion, the maximum output per acre will be increased much beyond what PhytoFarm achieves now. The discussion so far does not take account of such existing technology as bovine growth hormone, which has no proven effect on humans yet greatly increases the yield of milk products. Nor does the above assessment reflect such innovations as genetically engineered plants, which will surely produce huge commercial gains in the next century. For example, rapeseed output can already be boosted 15 to 30 percent with genetic engineering. The possibilities already shown to be feasible are astounding. For example, one might insert into a potato genes from a moth that affect the potato's coloring. Other genes might make proteins in a potato with the full complement of amino acids that humans need - giving the benefits of meat and potatoes by eating the potatoes alone. Please keep in mind that this technology has been developed after only a few decades of work on the topic, and only a little more than a century after the first scientific knowledge of genetics. Potential progress in the future - even within the next few decades and centuries - is awesome. Doomsaying forecasts about population growth outstripping the food supply that take no account of these possibilities surely are seriously inadequate. Food From Fish Fish crops are not fundamentally different from field crops. Based on a few years of data, the Global 2000 Report issued the influential forecast that the world fish catch had hit its limit - "leveled off in the 1970s at about 70 million metric tons a year." But by 1988 the catch had reached 98 million tons a year, and it is still rising rapidly. No limit to the harvest of wild varieties of seafood is in sight. Yet fish farms have begun to produce at or near competitive prices. A newspaper in the 1990s in Washington, D.C., advertised perch fillets from the North Atlantic for $2.99, while aquacultured Tilapia and catfish were $3.99 and $4.99 respectively. The aquacultured products sell well enough at these prices to be displayed prominently. And there is every reason to believe that with additional experience, aquaculture costs and hence prices will fall. Indeed, the main obstacle to a rapid increase in aquaculture is that wild fish are too cheap to invite more competition. The price of cultured catfish has fallen greatly already. Farm-grown salmon has been so successful that it "has produced a glut of massive proportions, which has brought down the wholesale price of a gutted fish from $7 a pound to $4." By 1992, the price to the fish farmer was only 60 cents a pound. Aquaculture capacity can be expanded almost indefinitely. Land is a small constraint, as catfish farming in Mississippi shows; present methods produce about 3,000 pounds of fish per acre, an economic return far higher than for field crops. (The biggest obstacle to a large increase in catfish farming in Texas is the federal subsidy to rice farmers that keeps them producing that product instead of shifting the land to fish farming.) And now systems that raise fish intensively by piping in the necessary nutrients and piping out the waste products, akin to hydroponic cropping, are being developed. The process goes on year-round indoors under controlled temperature conditions, and can provide fish to restaurants and stores only hours after the catch. New technology can also expand the supply of seafood by producing artificial substitutes. Imitation lobster, made of Alaska pollock plus artificial lobster flavor and almost indistinguishable from the real thing, sells for $4.00 per pound - vastly less than the price of real lobster. The same is true of artificial crab. WHY IS THE FOOD OUTLOOK MADE TO SEEM GLOOMY? The reasons why we hear and believe so much false bad news about resources, environment, and population are so many and so complex that they require another volume to discuss (forthcoming soon, I hope). But a couple of comments about food in particular are needed. It is puzzling why competent biologists go so wrong in their assessments of the food situation. They charge that people like me who are not biologists are by training disqualified from writing such material as this. But why is this so? What is it that they know (or don't know) that makes them believe that they understand the situation better than the rest of us, and that our calculations are not sound? An explicit explanation by one of them would be helpful. Another curiosity is that even people who should know best about the wonderful long-run prospects for food production often fail to see the larger picture. Typically, Noel Davis of PhytoFarm - which makes land almost irrelevant as a factor of food production - comments that "Each year the United States is losing an area of farmland greater in size than the state of Rhode Island." Chapter 8 documents what nonsense this is. Of course, such an alarming assertion may be given as justification for the need to invest in one's own new technology. But still it reflects some belief in the conventional wisdom - which Davis's own work belies. Still another cause of the common belief that food is a looming problem is the propensity for the news media to put a bad-news twist on even the best news. Catfish farming has been so successful in the United States in the 1980s that prices have fallen rapidly. This is a great boon to consumers, and is additional evidence of the long-run potential of fish farming. But the falling prices have naturally hurt the least efficient producers. So a front-page headline is "Fish Farms Fall Prey to Excess," and the story contains no suggestion that the overall impact is beneficial to American citizens and to all humanity. CONCLUSIONS The notion that we are facing a long-run food shortage due to increased population and a Malthusian shortage of land is now scientifically discredited. High-tech methods of producing vastly more food per acre will not be needed for decades or centuries. Only after population multiplies several more times will there be enough incentive to move beyond the present field cropping systems used in the more advanced countries. But beyond the shadow of a doubt, the knowledge now exists to support many times the present world's population on less land than is now being farmed - that is, even without expanding beyond our own planet. Malthus might be rephrased thusly: Whether or not population grows exponentially, subsistence grows at an even faster exponential rate (largely but not entirely because of population growth). And capacity to improve other aspects of the standard of living, beyond subsistence, grows at a still faster exponential rate, due largely to the growth of knowledge. The main reason why more food has not been produced in the past is that there was insufficient demand for more food. As demand increases, farmers work harder to produce crops and improve the land, and more research is done to increase productivity. This extra work and investment imposes costs for a while. But as we saw in chapter 5, food has tended in the long run to become cheaper decade after decade. That's why production and consumption per capita have been rising. Will a "population explosion" reverse these trends? On the contrary. Population growth increases food demand, which in the short run requires more labor and investment to meet the demand. (There is always some lag before supply responds to additional demand, which may mean that some will suffer.) But in the foreseeable long run, additional consumption will not make food more scarce and more expensive. Rather, in the long run additional people actually cause food to be less scarce and less expensive. Once again, the basic process portrayed in this book, applied to food: More people increase scarcity of food for a while. The higher prices prompt agronomical researchers and farmers to invent. The solutions that are eventually found cause food to be more available than before. (The population theme will be developed in Part II.) This conclusion presupposes a satisfactory social and economic system that will not prevent progress. The next chapter discusses which social and economic conditions will promote the fastest growth of food supplies. AFTERNOTE: MONOCROPPING During the past 10,000 years of agriculture, humans have concentrated their farming efforts on only a few descendants of the many wild varieties that were formerly eaten. As of the 1970s, the annual production (millions of metric tons) of the top crops was: wheat, 360; rice, 320; maize ("corn" in U. S.), 300; potato, 300. Barley, sweet potato, and cassava were below 200 tons, and no other crop was more than 60 tons. From this data, Jack Harlan and others inferred that the food situation had become more fragile than earlier in history, more vulnerable to catastrophic disaster with the failure of a single crop. This worry became one of the cliches of the 1970s, thrown at anyone who pointed out that nutrition had been improving in the world. The idea that fewer crops means more fragile food supplies is contradicted by many centuries of human experience: the data show that famine mortality has fallen rather than risen. And when we examine the proposition analytically, it seems unwarranted. First, we notice that though the world's foods have become more concentrated in fewer varieties over the centuries, this does not imply the same for local consumption. The diet of an Indian villager is surely more diverse now than in the past (when a single locally grown crop constituted the overwhelming proportion of every person's diet), because villagers now have access to foods from outside the village, and income to purchase them. Indeed, one need only consider one's daily intake to see how much the sources of our food are much more diversified from all over the world than in past centuries, largely because of the improvement of transportation and of storage techniques such as refrigeration. The data on the size of grocery stores and the number of products carried in them belie the assertion that "The supermarket and quick-food services have drastically restricted the human diet in the U.S." Because of everyone's greater access to more widespread sources of food, chances are that even if two of the top four crops were completely wiped out for an entire year, there would be less effect upon people's nutrition than if only one crop had been wiped out in a past century, if only because a large proportion of our grains are fed to animals and could be redirected to humans. Reduction in agricultural variety would seem to be just one more false scare, which may have arisen simply because people cannot believe that such good things can happen without our having to pay nature a penance for our blessings. In a telling observation, the same excellent scholar who produced the data adduced above but worried about reduction in variety noted that "Weeds are species or races that thrive in man- made habitats", and "[W]hat species thrives in man-made habitats better than homo sapiens? We are the weediest of all." Just so. And our weed-like survival capacities increase from generation to generation rather than diminish, despite (or because of) such changes as reduction in the number of species cultivated in the world. page # \ultres tchar06 \October 19, 1993