Food demand vs. food need
A recent report from PLOS One finds that growth in global agricultural yield is not projected to keep up with growth in demand. Brad Plumer picked it up, and someone gave his post this blog-snappy headline: "This terrifying chart shows we're not growing enough food to feed the world."
Well, not exactly. The report compares yield to human demand, not need. And a lot of us humans have been demanding a whole lot more food than we need. We burn it as fuel, or inefficiently convert it into way more meat than we should be eating, or simply throw massive amounts of it away. Meanwhile, people are hungry—due to unjust distribution of the food that already exists.
Which isn't to say that the report's crap and we won't ever need to produce more food. We will (though this doesn't mean the highest-yield methods are the best or longest-sighted ones). But I wish the researchers didn't frame demand projections as practically inevitable, and conservation approaches as a mere afterthought:
