Starve the Myth: Refuting the Food Crisis

Or, What Michael Pollan can do with himself. . . . .

It’s become trendy to talk in end-of-the world terms about the coming food crisis. While I’m not about to start on the global level, I feel compelled to say something about North America. First, we are not running out of land. Agricultural land has always been, and shows no signs of not always being, the thing that the United States has in surplus above all. While it may appear to the average urbanite that there is development everywhere and pristine country is hard to find, this is a matter of viewpoint more than reality. As the population concentrates in urban centers, fewer of them are close to the vast expanses of rural land that remain outside of them, and what’s out of sight remains out of mind. A massive portion of the land area remains settled to a negligible density, and suburban sprawl could double without making so much of a dent in the relative amount. Dallas / Fort Worth (new and sunbelt) is only settled to 2700 persons per acre, and its population is larger than 34 entire states. Think about the size of some of these states - Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska – and you get an idea of how many of the fourth-largest MSAs could be added without even touching the corn country of the Mississippi river basin.

Second, what agricultural land there is isn’t used efficiently. Crop prices are so low (i.e. supply so outstrips demand) that a great deal of agriculture has converted to vast monocultures to take any advantage of economies of scale that can be had. Much of the reason for the cornification of the food supply (chronicled in Fast Food Nation) is that there is a vast overabundance of corn that it’s been put to any use it can be by resourceful scientists trying to take advantage of the cheap price. While there has been a demand spike with the advent of ethanol increases, it’s worth remembering that it was both a spike from a very low baseline and a spike from a fixed amount of supply that was only productive at that low price. Corn, also, is the crop for the good land. The wheat that covers the great plains from the Red River through Saskatchewan is even more marginal as a commodity. It’s often more profitable for the wheat farmer to plow a perfectly good crop under and collect insurance than to try to sell the product for the going price. That’s not even mentioning grazing land, the western and southern land use in the plains. Pasture as land use is of such incredibly low intensity that almost any other agricultural use produces more calories per acre – and that’s even without grazing by horses, sheep, goats, or other animals that don’t usually enter the food supply. Any or all of this land can be increased in intensity: corn land can be converted to soy or vegetables at the margins, wheat land to corn, grazing land to wheat, fallow land to grazing, or a myriad of other combinations. All that’s lacking is an increase of price.

Agricultural economics is not new or exciting, but seems to be completely overlooked by the “urban farming” movement and its ilk. How can small plots inside a built-up area possibly be more efficient than transitioning, say, 5% of grain crop land in adjacent counties to vegetable-truck farms? When the price comes, the change will follow. A small drop in efficiency (as marginal land comes into production) plus a small increase in transportation cost might be an inconvenience to certain urbanites (to the tune of pennies) but surely does not spell anything like starvation.

The only argument remaining, then, is transportation. Sure, as the local-food movement says, it costs something to transport food around a continent or two, but is that really a problem? Long-distance transport guarantees a supply independent of weather, provides variety and allows for regions to pursue their comparative advantages – making the world richer for all. Rather than a romantic return-to-the-soil movement, wouldn’t energies be better spent improving the efficiency (and even “sustainability” if you like, electric trucks anyone?) of the transportation system than reducing the labor-to-calorie ratio of the product to make a few urban intellectuals feel better?

An example of how weirdly abundant food has become is the reduction in self-consumed food by the few families still left in agriculture. When it’s more efficient to import vegetables from California or Chile than to grow them on the farm you own (beyond a beaming David Ricardo) as was done for centuries, the world is in a very strange place. The rest of the world maybe not, but North America is not heading toward a crisis of anything other than cognitive dissonance.

Of course, conventional farming isn’t sexy . . . . .