There is always something to be scared about in this world, and lots of people available to do the scaring.

If it isn't climate, it's peak oil, or overpopulation or…..

One regular scare that keep coming up by pretty much the same people wanting to scare us with climate change, is the food shortages. Will we have enough to feed everybody on the planet when the population increases and the climate changes and the oil ruins out?. Recent price hikes in basic foodstuffs have helped the food scare along.

Remember the first rules of economic theory is that market prices are set by the relationship between supply and demand. So when prices are high the supply is likely to be less than needed and vice versa.

So here is a graph of food prices corrected for inflation published at WUWT:

So what do you notice?

In real terms food prices are still relatively low in historical terms, despite the rises of the last few years.

Also there seems to be no relationship between food prices and temperature or population.

In fact it seems obvious that despite rising incomes in most parts of the world, and therefore rising expectations of food quality and quantity per head, food production has kept pace with demand. While prices have increased over the last few years, they are nowhere near the historical levels. Furthermore there seems to be no impact of rising oil prices, declining fertiliser availability or any of the other things that are supposed to be making life very unpleasant for people in the next few years.

I remember hearing on the ABC's Science Show a few months ago, a scientist pointing out that despite increasing global population there is a significant decline in the land area being used for agriculture and some is being returned to forestry. Why is this? Because we are getting smarter at producing more food per area.

Of course there is no guarantee that what happened in the past will continue in the future. Over the last 100 years or so, we have seen more and more people earning higher incomes and the proportion of income they spend on food declining even thought they are eating more. There is no reason to believe that this will not continue.

We live in a world which was designed by God to be a good place, not a place of starvation and lack. He has given us abundant resources and great intelligence to use those resources. Yes we can wreck everything if we are not careful, but graphs like this show that we are a long way from wrecking everything.