Food Is Growing More Plentiful, So Why Do People Keep Warning Of Shortages?

"There's a common warning about our planet's future: the risk of food shortages."

"'We've got a growing world and a hungry world. We need to make sure we do our part in helping feed that hungry world,' said Kip Tom, a farmer from Indiana who's currently the U.S. ambassador to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, as he closed a panel discussion in 2018."

"'That is totally the mantra,"' says Catherine Kling, an economist at Cornell University. 'I'll bet I've been to 50 talks in the last five, 10 years where the beginning is, 'We have to feed 9 billion people by 2050. This is a crisis situation.' The word 'crisis' gets used regularly.'"

"But, in fact, the long-term trend, for more than a century, has been toward ever more abundant food, and declining prices."

"To be sure, every once in a while, it really does seem like a crisis. It certainly did in 2008. Tom Hertel, a economist at Purdue University, remembers it well. "This was right in the thick of the biofuel-driven madness," Hertel says, when government policies drove a surge in demand for corn to make ethanol. Rice and wheat prices were spiking for other reasons."