Feeding the World

Over at the evil Wall Street Journal we have an interview with the evil Chairman of that evil food producer, Nestlé.  Or so I have heard people say.  The article can be found here.

Food production is a big deal.  Read these paragraphs and wait for the "bottom line"

The energy stored in a bushel of corn can fuel a car or feed a person. And increasingly, thanks to ethanol mandates and subsidies in the U.S. and biofuel incentives in Europe, crops formerly grown for food or livestock feed are being grown for fuel. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent estimate predicts that this year, for the first time, American farmers will harvest more corn for ethanol than for feed. In Europe some 50% of the rapeseed crop is going into biofuel production, according to Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe, while "world-wide about 18% of sugar is being used for biofuel today."

In one sense, this is a remarkable achievement—five decades ago, when the global population was half what it is today, catastrophists like Paul Ehrlich were warning that the world faced mass starvation on a biblical scale. Today, with nearly seven billion mouths to feed, we produce so much food that we think nothing of burning tons of it for fuel.

Or at least we think nothing of it in the West. If the price of our breakfast cereal goes up because we're diverting agricultural production to ethanol or biodiesel, it's an annoyance. But if the price of corn or flour doubles or triples in the Third World, where according to Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe people "are spending 80% of [their] disposable income on food," hundreds of millions of people go hungry. Sometimes, as in the Middle East earlier this year, they revolt.

"What we call today the Arab Spring," Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe says over lunch at Nestle's world headquarters, "really started as a protest against ever-increasing food prices."

Someone I know summarized the article for us.

He covers not only the ability of the world to feed its people, but also three particularly counterproductive practices relating to genetically modified organisms (GMO) or crops, diverting food to fuel, and not creating a market for water.

European (and others) concerns about genetically modified crops makes one think about the Tea Parties and their concerns about long term debt, does it not?

When I was young a lot of people had gardens for growing some of their own food.  In the city in which I was born there was common land that was used by individual homeowners to grow vegetables, like they still do in Germany.  Today it is flowers.

Regards  —  Cliff