The NY Times 27 Years Ago, and Agriculture Now

Here's an agriculture story from 1981, hat tip to Info Farm, the National Agricultural Library's blog, for alerting me to the NYTimes categorization of stories from its archive since 1981. It's a downbeat article, seeing the end of the green revolution:

"agricultural economists who specialize in world food production,[say] there will be no dramatic leaps in food yields. Meanwhile, the rate at which more food is produced actually has been declining - while the world's population is increasing by 70 million people each year. Worldwide, the margin between these two factors is discouragingly narrow. In Africa it has already disappeared and the increase in the amount of food grown each year, despite the gains from the green revolution, is less than the annual population increase."

It's because I remember such stories (and even worse ones from the 1950's) that I appreciate the accomplishments of industrial agriculture, which was able, over the next quarter century, to improve the average diets of the world's populace even though the population increased by 2 billion.