> The amount of land under cultivation in the Andes is still a fraction of what it once was.
And yet I haven’t heard of famines in the past few years – which, given Europe’s history before ‘modern technology’ came along, should happen every now and then with the older methods.
Certainly modern agriculture does have some drawbacks, and with an appropriate set of priorities, you can probably claim that it is worse than what we had 200 years ago, but it works surprisingly well at feeding seven billion people while at the same time only requiring a tiny fraction of said seven billion people to actually be employed in agriculture.
And yet I haven’t heard of famines in the past few years – which, given Europe’s history before ‘modern technology’ came along, should happen every now and then with the older methods.
Certainly modern agriculture does have some drawbacks, and with an appropriate set of priorities, you can probably claim that it is worse than what we had 200 years ago, but it works surprisingly well at feeding seven billion people while at the same time only requiring a tiny fraction of said seven billion people to actually be employed in agriculture.