Kyros on 19 May 2008
which are already suffering from food shortages due to food price inflation
The biggest reason for this are in (most likely this order)
1) In China, Vietnam, Brazil, India hundreds of million of people get rich and want to eat western diets with lots of meat.
2) Stupid farm subsidies of Europe which actually discourage food production
3) Biofuel demand.
Doesn't have to do anything with global warming or peak oil. Rather with the world getting a better place overall (1) and stupid politicians (2+3)
I'm pretty sure our optimism would disappear pretty quickly if those food shortages started impacting us.
As I said food is getting scarce because people get richer. For decades food production has increased faster than population growth. This doesn't help poor people who have nothing to eat ( countries with lots of urban poors, poor farmers profit from higher prices they can get for their products)
You can be sure that the food production will grow. Market economy is an amazing thing in this regard. You get more money for a product so people will increase production. 15 years ago you always heard that the EU is producing far too much food and nobody knows where to put it. 5 years ago food prices were far too low because of subsidized EU+USA dumping prices and poor third-world farmers didn't get enough money for their products. Now we have high food prices for 6 months and riots in Haiti. And suddenly the world will end.
