3/28/2023 0 Comments Does janetter still work![]() ![]() ![]() “ If we can’t do xyz or use abc then we can’t feed the world!” But it’s usually not true, is it? Producers figure it out and the market sorts it out. But it also misses what's happening in the real world where yes, the underlying market incentive is always for quantity of production but there's increasingly market opportunities & incentives for producers who are optimizing for quality, and/or specific attributes.įeed the world has also been weaponized to defend certain production practices. Feed the world assumes you can high yield your way to profitability which isn’t always the case. Feeding the world is a commodity message. What do people want? What are they willing to pay for? What do they have access to? Food tastes and preferences change over time and chances are pretty doggone strong that preferences will look differently in 2050 than they do today. On the other side of the price equation is demand. But talking about reducing waste isn’t nearly as fun as talking about increasing production so here we are.ĭemand is a moving thing. And then there’s the question of how to minimize food waste, whether in field/barn, in transit, in grocery store/restaurant, or in the home. ![]() There’s also the question of distribution & getting the right food to the right markets at the right time. Producing enough food for x billion people is one part of the supply side of the equation. Nobody needs to suggest producing more, the market will do that. The market’s job is to solve for m-o-r-e through price. 7 flaws with dumbing it all down to Feed the World If you think about the scale and complexity and geopolitics and cultural trends involved in the global food industry, it’s almost intellectually insulting that we’ve boiled it all down to ‘feed the world’. Oof, that’s a lot of complexity and competing dynamics among really really hard problems. Not to mention the changes in demand for different types of food as incomes rise, and the role of policies around biofuels and how that will impact commodity prices. What else did the report say though? It talked about the complexity of accomplishing this from considerations for production (water & land use & availability) to considerations for lifting more people out of poverty (from investment in rural infrastructure across Africa to increase access to food to the prediction that 70% of people will live in urban areas by 2050 up from 49% today). (Creating the need to) produce 70 percent more food for an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050. In 2009 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released it’s report saying:Īccording to the latest UN projections, world population will rise from 6.8 billion today to 9.1 billion in 2050 - a third more mouths to feed than there are today. ![]()
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