A crisis in food policy rather than food capacity

Continued restrictions on agricultural imports into Europe and the USA have also meant that developing nation farmers have been locked into poverty, and not able to afford the farm inputs or technologies that could rapidly improve agricultural productivity.

The imminent introduction of greenhouse emission mitigation policies in Australia and New Zealand also has the potential to adversely impact global agricultural capacity, and to simultaneously increase global greenhouse emission levels unless managed very carefully. Australian and New Zealand farmers will be uniquely impacted by these policies due to their high level of trade exposure, which means they have no capacity to demand higher prices in response to the higher farm input costs that greenhouse mitigation policies will create.

The result of such policies is very likely to be the “leakage” of both economic activity and greenhouse emissions to nations without greenhouse mitigation policies. This is particularly the case given the Kyoto Protocol emission accounting rules which both Australia and New Zealand have now agreed to observe, and which ignore the cyclical nature of greenhouse gases in agricultural systems, counting agricultural emissions but not sequestrations. Unless changed, they have the potential to divert agricultural land to permanent carbon sink forests (which operate under different greenhouse accounting rules) and reduce agricultural output by two of the world’s major agricultural exporting nations.

In conclusion, a re-examination of Malthus’s writings highlights that he actually identified humans and the decisions they make as the main issue in efforts to secure long-term food security, rather than natural resource constraints. It seems over the ensuing centuries, little has changed.