Food crisis was predicted 200 years ago

Why is Malthus back in vogue?
The famously pessimistic 18th century English parson was the first to give scientific weight to the theory that unchecked population growth, combined with dwindling food supplies, would lead to "gigantic inevitable famine" and the extinction of mankind. His doomsday theory has invariably been invoked at times of real or imagined food shortages: from the 1840s Irish potato famine, to the food hyperinflation of the Seventies, to the current global alarm. Amid soaring food prices, riots in Haiti and Cairo and UN warnings that grain production must rise at least 50 per cent by 2030 if global hunger is to be averted, the consensus view that Malthus was wrong is once more being challenged.

When was Malthus’s theory debunked?
Almost as soon as he published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus argued that while population tends to increase in a geometrical ratio (2,4,8,16), food supplies increase only arithmetically (1,2,3,4). His mistake was to underestimate the Industrial Revolution's impact on agricultural productivity. That, combined with the opening up of the prairies in the New World and the rise of global trade, ensured an overall declining trend in world food prices that has lasted, with the odd blip, for two centuries, despite a sixfold increase in world population. Recent "neo-Malthusians" have been equally wrong-footed. The Club of Rome's 1972 treatise Limits to Growth, predicting mass famine by 2000, failed to anticipate a further "green revolution" in improved seed varieties and fertilisers in the Seventies and Eighties.

So why is food production failing so badly today?
It isn't – yet. Indeed, last year's bumper harvest saw global grain yields rise 5 per cent on the previous year, while rice production grew faster than total consumption. It is record prices, not food shortfalls per se, that have been causing havoc in countries reliant on imports. Wheat is up 150 per cent on the year; rice prices have trebled; maize, soya bean and meat prices are at all-time highs. In Britain, that has meant a nasty shock at the checkout. In poor countries, where a far bigger share of household income goes on food, it means real hardship and the threat of political instability.

What caused prices to soar?
Biofuels are often cited as the culprit – not least because they're a textbook example of the distorting