IEEE Spectrum June, 2013 - 28

The age of plenty

Fpo
Global
averaGe
1960
North
america

1950

Farm oUtpUt per worker averages
Us $2000 globally, $90 000 in north
america, an edge due in part to higher capital
investment, in part to greater efficiency.

a cow's yielD has risen fourfold in the
United states within living memory, the result
of selective breeding and more sophisticated
care and feeding.

It has never been lower. On the eve of the French Revolution in
1789, about when Malthus first published his essay, it took nearly
the entire daily wage of an unskilled worker to buy two loaves of
bread, enough to feed a family of four. Today, it takes a Parisien
about 15 minutes working at minimum wage to do to the same.
There are two reasons for this great change: Farmers are work-
ing more land, and they are wringing more food from it. This latter
factor is what's critical now. From 1800 to 1950, the acreage under
cultivation pretty much kept pace with world population growth.
But since 1950 the amount of such land per capita has fallen by half
even as food supply per capita has increased by about 30 percent.
In addition, global trading networks greatly expanded to bring
food from regions with food surpluses to those with food deficits.
Those predicting the onset of scarcity argue that the trend
toward ever-cheaper food is beginning to falter. And indeed,
beginning around 2001, global food prices did begin to edge up.
The shift in direction was a result of several developments. One
was a decline since 1990 in the year-on-year growth in yields of
major cereal crops like wheat and rice. But the more significant
causes were a rise in demand for food in rapidly developing coun-
tries like China, as people there moved away from food staples
to more grain-intensive meat, and crops like corn, sugar, and
oilseeds were diverted to the production of biofuel.
We shouldn't be overly vexed by these burdens on the food
supply. There is indeed every reason to believe that produc-
tivity could go on rising briskly for at least several decades, by
which time the world's population is expected to top out at
around 10 billion. However, this productivity increase won't
happen by itself-we have to invest in technology, not only in
our accustomed centers of research but in the very regions of
the world that lag behind the modernized nations. Research
has to happen where the crops are. In the end, all agricultural
innovation, like politics, is local.
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jun 2013

north american

2013

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1980
total factor
productivity

2000
expaNded
resources

total Factor proDUctiVity has contri-
buted ever more to the growth in global farm
output, outweighing the mere addition of
labor, chemicals, machinery, and land.

yo u p r o b a b ly u n D e r s ta n D t h at ag r i c u lt u r a l p r o D u c t i v i t y
depends on science and technology. But you may not realize
just how much it does so. At the beginning of the 20th century,
essentially any increase in food production came from new lands
going under the plow. By the end of the century, most increases
in production came from better seeds, breeds, fertilizers, pest
control, automation, and management skill. All of those improve-
ments were almost entirely due to research.
Perhaps the greatest examples of what research has done
are the discoveries of genetic inheritance by the Austrian monk
Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century and the Haber-Bosch
process for the chemical fixation of nitrogen from the air, devel-
oped in Germany in the early 1900s. The lack of nitrogen was the
single outstanding constraint on crop yields, and removing that
constraint allowed a given amount of labor, on a given amount
of land, to produce vastly more food.
Use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer expanded rapidly, especially
after World War II, when munitions factories could be converted
to manufacture fertilizer. Then researchers capitalized on this
innovation by applying Mendel's discoveries to the breeding of
crop varieties that responded to higher doses of fertilizer. These
included corn (maize) hybrids that could be planted more densely
and "semidwarf" varieties of wheat and rice, which responded
to higher doses of nitrogen by producing more grain rather than
growing too tall to stand. This combination unleashed a green revo-
lution starting around the 1940s in North America and the 1960s
in developing countries. It's true that the revolution unleashed by
nitrogen fixation has had unwanted side effects: Much of the fer-
tilizer currently applied is wasted, escaping into the atmosphere
or running off to pollute waterways. Solving these problems is
challenging-farmers must improve the efficiency with which
they apply fertilizer. But that's already happening in many places.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2013