I'll assume the Econ 101 wasn't supposed to sound that condescending.
I submit that you're grossly incorrect about the elasticity of food demand. Maybe *you've* never chosen whether to eat or pay bills, but lots of people have, and the vast majority of people in the 1st world eat about twice their subsistence level, which at the very least demonstrates a lot of potential for elasticity--there's just never been a *reason* for the first world to ramp back food consumption, since this is where it's easy to distribute. (When the Soviet Union imported grain from the US in the 1970s and 1980s it was exclusively an infrastructure problem. They have enough arable land in Russia to feed pretty much the whole world.)
Beyond that, do you have any actual evidence that there will be a significant net loss of arability due to global climate change? There's a lot of fairly fertile soil that's trapped in permafrost right now, as opposed to the farmland that's been subjected to "modern methods" for 100 years or so, which tend to leave it relatively unsuitable and require lots of extra fertilization, because the government penalizes you for rotating crops.
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Date: 2007-08-12 08:56 pm (UTC)I submit that you're grossly incorrect about the elasticity of food demand. Maybe *you've* never chosen whether to eat or pay bills, but lots of people have, and the vast majority of people in the 1st world eat about twice their subsistence level, which at the very least demonstrates a lot of potential for elasticity--there's just never been a *reason* for the first world to ramp back food consumption, since this is where it's easy to distribute. (When the Soviet Union imported grain from the US in the 1970s and 1980s it was exclusively an infrastructure problem. They have enough arable land in Russia to feed pretty much the whole world.)
Beyond that, do you have any actual evidence that there will be a significant net loss of arability due to global climate change? There's a lot of fairly fertile soil that's trapped in permafrost right now, as opposed to the farmland that's been subjected to "modern methods" for 100 years or so, which tend to leave it relatively unsuitable and require lots of extra fertilization, because the government penalizes you for rotating crops.