Global Food Security and Supply
Rating: Wayne Martindale. 2015. Global Security and Food Supply. Wiley Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 118 69932 4 Malthus might have written about a time long past but his Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1798, still has a power to engage. The idea that, unchecked or unaided, population will always outstrip food supply is one of the fundamental tenets of population ecology but, some some reason, it never seems to apply to us. Malthus, in an age of […]
The Limits to Scarcity
Rating: Lyla Mehta (ed). 2010. The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation. Earthscan. ISBN 978 1 88407 542 3. The trouble with scarcity is that it’s taken as value neutral. It helps explain why supply and demand economics works as it does. Scarcity sets the price of something – with a finite supply, price varies to balance the equation. The problem is, scarcity is personal – someone loses out. If that’s a seat at a concert it’s just […]
