Our irrigation water comes from large reservoirs in the Wyoming mountains. The snow amount was not enough so we have been cut back on the amount of water allowed. We have been getting rain finally and that is helping if it keeps up and no hail.

I am hearing stories an abysmal wheat harvest in Texas and Oklahoma.

Not good.

"A Mr. Malthus is on the line for you..."

Does food create people?
Or do people create food?

He keeps calling.

"This time it's really going to happen!"

Comforting thought, that...

So far... yes.

"Persistently wrong, but never in doubt" is his M.O. - but he can't avoid the embarrassment of centuries of error by claiming that he can't be wrong forever.

Malthusians perpetually see the end of civilization right around the next corner... without ever coming to grips with the fact that they have been wrong over and over and over again. It's always "this time it's different"

Brown has been making these predictions for several decades now. They will eventually come true, but we don't know whether that's ten years from now... or a hundred... or a thousand or more. As with my title, the fact that it will eventually happen does not mean that the predictions are based in fact.

"Rice yields in Japan have not increased for 17 years"

Japan's aging (and shrinking) population demands less rice each year... and their diet continues to add more breads. Add to this the fact that Japan has a WTO obligation to import hundreds of thousands of tons of rice each year and it's clear that there isn't any economic reason why rice yields would grow. So we can't take a plateu in such yields to mean that yields can't increase.

When the question is whether or not to believe the boy who cried wolf (and adjust global public policy to accomodate that belief), it isn't sufficient to say that the wolf could come at some point in the future.

The article makes it clear that this warning is based upon data from multiple countries producing multiple crops, not just one that may or may not have easy cultural or economic explanations behind it.

Also, while global per-capita consumption of rice has flattened in the past decade or so, the rise in global population has kept the global demand for exportable rice high. The same is true of Europe's wheat markets.

And finally, I don't see any mention of the role of climate change being mentioned in the OP. Most of the major yield improvements we've seen in plant breeding in recent years have come from breeding plants to produce decent yields in the face of droughts, hot weather or flooding that we didn't experience as frequently in years past.

We're already playing the Red Queen's Race, but many haven't noticed it yet.

Production in individual countries is impacted by government policies (import restrictions/etc), alternatives, and prices.

The constant blind spot for malthusians is that economics always plays a role. They see a plateu (in oil production, food production, whatever) and assume that it's an unalterable contraint. They don't see supply and demand and the impact of prices... they see supply (and again assume that it's a capacity cap).

The article makes it clear that this warning is based upon data from multiple countries producing multiple crops, not just one that may or may not have easy cultural or economic explanations behind it.

Those two statements are seperated by only a comma... but they don't go together. Multiple countries and multiple crops does not mean that there isn't an economic explanation behind it. This is because (as above), plateaus in production in one area are not the same thing as plateaus in the "capacity to grow food". The underlying assumption is "of course they're producing as much as they can... so any decline (or decline in the rate of growth) must mean that they can't product any more"

Of course it means no such thing.

The only time you could say that would be if global prices were out of control, were expected to remain there long-term, and supply still couldn't increase after enough cycles that it should otherwise be able to.