In The Times, Tim Worstall takes to task a British environmentalist-turned-aspiring-Tory-politician (Zac Goldsmith) whose whose opinions about agriculture and farming were published prominently in The Times yesterday. Goldsmith and other European pundits seem to be some of the few who dare to lament that food prices for consumers are decreasing.

The direct benefits of modern agricultural technologies to humanity and the environment in the 20th century have been elucidated in numerous scholarly articles on agriculture by by Indur Goklany. For instance:

If agricultural-technology development had been frozen in 1961, we estimate, using data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (see FAOSTAT 2003: apps.fao.org), that cropland would have had to increase from its present 11% to some 25% of the planetary surface to produce the same amount of food now.(Nature, vol 423, p.115)