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.
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.