Food production

The record of food production entirely contradicts the scary forecasts.

A long and broad view of food production found continuous improvement with no end in sight. Any country that gives farmers a free market in food and labor, secure property rights in the land, and a political system that ensures these freedoms in the future will soon be flush with food, with an ever-diminishing proportion of its work force required to produce the food.

The rise in food output was so great as to cause grain to become cheaper despite the large increase in demand.  (agricultural knowledge gained from research and development induced by the increased demand, the increased ability of farmers to get their produce to market on improved transportation systems.

Superficially it might seem that farmers benefit from the overall government program because of the subsidies. But close analysis shows that most of the subsidies finally come to rest in the hands, not of the cultivators, but of the owner of the land in the form of proceeds from land sales at price made high by the value the subsidies confer.

Another set of beneficiaries of government programs are the government officials.

Modern technological capacities in league with modern transportation capacities, harnessed to farmers' ingenuity when offered a chance to make money, have vastly reduced the likelihood of a major disturbance in our food supplies. 

The most important fact about the world's agricultural land is that less and less of it is needed as the decade pass. The reduced economic importance of land is shown by the long-run diminution in the proportion of total tangible assets that farmland has represented in various countries.

The definition of "arable" changes as tech develops and the demand for land changes. Hence, any calculation of "arable" land should be seen for what it is-- a rough temporary assessment that may be useful for a while but has no permanent validity.

The combination of increased productivity per acre of good land, and increased use of equipment adapted to flat land, has made it unprofitable to farm some land that formerly was cultivated.

Though the stock of usable land seems fixed at any moment, it is constantly being increased by the clearing of new fields or the reclamation of wasteland. Land also is constantly being enhanced by increasing the number of crops grown per year on each unit of land, and by increasing the yield per crop with better farming methods and with chemical fertilizer. And land is created anew where there was none.