Vindicating Thomas Malthus

One of the problems plaguing the world now is the sharp increase in food prices. I read on Saturday's papers that NTUC is increasing the packets of rice it is selling by about 30% due to the global shortage in rice. Even major rice producing and exporting countries like Thailand, Vietnam and India, the increase in price of rice is hitting the locals so badly that their governments are increasing taxes on rice exports in order to increase the supplies of rice back to their home countries.

One of the explanations offered in the news article for the current shortage in food crops is that it is a spill-over effect from the increase in oil price. The persistently high oil prices have spurred the world to look for alternative energy sources to fossil fuel and one of which is biofuel. For example, ethanol can be extracted from sugarcane which is also a food crop. Thus ironically, the shortage in food crop is partly due to people using food crops for power production.

However, I suspect that the competing use of food crops as biofuel is just one factor. Another reason could simply be that crop production is now failing to keep pace with the global population growth. Thomas Malthus, a political thinker from 19th century had warned of such a consequence of unchecked population growth more than a century ago. His reasoning was that population tend to increase at a geometric ratio (1, 2, 4, 8, 16...) while food production only increases at an arithmetric ratio (1, 2, 3, 4...). I came across the ideas of Thomas Malthus quite a number of years ago and remembered then reading the criticism that Malthus' pessimism was unfounded as he failed to take into account innovations and technological advances in agriculture which allow farmers to increase the yields of their land. (Recall the Green Revolution of the 1960s)

I now wonder if we are overly optimistic. I think agricultural advances can only increase the crop yield within a certain limit and one of the limit is of course, the limit set by land. And land itself has much competing uses. We now live in a commercial and industrial age where factories and commerce determine economic power compared to the agricultural age before the 19th century where economic power is still largely built on population and therefore food production. In this age where industrialization leads economic growth, all developing countries would want to set aside as much land as possible for industry. The land must come from somewhere and so while forests are being cleared, farmlands would also be converted to industrial uses. Couple this with widening income gap between the urban and rural people which lead to a lot of rural to urban migration and we should be very surprised indeed if we still see agricultural land increase over the recent decades. It is interesting that though the world is now much more technologically advanced than the pre-industrial world 200 years ago, we still cannot run away from the basics.