Agricultural and Resource Economics Update, a University of California magazine devoted to contemporary food and environmental issues. He has published extensively in leading economics and agricultural journals.
Sexton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World, and reported the following:
Food Fight is about the challenges we will face in the 21st Century to adequately feed the world and avoid rising food prices and increasing hunger and malnutrition. Food Fight documents the increase in food demand that is certain to occur in the century and the challenges to expanding supplies sufficiently to meet demand growth due to declining agricultural productivity, climate change, pest resistance and more. It is also about destructive public policies enacted by governments around the world that are guaranteed to produce less, not more, food.Learn more about Food Fight at the University of California Press website.
Amidst this big picture, page 99 in Food Fight does a good job of illustrating one of the key policy issues. It is part of the chapter on organic foods. People, mainly wealthier ones, like to consume organic foods because they think they are healthier than the conventional alternative, although no evidence supports such claims, and they think organic is better for the environment. However, converting land to organic production reduces the yield of that land by 30 – 45%, depending on crop and production location. This results in less food production on a given land base, raises food prices, and causes expansion of the land base in agriculture, known as extensification. Conversion of forested lands for agriculture is harmful to the environment in many dimensions, among them greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Yet governments around the world support the expansion of organic agriculture.
Page 99 discusses whether the organic yield decrement will increase or decrease in response to policy-driven expansion of organic acreage. It also addresses the adverse environmental implications due to expanded organic production and the concomitant expansion of the agricultural land base that ensues.
Commentators through recent centuries, with Thomas Malthus most prominent among them, have forecasted that the world would not be able to expand food production sufficiently to feed a growing population. They painted a bleak picture of hunger and starvation that has proven, for the most part, to be dramatically wrong. Food Fight’s message is different. Despite likely dramatic growth in food demand in this Century, and strong headwinds to expanding supplies as we’ve done in the past, we can still succeed as a global society in meeting the challenge if we stop enacting policies guaranteed to reduce food supplies and instead remove the shackles we’ve placed upon the agricultural industry and support policies to expand food supplies.
--Marshal Zeringue
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