Some people like to blame farmers and agriculture for most of the world’s problems – no, really! These folks start from the rise of city-states, the creation of economic and social hierarchies and the resulting oppression, and tie agriculture to the degradation of the environment, warfare and overpopulation. While there may be a small grain of truth in some of this (it is true that farming is the starting point of a high human population) it is a simplistic analysis of a great many complex variables.

Sure, farming starts us on the road to a big population – but consider that it took well over 100,000 years for the world's human population to reach one billion, which happened right around the year 1804, despite the fact that agriculture had been around for at least 10,000 years. Industrialization, not agriculture, is what makes genuinely huge (and environmentally destructive) populations possible.

Today, between 70 and 80 million new humans are added to the net population each year, mostly in regions of the world least able to support them with local resources. For the past several decades, countries in these regions have been struggling to industrialize and catch up with the "modern" nations of the world. It the process, they have de-prioritized agriculture, taking millions of acres out of production in order to build factories and cities. In fact, the portion of the world's GDP that is agriculturally based has dropped by half in the last fifty years, as more developing countries shift their economies to services, resource extraction, and industry.

Yet, despite real food problems in many areas of the world, starvation is no more a threat now than it was fifty years ago – less, in fact. This is because farmers have adopted new techniques and technologies, many as part of Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution”, that have massively expanded outputs while allowing fewer and fewer people to work in agriculture. Ever more output from ever smaller inputs - score one for technology!

However, it doesn't take a genius or an advanced degree in social and economic sciences to see the possibility of eventual tragic consequences. When a tiny fraction of the world’s people produce a huge fraction of the world’s food in an industrialized fashion, the potential for a global agricultural collapse becomes much higher, because all the eggs are in one technological basket.

Those risks are likely to grow worse as time goes on, in large part because people in poorer areas of the world (especially southeast Asia) are growing wealthier and adjusting their traditional diets in favor a more meat-heavy Westernized nutritional regime. (For example, beef consumption in China has increased eightfold in the last thirty years – both because the Chinese are growing wealthier and can thus afford more meat anyway, and also because patterns of consumer preferences are shifting to make beef a more popular choice.)

In some ways this is wonderful because people are living better – but at the same time, it represents a huge strain on the ecology and our food delivery system. Food for thought – and a balancing act that I will continue to address here.