Current population of the world: 7.6 billion. It’s expected to be about 9 billion by 2050.

Some would propose a huge expansion of farming to address this. What a disastrous, unimaginative solution. Disastrous for the forests that Earth needs to breathe, habitats for our threatened species, and the future of pollution and antibiotic resistance. Unimaginative because, seriously, modern farming is so crummy, is that really the best way we can think of for producing food?

Modern farming is crummy? I thought it was supposed to save the world! It was, but instead it’s an engine to concentrate wealth at the top. A lot of our farmland produces inedible corn, used for ethanol or for High Fructose Corn Syrup or for cattle feed. The ethanol is mixed with petroleum products, extending the life of the extractive energy industries and cutting into the change to renewables. HFCS drives the processed food industry, which is wreaking habit with our health. Feeding cattle corn makes them sicker, since they are supposed to eat grass, so they need more antibiotics, which are then excreted into the environment, where they drive antibiotic resistance.

It’s sort of like big pharma. Could it be finding cures for rare diseases? It could, but instead it’s an engine to concentrate wealth at the top. The focus is on drugs that can sell widely. We need a new antibiotic that we save for extreme cases, which means it won’t be put into every cow, which means we aren’t going to get that, or any other low-use drug. We’ll get another sex drug for sure, those are popular. To add insult to injury, evidence shows high drug prices recoup many times their research and development costs, and are used to fuel marketing campaigns and anti-competitive acquisitions.

But there is good news here, at least on the food front. To quote from James Suzman’s Affluence and Abundance, published in 2017, We produce so much food that around 440 pounds of food per person currently alive ends up in landfills every year–enough again to adequately nourish another five billion or so of us. We don’t have a production problem, we have a distribution problem!

That we can solve. We are really good at shipping things.