Over the course of the food crisis, various folks have used the skyrocketing price of grains to argue for a return to decentralized, local agriculture. Economist Paul Collier, however, terms this simple "agricultural romanticism," and says the long-term solution to the food crisis is simple: We need to produce more food. And that means embracing industrial agriculture. "Unfortunately," he admits, "large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies." On the other hand, the UN's recent report on agriculture came to the opposite conclusion, and argues that "The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse." Complicated stuff. The only fair way to resolve the dispute, I'd argue, is through some sort of pie eating contest.
