The Problem With George Monbiot

I find George deeply interesting: amusing even. His column today is  one of his standards: lots of calculations leading to the inevitable conclusion that we must be doing whatever it is that he desires. Sometimes such pieces are about how we need to have fewer people: at others, that everyone needs to be poorer, today it's about how we all need to eat less meat.

Now his basic set up is indeed true: there's an increasing population, a rise in meat eating globally and of course the (insane) biofuels nonsense. This is indeed putting pressure upon grain supplies. But then he delves into his calcuations and gives us this:

At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%.

OK, that's good.

The UN expects the population to rise to 9 billion by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain.

And thus the conclusion, we can't find that extra and thus meat production, which currently takes some 50% of the world's grain, must be sharply cut back.

But the problem with this, as with all of his calculations of this sort, is that he assumes static technology. Even if we leave aside the points that yields vary wildly around the world (US yields of wheat are three times the Ukraine's, for example) we do still need to add in the increase in yields as technology advances.

Historically, at least since the 1950s, this has been 1% per year at minimum. So, let us plug our current harvest of 2.1 billion tonnes into the compound interest calculator, grow it at 1% a year and then wait 42 years, to 2050. Umm, 3.1 billion tonnes of grain. So, without even insisting that current best practice is followed everywhere, purely and simply by making a straight line prediction of the technological advances of the past 58 years onto the next 42, we've not only found out necessary 325 million tonnes of grain, we've found three times that.

No, I don't believe it will work out exactly like that either, but as we've found with other complex matters (forecasting the inflation rate for example, or GDP growth) simply stating that next year will be like last year gives a pretty good fit to the actual results.

We can in fact put this the other way around. Anyone looking at the globe over the past two centuries and trying to make sense of it would have to note the increasing productivity (of all resources and industries, not just agriculture) over that time. Any rational projections into the future would need to either assume that such would continue: or explain, in detail, why that assumption should not hold.

Now it might be that it won't, but with the biotechnology revolution going on that certainly isn't the way I would bet. And any forecast that is made that ignores, rather than explains why productivity won't increase, simply isn't worth the paper it is printed upon.