MALTHUS LIVES FOREVER IN WASHINGTON, D.C. In 1982, William Hudson and I responded to an article that Lester Brown had written about the future of the world's food supplies. Here follow major chunks of that response, unchanged except for the inclusion of updated graphs. It is important that everything said then is as true now as it was then, and that the extensions of the graphs since then confirm our predictions completely. In contrast, Brown's forecasting record was a hundred percent wrong then and it is a hundred percent wrong now. Yet as we shall see, he continues to say the same things now that he said then - and the press continues to report his forecasts with complete credulity, without recognizing that every reputable agricultural economist disagrees with Brown. *** As suggested by the title of his January-February, 1982, article in Challenge magazine, "Global Food Prospects: Shadow of Malthus," Lester R. Brown could hardly be more pessimistic about the world's food future. He writes: "The period of global food security is over ... the worldwide effort to expand food production is losing momentum ... world food supplies are tightening and the slim margin between food production and population growth continues to narrow."[1] We think it likely, however, that the events of the future will be exactly the opposite of what Brown predicts. If historical trends continue, the food situation will improve rather than worsen. We so predict because, in our interpretation, the data on past trends show quite a different picture from what Brown says they show; his forecasts are based on the wrong empirical premises, we judge. We shall try to present enough data for you to make up your own mind about whose predictions are better founded. And we shall refer back to Brown's earlier forecasts over almost two decades which, we believe, show that his track record has been very poor. Trends in Total World Grain Production Brown wrote (in 1982) that, "Since 1971, gains in output have barely kept pace with population growth; production per person has fluctuated widely but shown little real increase." The period between the then-peak year of 1971 and the "unusually poor harvest" (Brown's words) in 1980 enabled Brown's words to be technically true. Now look at the period between 1971 and 1980 in Figure 1, which displays Brown's own graph (produced in 1994) of the long-run data for world grain production per capita (kilograms). Why should one have compared, as Brown did in 1982, just the past decade? Only such a pick-and-choose comparison was consistent with Brown's gloomy assessment. By almost anyone's statistical or eyeball examination, these data - even when standing in 1982 - show a continued trend toward more food per person. The improvement in the world food situation is seen to be even more impressive when we look at the data in Figure 1 on food production per person, which includes not only grains but also pulses, oilseeds (a very important element in the improvement), vegetables, and fruit (measured by value rather than by weight because of the need to add apples and soybeans). The gain since the data first became available after World War II has been extraordinary - and that, remember, is the per person increase, after population growth is allowed for. Figure 1 The Trend in Food Prices Brown forecast in 1982, and again in 1994, that "inevitably real food prices will rise. The question no longer seems to be whether they will rise but how much ... rising food prices may become a more or less permanent feature of the economic landscape in the years ahead...." Figures 2a and 2b, reproduced from an earlier book of Brown's, show how he constructs graphs to apparently prove his point. But the long-run trends in Figure 3 - concerning which Brown never shows the data - indicate long-run declines in prices. And it is true whether one measures prices relative to wages in the United States (the most important for U.S. citizens); as a proportion of total income (as with the wage comparison, the fall has been sharper in the now-rich countries, but has also been proceeding in the less developed world); or even relative to the prices of consumer goods, which themselves have been produced ever more cheaply over the years in terms of basic inputs. Figures 2 and 3 Why, then, does Brown think that food prices will rise in the future if they have been falling over the long haul? Perhaps more than anything else, Brown's forecasts of price rises and other unhappy future trends stem looking at short periods in the past, and choosing to examine those short series at moments when recent fluctuations have been sharply upwards. This short view leads Brown to conclude that there has been a turning point in history, and that the long-run past trends have been reversed. For example he says, "The long postwar period of food-price stability came to an end with the massive Soviet wheat purchase in 1972. The largest food-import deal in history, it signaled the beginning of a new era." Figure 2 shows how he portrayed the course of then-recent food prices; diagrams like that are enough to lead anyone to forecast doomsday. Examination of the long-run data in Figure 3, which shows what happened after the "beginning of a new era," yields a different impression. Despite all the positive trends in the past, Brown's forecast in Figure 1 is again downwards. The extension of actual observations tells exactly the same counterfactual story as his earlier graphs. He still points to recent apparent reversals in long-term trends and interprets them as permanent reversals. And his message is still treated by the press as if it is the gospel.[1] Trends in Soil Quality Brown sees the United States as exploiting its land for short-run profit, a "sacrifice of the land's long-term productivity ... mining soils in order to meet the ever growing demand." He writes about "a rate of soil erosion that is draining cropland of its fertility" in the United States and perhaps elsewhere. And the Worldwatch Institute, which he heads, has raised much public concern about this issue. Brown does not cite any supporting data. And the aggregate data we know of suggest that the opposite of ruination is happening. Nobel prize-winner Theodore Schultz recently wrote a long article debunking the present scares about soil erosion, following on a discussion by Leo V. Mayer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): "There have been two national soil surveys, the first in 1934 and the second in 1977. These surveys provide no support for the many dire pronouncements that soil erosion has been going from bad to worse. On the contrary, the proportion of our cropland with only slight erosion increased 47 percent in 1934 to 77 percent in 1977. To the extent that this evidence is reliable, it is a remarkable achievement. I know of no compelling reasons why this favorable secular tend cannot be continued." Three nationwide survey inventories of land use in 1958, 1967, and 1975 were conducted by the Soil Conservation Service. Their findings were that, "The quality of cropland has been improved by shifts in land use." A larger proportion of the cropland recently has been in the best "capability" classes, and a smaller proportion in the worst capability classes, than in earlier years. Schultz adds: "I am a bit harsh on those who are arguing erosion is catastrophic. It simply isn't true" (letter of March 25, 1982). Figure 4 compiles the data documenting that the U. S. farmland has become less rather than more eroded with the years. Figure 4 Productivity Trends As of 1978, Brown was writing in the New York Times that "per-acre yield of all cereals in the United States peaked in the early '70s." But his own data on corn yields from 1866 to the present in Figure 5 even as of 1978. Given this evidence that productivity continued to rise, Brown warned in 1982 about a "slower rate of yield increase." But even that was not supported by the data at the time Brown wrote. Agricultural economist Earl Swanson showed that yield had continued to rise at the same amount of yield per year; "Both corn and soybean yields in Illinois are still trending upward. Nothing in this study indicates that there is a leveling off, contrary to predictions a few years ago" (Swanson, 1980, p. 9). Overall U.S. agricultural productivity continues to increase. Figure 5 Trends in Food Storage Brown sees "growing food insecurity" in the trends of world stocks of food reserves. It should be useful to note that he has seen the situation in the same way for quite a while. In 1974 he titled a section of his book, In the Human Interest, "Growing Global Food Insecurity." And he presented a graph as shown in one of the lines Figure 6, which purports to show a combination of "global reserve stocks of grain" with the "grain production potential of idle cropland," combined as "world grain reserves." Figure 6 Just as did the data he showed in 1982, the 1974 graph showed (1) things apparently getting worse, and (2) the data for the first years charted as the best years, and the last years charted as the worst years. Yet the food situation has gotten better and more secure, rather than worse and less reliable. Why did Brown go wrong on this, and why do we think he is again headed in the same wrong direction? We (Bill Hudson and I) differ from Brown in that he looks only at an index combining idled farmland and food stocks, whereas we think food stocks alone are the more meaningful measure. Nevertheless, in our 1982 article, Hudson and I included both sorts of data - as far back as data exist - as seen (along with the graph Brown drew (see Figure 6). They reveal again that Brown shows a false picture by focusing on only selected years of data. And for completeness we show the data to the present in Figure 7, confirming that no bad long-run trend has been taking place. Figure 7 One may see in the food-storage data some long-run trend downward. But in our view this is a good sign, reflecting increased efficiency in worldwide grain storage, just as increased efficiency in industrial inventory control leads to lower inventories and less cost for keeping them. Trends in Idle U.S. Cropland Brown was writing in 1982 that "for the first time in a generation, there is no cropland idled under U.S. farm programs," a key statement of his analysis. But Figure 8 shows the vast amount of potential production, considered as a stock of food- producing capacity, that has continued to exist. Whom Should You Believe? At this point, the reader naturally wonders: Whom should I believe? You can rest assured that the data we offer here are the only data that exist, stemming from the United Nations and the USDA; there is no discrepancy between our data and Brown's, because Brown does not offer trend data pertaining to most of the issues in dispute. But Brown and the Worldwatch Institute are surely the most quoted sources on agricultural matters in the U.S. press, and they are the source of many of the current scary stories on soil erosion, urbanization of land, and world desertification. Is it even possible that they might be completely wrong? It should be illuminating to know that Brown has changed his mind completely on these matters, and not just once but twice. When he began his public career he argued that the food situation was frightening. Beginning in 1964, he worked with Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman as advisor on foreign agricultural policy and as Administrator of the International Development Service, the technical assistance arm of the Department. His point of view is captured in the opening line of a statement he prepared for the Secretary of Agriculture in 1965: "The less developed world is losing the capacity to feed itself." Then came the "new, high-yielding cereals and the men who developed them...I am fortunate to have had a front-row seat in this historic drama," he wrote. Brown was so impressed that his 1970 book, Seeds of Change, "tells the story of the turnaround on the food front." He became so optimistic that his main worry became whether the poor countries would be able to export all the food they would grow. "The pivotal question is whether the rich countries ... are prepared to open their internal markets to cereal exports from the poor countries." Then his view changed again--despite the fact that there had been no basic change in the food-supply trends of the previous two decades and more--and he again became exceedingly pessimistic, as we have seen. This was not the double-flip-flop of an amateur or casual observer. Brown has been deeply involved in food and agriculture as a professional since 1964. All honor to a person who can change his or her mind, and all admiration for a person who has the courage to reverse his or her public stand. But as Arthur Schlesinger wrote in another context: "How many times does an expert have to be wrong before he loses his reputation for expertise?" The View in 1995 The story of food and doomsayers described above could be re-written almost word for word with respect to every other natural resource, including energy. Every single trend in material scarcity shows increased availability and improvement in supplies, rather than the increased scarcity the doomsayers expect. The graphs of falling prices for every natural resource look similar to those shown above for food. **FOOTNOTES** [1]: Challenge, November/December 1982, pp. 40-47 (with William J. Hudson). [1]: For example, Brown appears with extraordinary frequency in The Washington Post, which I read as my daily newspaper, and frequently receives their support in editorials. To illustrate, from the period during which this is being written, the forecast of catastrophic food shortage in Brown's 1994 book, from which the chapter sent to authors of this symposium was extracted, was reported at length in the scientific "Findings" column on page 2 on August 14, 1994, under the title "Book Predicts Food Shortages"; reported again in the same section on August 25, 1994, headlined "Less Grain for China"; and then a long article by Brown entitled "How China Could Starve the World" was published starting in the right-hand column of page 1 of the Sunday "Outlook" section; these are just the items my casual clipping collected, and there surely have been still others. Such extended coverage, which would not be given to any scientific discovery short of a Newtonian or Einsteinian revolution, is commonplace for the output of Brown's Worldwatch Institute, even though all of it - as will be shown - has been wrong in every past utterance, and is completely opposed to the overwhelming consensus of agricultural economists. page 1 article5 brownles December 24, 1995