Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do.

Ecclesiastes 9:7

 The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

Thomas Malthus

I   Introduction

The story of human evolution is a story of food. This evolution has carried humanity far beyond its ‘natural’ constraints, allowing vast populations to be supported by equally immense production systems. Unsurprisingly, a preoccupation with the perceived limits to producing food for a growing population has been a longstanding and pertinent cause for anxiety. Yet centuries of doomsaying has not been vindicated because production has continued to outpace population growth. Today, at the peak of our technical competence, the real dilemma no longer seems to be about whether we can, but whether we should continue to increase food production.

Over the past fifty years the rapid expansion in both population and food production has been remarkable, but not without consequence. The ecological damage, ethical compromise and inequalities weathered to produce enough food for our current population of 7.4 billion people foreshadows what may need to be sacrificed to support the 10 billion of the next fifty years. Can the urgency of this challenge render irrelevant the numerous concerns surrounding how this goal should be realised? Or are we better off limiting production and letting food shortages takes their horrific toll?

Thankfully, this quandary should remain hypothetical. The rising population does not impose a binary choice between producing enough food on the one hand or preserving our essential values and environment on the other.  Food production is not just compatible with these issues; it is deeply dependent on them. This essay demonstrates this through two propositions. First, that over prioritising production destroys the normative rationale for producing more food in the first place, and second, that attempting to meet sufficient production is futile without considering essential issues beyond production alone.

II   Normative Functions of Food Production

Increasing food production is a tool used for achieving broader normative purposes – it is not a goal pursued for its own sake. I propose these purposes derive from underlying equitable, ethical and social norms. If this is true, then the notion that those norms can be disregarded in single-minded pursuit of production becomes problematic. Adopting such a singular focus poses a high probability that the original purposive rationale for increasing production will be frustrated. The pursuit of universal human value and social preservation are two salient justifications for increasing food production, analysis of which reveals the contradictory logic of considering their normative underpinnings as irrelevant in favour of prioritising production.

A   Universal Human Value

Recognition of universal human value is so established as a normative purpose for increasing food output it almost seems axiomatic. A right to life, including access to food, features within even the narrowest philosophical articulations of human rights and is enshrined within international rights frameworks.[1] Equity of access to basic subsistence is at the heart of the desire to end hunger, and as the population grows, equitable concerns motivate increasing production to ensure there is enough food for everyone – failure to do so would be considered monstrous.  It is, therefore, quite absurd to claim the urgency to produce more food is now so pressing that equity should be rendered irrelevant when the foundation of that urgency is equity itself.

If avoiding hunger in our growing population is why producing sufficient food is urgent and essential, a singular production focus is unlikely to achieve this.  Although classical economic perspectives argued prioritising production would be the best mechanism to feed the population,[2] hunger is rarely a result of insufficient outputs. The sense of moral failure in the face of modern famine arises because total production comfortably exceeds global requirements by around fifty per cent.[3] Aggregate food supply is not apportioned equally through a population;[4] it is divided unequally along geographical and economic contours. Malnourishment and obesity are two of the most serious – and seemingly incongruous – global health challenges, aptly representing the perverse consequences of prioritising production while blind to equity. Further, irrespective of how high production may rise, the socio-political factors that drive the worst famines would remain