AGRICULTURE

Although the share of agriculture in world GDP continues to fall this trend masks the sectors importance, in large part because we have yet to develop a synthetic substitute for food. Synthetics have eroded agriculture’s share of industrial output such as textiles. But the world relies on an increasing supply of food to feed the world’s growing population. As the world’s population heads towards 7 billion (37% in China and India) a new set of challenges are emerging: environmental sustainability; biodiversity; climate change; and now the incentive to switch from food to industrial crops for energy as oil prices move ever higher. It all seems to foreshadow a jump in food prices, perhaps a permanent jump.

For a few centuries now agriculture has managed continuous improvements in productivity to feed a seemingly ever growing population. Much of this productivity growth is due to new technology and structural transformation that has enabled fewer people to produce the food for a growing population. But this transformation has also released people to work in the industrial sector and services. That’s a few of the reasons agriculture is not just important, it’s a critical sector in not just survival, but also growth and prosperity