A recently published book claims much of the environmentalist rhetoric about running out of food is fundamentally flawed. The World Food Outlook is the product of two economists with the World Bank, Donald O. Mitchell and Merlinda D. Ingco, and Ronald C. Duncan of the National Centre for Development Studies at the Australian National University.
The book jackets summarizes the main points of the book this way:
The fact is that the world food situation has improved dramatically for most of the world’s consumers. Output of cereals, the world’s main food source, has increased 2.7 per cent per annum since 1950, while population has grown by about 1.9 per cent per annum. Cereal yields have increased at 2.25 per cent per annum. Not all people in the world today have adequate diets and there is no doubting the desperate circumstances of some peoples, but diets for most of the world’s consumers have improved dramatically and per capita calorie consumption in developing countries has increased by some 27 per cent since the 1960s. It should continue to improve, and food will be cheaper than it is today.
The trio also estimate that to feed future population, agricultural growth needs to achieve at least 1.4 percent annual growth (current growth is about 1.7 percent), and a growth rate of 2 percent annually would allow up to 11 percent of the world’s crop land to be returned to other uses while still maintaining adequate food security.