Food Systems and Agricultural Production

A food system encompasses everything involved in feeding a population: the growing, harvesting, processing, transporting, trading, and consuming of food, along with the inputs and waste at each stage. Geographers study how these systems have intensified and globalized, and they draw on long-standing theoretical debates about whether food production can keep pace with population.

The foundational debate is between Thomas Malthus and Ester Boserup. Writing in 1798, Malthus argued that population grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8) while food supply grows only arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4). He concluded that population would inevitably outstrip food, and that this imbalance would be corrected by "positive checks" that raise the death rate, such as famine, disease, and war, or by "preventive checks