From Niels Röling, Department of Communication and Innovation Studies, Wageningen University
The analysis underlying Debora MacKenzie’s article “What price more food?” (14 June, p 28) disappoints. You “asked the world’s leading agricultural experts what it will take to boost yields”. The main answer you reported was: “invest in the science that can increase yields and in the infrastructure that can get the resulting technologies to the farmers who need them”. Yet the 2007 World Development Report and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development Report (5 April, p 8) laid this “technology supply push” thinking to rest.
True, the evidence does point to the need to increase the productivity of smallholders in developing countries. But what these people lack most is opportunity, which is denied them by skewed global trade and markets, and by inadequate institutions: credit, tenure laws, water rights, political representation, links to markets and so on.
Higher crop prices benefit small farmers and rural labourers more than they harm poor consumers, making it more effective to provide safety nets for consumers than to deny small farmers a good price for their produce.
From Gabriel Stecher
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Your diagram comparing yields of milk and meat with the quantity of grain needed to produce them is an over-simplification. Australian production of meat is dominated by grazing and foraging with low animal densities in parts of the continent unsuited to grain production. Sheep, goat, camel, emu and kangaroo are entirely free-range, and so is the bulk of beef.
Of far more potential impact is the diversion of grains for ethanol production. As far back as 1979 I presented an analysis, later published in the CSIRO volume Energy and Agriculture, that showed that making ethanol from wheat has a negative energy balance under most conditions.
Carboor, Victoria, Australia
From Jody Mark Huston-Hall
Is it not absurd that the human race depends on only four food groups – rice, maize, wheat and potatoes – for the majority of its calorie intake?
As a permaculturalist I practise diversity, not only in the foods that I grow but also in the foods that I consume.
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, UK
Wageningen, The Netherlands
