Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 183

Giovanni Federico’s global economic history is the first of its kind, an ambitious, bullish survey of an industry that has confounded the forecasts of pessimists from Thomas Malthus to Paul Erlich. It summons an impressive range of data (75 tables in the text, plus a statistical appendix of 17 pages) and a huge specialist literature, mainly in English (46 pages of bibliography).

The book is very well organized. It begins with an account of how geography (encompassing soil and climate) made agriculture ‘different’. The diversity that is much of the sector’s charm for agricultural historians does not detain Federico, however. This is history cast very much in economic terms, in which arguments from first economic principles are generally favoured over the ‘anecdotal evidence’ of historians (e.g. pp. 4, 141, 186, 231). The core of the book analyzes the industry within a production function framework. This involves describing output trends (Chapter 3), and then explaining how inputs (Chapter 4), productivity growth (Chapter 5), technological progress (Chapter 6), institutional change (Chapter 8), the role of the state (Chapter 9) affected output over time. The final chapter offers fifteen stylized facts – some of them quite striking – and casts a provocative and optimistic look to the future.

No soundly-based estimate of global food production is possible before 1870. Federico reckons on the basis of admittedly flimsy evidence that output kept pace with population, but at consumption levels consistent with poor nutritional status. Thereafter, with the onset of national agricultural censuses, the data improve. Federico estimates that the annual rate of growth of world food output per head rose from 0.15 per cent in 1870–1938 to 0.56 per cent in 1961–2000. The earlier figure is derived from an expert reading of a range of sources, the later from data in the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s website (http://faostat.fao.org/). The achievement of late nineteenth-century agriculture was to keep pace with population growth, against widespread predictions to the contrary. Output per worker grew, albeit slowly, thanks mainly to additional inputs of capital and land. Price data are shown to broadly corroborate this story: the real price of food products tended to rise before 1870 but has fallen sharply since then.

Taken together, the percentage growth rates above imply an increase in the available food per capita of less than two-fifths between 1870 and 2000. The impact of such a relatively modest increase on life expectancy and physical size of homo sapiens is striking. Presumably the increase in output was matched or exceeded by the increase in nutritional content, although the issue is not broached. Artificial fertilizers, biological innovations, increased specialization, and the resilience and creativity of farmers (large and small) fended off the law of diminishing returns with ease. An attendant reduction in the impact of harvest fluctuations over time is implicit, though not discussed.

Throughout, Feeding the world bears witness to a historian’s conversion to the economic approach to the past. In the spirit of Douglas North, institutions tend not to matter in the long run, because they are adaptable. Federico concedes that a purely rational choice approach is, to an extent, ahistorical because it leaves much of what happens in the short run unaccounted for (p. 220). Federico’s 1800–2000 is a long time, however, even in history. In the spirit of Ronald Coase, property rights don’t matter insofar as they are enforceable. Thus traditionally contentious issues such as sharecropping, inheritance customs, and forms of ownership are by no means ignored, but they play secondary roles. This also means that the focus is much more on issues of efficiency and productivity than on the distributional issues that feature much larger in traditional accounts.

Federico’s reading of the past informs his relatively ‘upbeat’ outlook on the future. In common with most present-day students of agricultural economics and development economics, he is optimistic about agriculture’s capacity to deliver the goods and unconvinced by the many environmentalists and ecologists who worry about ‘sustainability’. Federico is probably right, but greater attention to the situation in Africa, which does not feature much here and is absent in the index, must temper confidence. In both Africa as a whole and in sub- Saharan Africa, the food supply has barely been keeping pace with population since 1960. Is Africa’s backwardness due to the ‘peculiarities of agriculture’, the inflexibility of its institutions, the persistently high rates of population growth, or the uniqueness of the African environment (p. 222)? The failure – so far – of desertification to wreak the havoc widely predicted in the 1970s and 1980s, and the decreasing incidence of famines of biblical proportion, are in tune with Federico’s themes of farmer resilience and institutional flexibility. Yet global warming poses a real threat, and Africa’s poor are probably more susceptible to its potential impact than those of any other continent. That Africa’s share of global population is predicted to reach 21.7 per cent by 2050 (according to the latest UN medium-range predictions) – compared to 8.8 percent in 1950 and 14 percent today – is no cause for complacency.

The range, stance, and clarity of this hugely impressive book make it ideally suited to classroom use at advanced undergraduate or graduate level. It deserves to be widely read, in university libraries and beyond.