Food is perhaps the most important single resource for humanity, since our very existence depends on it. It is a renewable resource, but still a scarce resource, potentially under pressure from the increasing population.

Lester Brown from Worldwatch Institute has throughout the last 30 years of population increase claimed that agricultural production could no longer keep up and that now prices would start increasing. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, this has not happened. In the 1998 edition of The State of the World, Figure 48 was produced as evidence. Most people would probably see a general downwards tendency undermining the previous predictions of crises and price hikes. But instead the data are used to prove that prices are turning and now on their way up: