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Farr, Marigo

Community Development and Applied Economics

2013

MS

Agriculture is both the source of human life and one of the greatest threats to all life - a major cause of pollution, resource depletion, and climate change. But the global population is growing, and will continue to put pressure on ecosystems to feed more and more people. This is a predicament in which there are no acceptable tradeoffs -- the planet must adequately and equitably feed a growing population expected to peak at 9 billion, and life-supporting ecosystems cannot be pushed beyond their limits.
This research analyzes supply and demand for food in the presence of ecological thresholds that food systems threaten to cross, and physiological thresholds of malnutrition and starvation faced by a billion consumers in danger of falling off the demand curve. The goal is to offer an alternative representation of supply and demand for food that better illustrates the implications of ecological costs and unequal distribution of wealth. Drawing on the concept of ecological thresholds and concepts from ecological economics, this paper presents multiple representations of supply and demand for food that account for planetary boundaries and the inequitable distribution of food supply.
These supply and demand graphs demonstrate that for multiple planetary boundaries, a sustainable supply of food does not meet the minimum dally energy required by a population of near 7 billion people. In addition, I present alternative scenarios for redistribution of food and mitigation of the food system's impact on planetary boundaries.