Nice post by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That:
Farmers versus FamineWhat follows are two graphs made with data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that show quite the opposite. A bit more -- Willis offers this post script to his post:
Bill McKibben, the skeptics best friend, can always be depended on to provide interesting claims. Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, he opines on the tsunami and our �shrinking margins� over at the Guardian. A number of people have highlighted various of his ideas, not all of them favorably. One claim of his that I have not seen discussed is the following:We�re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests � the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years.
The continued ability of the world to feed itself, despite adding a total of four billion people to the planet in the last fifty years, is an unparalleled and largely unrecognized success for humanity. I am so tired of people like McKibben not only not acknowledging that, but going so far as to claim that the trend has reversed and that things are getting worse. That�s nonsense. In terms of world nutrition, things are better than they have ever been, even for the poorest countries. Not only that, but they continue to improve. That�s a huge success.Indeed. Can anyone point me to a Malthusian prediction that happened as predicted? Me neither...
