The end of food inflation?

Improving efficiency in producing and converting edible calories when demand weakens could throw new social challenges

Topics
Gross domestic product | energy consumption | Ministry Of Water Resources

Neelkanth Mishra 

Neelkanth Mishra

Will food be the channel through which unprecedented monetary intervention may drive inflation? Will the earth run out of land and freshwater in feeding a growing human population? Cropland after all is just 12 per cent of the earth’s land area, and pastures another 25 per cent: Ratios mostly unchanged for the past three decades, with limited further scope for multi-cropping at scale.

In addition to the steady growth in human population, rising incomes shift diets towards more expensive calories, like from fats, which have a much larger land and freshwater footprint. To ...

First Published: Wed, July 01 2020. 00:10 IST