[FooHentai]

>At least in the US, the proportion of land needed to produce food is steadily declining.

As an aside, I wonder how much more vulnerable this makes the food supply to shocks, coupled with the increased supply chain length and how many additional points of failure that introduces.

Not necessarily in terms of the frequency of those shocks increasing, rather the compounded impact of those shocks given the number of people being supported by smaller agricultural bases.

[ArkyBeagle]

It all seems rather unlikely. There are all sorts of shocks, all the time in agricultural production but we have a hybrid system composed of subsidies ( that cause pretty significant overproduction ) and derivatives that lay off price risk. SFAIK, these are now deeply entangled.

It hardly perfect, but it's been polished and debugged over decades. The film "King Corn" does a good job of a layman's exposition of at least the subsidy system.