Only about 5% of the total cost goes to the farmers, and they are probably only about 5% of the sustainability issue.
Also, there is not enough food in the world to sustainably feed everyone. Current average diets for wealthy countries are driving climate change that is reducing the ability of less-developed countries to reasonably plan for crops and build their own sustainable food sources.
It's not necessarily more food that's the problem so much as sustainable and low-cost food.
Also, not all food problems can be blamed on western climate change that we will always need to account for, like literal deserts in North Africa.
People need to get over the idea of efficiency and centrally planned. These are not necessary qualities in order for humans to prosper.
Also note that planning and central planning aren't synonymous. A central planning process makes more efficient use of planning resources, but that doesn't help if the plans it produces are themselves inefficient because they're based on five-year-old statistics someone faked for their personal gain. So far, decentralized planning seems to be more robust overall, and the additional decision-making overhead is small compared to the cost of actually moving things around.
In that sense, it's not even the case that food distribution is currently unplanned; a great deal of effort goes into determining what quantities of various foods should be transported to warehouses all over the world in order to meet future demand. The problem is just that the planners are optimizing their own profit, and keeping the largest possible number of people well-fed isn't profit-maximizing currently.
Of course so can technological change, but it's not like efficiency is just some dumb irrelevancy.
People need to get over the idea that a free market is the solution to everything?
To be clear I’m not advocating centralized planning, or any specific planning method. I’m simply pointing out the free market has specifically failed at food distribution. Or at least, you're going to need to contort the definition of success to get the free market to meet it.
I just don't know what this means. Do we have enough food to feed 9B people for one day? For their whole lifetimes? I think the statistic is too vague to mean anything.
I maintain that we do not have processes in place to feed 9B people for their expected lifespan. If we used our current processes, food sources, diets, etc to feed 9B people, there would be so much disruption in the environment that the situation (being able to feed 9B people with existing food) would not last for the lifetime of those people.
Perhaps I am wrong - but climate predictions for year ~2100 are pretty intense wrt. changes in crop production and such. I just don't think "we have enough [food] now for 9B people".
Market forces will cause the types of food produced to be diverse enough to consist of a sane and reasonable approximation of a healthy diet, so I don't think that counterarguments along the lines of "we can feed 9B people if you think living off corn counts as feeding" apply here.
Modern agriculture is incredibly efficient. I am completely sure that if our modern techniques were fully implemented across the developing world, we would be able to feed another 4B people with ease.
I don't think that's all very clear to start with, but if that's what it means then I still don't consider it a useful metric; it's a local maxima that is reducing our ability to talk about long-term sustainable planning.
"Market forces" are largely ignoring the changing climate and food production's part in that. I don't think it's useful to only think about the daily food production and daily food requirements, since our real requirements are to plan to eat for a lifetime, not just one day at a time.
> Modern agriculture is incredibly efficient.
I think this is only true for narrow definitions of efficient. Modern agriculture is extremely inefficient in terms of pollution and sustainability.
If we implemented your idea of modern techniques globally I think we'd be in for a faster-than-expected change in climate that could put large swathes of that new infrastructure and land use at risk.
I mostly agree with this, but it's still a useful talking point to illustrate the failings of the current distribution of food to people who need food. In a more general context it's a disingenuous data point to bring up that does have long term sustainability issues. The issue of which food we're producing where is a different part of industrialized food production that's also worth time discussing for sure, but not my aim here. Even if we were to move to a better way of generating food for 9 billion people (say, radically via not farming meat on industrial scales) the problem of food distribution would remain. It certainly remains and grows in importance if our supply contracts. However, I don't think there's dire concerns that we should contract our food output, just many characteristics of how we farm our food.
The definition I was going for is this: 2% of the US is currently employed in the agriculture sector. The US is also a very large exporter of agricultural products. So each ag worker produces over 50x more food than they consume. I think that's pretty amazing.
I think targeting that definition of 'efficient' is a mistake, as it doesn't represent the true, whole-system consequences. The efficiency metric you quote just completely ignores the pollution from the industry, which is a part of the system you're studying.
Passing the sound barrier wouldn't have been so amazing if the plane blew up just after.