[politician]

"Deer: Predation or Starvation" [1], is an exercise many may remember from high school biology class.

In the exercise, the implicit goal is for students to recognize that the deer population shrinkage was a good and natural outcome leading to balance and that balance is good.

There are various problems with the exercise though; for example, we only see a few years of "balance" with the implication that it continues forever.

Replace wolves with food costs, and deer with humans. We would expect the Industrial Agra crowd to be "pro deer", and the Alternate Agra crowd to be "pro balance" while Industrial Agra itself is "pro wolf".

I find it interesting that if you're interested in rising human populations, then you're coupled to rising food prices no matter what. In other words, consumption of organics is non-linearly related to rising food prices and orthogonal to morality.

[1] http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/predator_prey_graphi...

[pistle]

Big agra has been able to shrink the cost per calorie at a rate which has kept food costs in check, so I'm not sure I can allow the assumption of increased costs being a given. We can talk portion of costs, relative costs, or per capita... there could be advances that enable a new green revolution... if you would just pray at the altar of big agra and wear your nitrate and phosphate filters according to the directions. :)