Sir

Your “Food and the Future” Insight1 discusses problems of and prospects for agriculture. In the overview article, Anthony Trewavas (pages 668–670 of ref. 1) argues that agricultural technologies have averted and will continue to avert malthusian crises in which the human population exceeds its food supply. Trewavas writes: “The lessons of history are clear. Successive lurches in population number have driven the development of new agricultural technologies designed to provide food for growing populations.”

There are, however, other perspectives. An alternative analysis2 shows that the development of new agricultural technologies has been driven by increasing corporatization and economic integration of agricultural processes and products, particularly in the twentieth century when the most spectacular increase in human population size occurred. During this time, famine resulted not from a global or even (according to some perspectives) local shortage of food3,4,5, but from poverty and lack of political power among starving people.

Trewavas discusses concerns about how the projected nine billion people that will inhabit the Earth later this century will be fed. Even today's food supply would suffice if cultural preferences could be changed to reduce meat consumption substantially. This change could, in principle, free more than 40% of the world's grain to feed people rather than livestock6. But feeding people receives a lower priority in the current food system than does the profit to be made from the global spread of luxury diets — most of which have deleterious effects on both human and ecosystem health7.

We require agricultural practices that are more hospitable to native biodiversity than are the industrial methods that prevail today8. The three challenges of agriculture are: to feed everyone well; to safeguard biodiversity; and to provide a decent living for those who produce food. These goals are neither incompatible nor imaginary. From urban gardens in Cuba, to shade-coffee farms in Mexico, to grass-fed beef from Minnesota, to community- supported agriculture supplying food to downtown New Yorkers — some ecologically and economically innovative farmers and consumers are attempting to reshape the food system to emphasize sustainability over production.