korrents · piece

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

George Monbiot · 4 Oct 2023

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Raising yields on land already farmed is what keeps farming from taking more of the wild world.

Their wordsIt was achieved almost entirely through higher crop yields per hectare.

Also said by Linus Blomqvist

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George Monbiot did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The world today feeds far more people with far less famine than it did sixty years ago, and almost nobody celebrates it.

Their wordsIn 2023, a world of 8.1 billion people suffers far less hunger and famine than the world of 3.2 billion did in 1963, the year of my birth.
Our reading
Raising yields on land already farmed is what keeps farming from taking more of the wild world.

Their wordsIt was achieved almost entirely through higher crop yields per hectare.
Our reading
Long-distance food transport is what stops a local harvest failure from becoming a famine.

Their wordsBut without long-distance transport, many more would starve.
Our reading
A third of humanity already cannot afford a healthy diet, which is why food has to get cheaper rather than dearer.

Their wordsUsing this definition, 3 billion people – over one-third of the global population – cannot afford a healthy diet.
Our reading
Making food more expensive is not a way to fix the food system, because higher food prices fall hardest on the poorest people.

Their wordsBut while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it.
Our reading
Local self-provisioning cannot feed the world, because most people do not live within reach of enough fertile land.

Their wordsThey show that, while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.

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