I don't know if the math on this works out. In 1900 the average family size was probably at least 7 people, so if a farmer was feeding 7 people his family would use all of it and there would be no surplus and everybody else would starve.
----- Original Message ---- From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sat, April 17, 2010 12:05:43 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity (was Thatcherism)
Shane and Alan think that Brad is wrong to point to increased agricultural productivity as a gain. They could not be more wrong. There are four billion + people living today - two out of every three in the world - who would not be, but for the gains in agricultural productivity over the last 110 years.
An American farmer in 1900 fed seven people; today his great grandson feeds 96 people. World grain output rose from 400 million tons in 1900 to 1.9 billion tons in 1998. The spectre of soil exhaustion has been threatened over and over again since Malthus' day, but in fact yields per hectare have contined to rise ever since (from 1.1 tons to 2.7 tons between 1981 and 2000).
The threat to food has not come from soil exhaustion, but from policies of land retirement adopted by the big producers like the European Union which has retired 3.8 million hectares under the set aside scheme. World wide land area re-designated as national park - where farming is not forbidden, but discouraged - has grown from 2.4 million sq KM to 18.8 million sq KM between 1962 and 2003. In 2005 those managed land retirement schemes began to force food prices upwards. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk