How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

Between 1960 and 2010, the acreage of land needed to produce a given quantity of food has declined by about 65 per cent. Had this not happened, pretty well every acre of forest, wetland and nature reserve in the world would have been cultivated or grazed, and the Amazon rain forest would have been far more severely destroyed. As it is, the acreage of wild land and nature reserves is steadily increasing, while forest cover has stopped declining and in many places is now increasing, so that overall there has been a 7 per cent increase in tree cover since 1982. By the middle of the current century, the world will be feeding nine billion people from a smaller area of land than it fed three billion from in 1950. Moreover, recent studies have concluded that – for a given yield of food – intensive agriculture not only uses less land but produces fewer pollutants, causes less soil loss and consumes less water than organic or extensive systems.