Food Security 2 — Presentation to the Academy of Social Sciences

In my earlier blog today, Food Security 1, on the food security seminar convened last week by the ANU, I referred to a 2011 symposium organised by the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, following release of the PMSEIC report on food security.

I presented on the issue of agricultural production in the Murray-Darling Basin in the context of international food security (I was chief economist at the  Murray-Darling Basin Authority at the time). While not criticising the PMSEIC report directly, I pointed out that water (in this case) was just one factor of production, and farmers are adept at maintaining production, even in the face of very sizable changes in input availability or prices.

Furthermore, I noted the relentless decline in agricultural prices over a very long period, and that productivity growth has been (on the one hand) critical to maintaining and even increasing the value of agricultural production, and consequently profits from that production, and (at the same time) a significant contributor to the decline in prices.

The thrust of my talk was that, at least at an aggregate level, agriculture has a proven track record of expanding output faster than global population growth. And if anything, that production growth has been constrained because of all the policy distortions in this highly regulated sector. In short, it didn't seem likely that widespread global food shortages were at all likely, and was particularly irrelevant for Australia. 

I was a lone voice of economic reason at the symposium, competing against a long line-up of scientists and social scientists all making the same types of populist assertions and economic errors that Julian Cribb makes in The Coming Famine. I note that the academy has strangely never made any of the presentations from that symposium available. That's a shame, as it would be interesting to go back and analyse them.

Presentation to Academy of Social Sciences on Food Security and Sustainable Production in the MDB (8 November 2011)