Boudreaux says no

The economist Don Boudreaux writes to the New York Times about the latest scare doing the rounds of the left-wing media.

You report that "Climate change will pose sharp risks to the world’s food supply in coming decades" ("Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies," Nov. 2) - with the premise that this impending calamity requires aggressive government curtailment or modification of industrial capitalist activities.

Color me skeptical. Wherever industrial capitalism has flourished over the past three centuries it has eliminated for the first time in human history the millennia-long curse of recurrent famines. Today, food is in short supply only in societies without market institutions and cut off from global trade. (The people suffering the greatest risk now of fatal shortages of food are true locavores, such as the North Koreans and the Somalis.) Relatedly, some of the worst famines in modern times - most notably, in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China - have been caused by the hubris of government officials curtailing market forces with command-and-control regulations.

The greatest risk to the world's food supply is not the industrial capitalist activities that environmentalists are keen to curtail. Rather, the greatest risk is the trust that many currently well-fed westerners blithely put in government to rein in the only force in human history that has proven successful at eliminating starvation: market-driven capitalism.

Looking at what government planning has done to the energy market in the UK, you can see his point.

Comments

[Entropi man]

diogenes

Both fossil fuel production and food production are approaching capacity limits.

Any supply side disruption produces a temporary shortage and a price spike.

As the limits get coser the disruptions and the spikes become more frequent until a permanent shortage situation develops.

Poor people and poor countries are priced out of the market first. For fossil fuels the price then rises as the remaining reserves are used until it becomes unobtainable at any price. For food, the price only drops when the demand (human population) drops to match supply.

[osseo]

" For food, the price only drops when the demand (human population) drops to match supply."

Eventually maybe - but over what timescale, Entropic M(althusi)an? Months, years, decades....centuries?... millennia?

Without a timescale for your prophecy, you can never be proved wrong. So far, technical advances have kept ahead of the prophets of doom.

[Clunking Fist]

"It matters here because the event discredits the notion that command economies alone lead to famine"
Command economies.. or command economics? The actions of the Raj in relation to Bengal are surely "command economics" in action, that is, the dictates of the government override the natural self-interest of the grain traders.

Annoyingly, I can't find a link to the letter. But in the Bish's excerpt, Don Boudreaux ACTUALLY says:
"some of the worst famines in modern times... have been caused by the hubris of government officials curtailing market forces with command-and-control regulations." No distinction there between countries or types of ECONOMIES. You and lapogus seemed to have read that into it. Confirmation bias...?