Food is poised to get a lot more expensive, but it doesn’t have to

By Evan Fraser, University of Guelph

and Lenore Newman, University of The Fraser Valley

Guelph / Abbotsford, Canada, June 24 (The Conversation) With the pandemic behind us, people everywhere are facing punitive housing costs and stagnating wages. In the supermarket, too, consumers are faced with rising food prices, a sobering reminder that good food costs too much for too many.

Consumers are not used to expensive food. For the past several years, most North Americans have typically spent about 10 percent of household income on living. In 1900 (when housing was much more affordable), food costs were 42 percent of income in the United States.

By 1950, new agricultural technologies had boosted production and helped bring costs down to 30 percent, but profits were only just beginning. By 1960 that number had dropped to 18 percent and has been largely on the decline since then.

With inflation soaring, today we must think about what we can do to ensure that the cost of healthy eating stays within reach. There are two broad approaches. The first is poverty reduction. The second is to reduce the cost of food.

Both approaches are necessary, but we’ll focus on the latter: how to keep food costs down. In particular, we believe that with the right strategies, healthy foods may also be cheaper than ever in the relatively near future. The key will be technology and politics. For the doubters, and we know there are many of them, consider the following example.

40 year old bet

In 1980 an economist made a bet against an ecologist.

Julian Simon, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, bet Paul Ehrlich, an ecologist at Stanford University, that raw material costs would fall over the decade. Ehrlich chose a number of raw materials and the two agreed to meet again on September 29, 1990. When prices rose (a sign of scarcity) Ehrlich won. But if they fell (a sign of plenty) Simon would gain the upper hand.

The reason for the bet was based on each man’s worldview. Simon was a strong believer that innovation and technology allow us to push the limits of growth. Ehrlich observed the world’s environmental problems, arguing that the result of population growth would be famine, scarcity, and ruin.

Forty years later, with the specter of inflation coupled with climate change, a similar debate arises. We want to keep developing our idea, which is more in line with Simon’s optimism. We believe that technology could actually make healthy foods cheaper – radically cheaper – in the next 20 years, as innovations offer many tools to overcome some of the problems caused by resource scarcity.

How can we do that?

Today, a wave of technological innovation is sweeping across food and farming systems. Better quality seeds are helping farmers around the world stay productive during droughts.

Intelligent tractors, new platforms for “green chemistry” and nanotechnology promise that farmers will achieve record harvests in the near future and only apply a fraction of the previous fertilizers and pesticides.

Cellular agriculture, where animal proteins are produced in bioreactors or fermentation tanks, will produce an enormous amount of protein.

And extraordinary improvements in artificial lighting and automation suggest that greenhouses and vertical farms close to consumers will soon be able to produce fruit and vegetables at low cost.

“Good cheap” versus “bad cheap”

But before we get too carried away, there is one important nuance. If food is cheap because the environment is being exploited, or farm workers and livestock are badly treated, cheap food will not solve problems.

Even if cheap food is inferior and unhealthy, that doesn’t help either. When it comes to cheap food, you have to distinguish between “good cheap” and “bad cheap”.

To make sure we land on the right side of this equation, politics comes into play. Government regulations need to price things like greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution so that farmers who care about the environment are rewarded.

Animal welfare must also be protected and work must be adequately rewarded (both in agriculture and in the economy as a whole). If we take the right action, the technologies that are opening up new avenues for us to produce food really have the potential to lower the cost of healthy, sustainable and affordable nutrition. Good food doesn’t have to cost the world.

Who won the bet?

The economist won the bet against the ecologist. All of the resources Ehrlich identified fell in price in the 1980s. Simon raved about the role of ingenuity and innovation. Ehrlich grumbled that he had made a bad choice and a 1990 recession artificially dampened prices.

Both academics were partly right and partly wrong. Ehrlich underestimated the innovation that Simon celebrated. But Simon was not aware of the importance of a strong work and environmental protection policy.

If we look at the 21st century, a century that threatens both massive disruption and huge innovation, we need two things.

First, we need to use the technology that can help us change the way we make food. And we must never forget the importance of public order to ensure a fair price for things like biodiversity, climate change, human labor and animal welfare.

If we adopt these two principles, there is a very real chance that we can bring down the price of healthy food production without destroying the ecosystems on which we all depend for life. (The conversation) NSA

Disclaimer: – This story was not edited by Outlook staff and is automatically generated from news agency feeds. Source: PTI

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source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/food-is-poised-to-get-a-lot-more-expensive-but-it-doesnt-have-to/