Dear editor,

This letter is in response to a Nov. 14 article, “Two faces of food insecurity.”

The story says that “the combination of climate change-related disasters, more people to feed and shrinking farmland sounds like a doomsday scenario.”

Yet, while the recent floods in Thailand and the birth of the world’s 7 billionth person made for dramatic news stories, there is little reason to believe that they are signs of a looming apocalypse.

Since at least the time of Norman Borlaug, the so-called “Father of the Green Revolution,” famine has ceased to be a product of weather and has come instead to be the fault of autocrats like Kim Jong-il and Robert Mugabe, who have each taken once-fertile breadbaskets and turned them into wastelands of hunger.

By contrast, starvation has long since ceased to be a problem in South Korea, which when bad weather strikes, can simply import food from abroad. Food security, then, comes not from self-sufficiency but from openness to world markets.

And despite the world’s growing population (and occasional price spikes), real commodity prices have actually fallen about 1 percent per year for over a century. The world is not, in short, running out of minerals, fuel, or food. If anything, humans appear to be growing ever more efficient at producing their victuals.

Consider that, taken as a whole, in 2005 twice as much grain was produced from the same acreage as in 1968. As logical economics would predict, humans become more efficient at using a resource as that resource becomes scarcer.

So let’s try to be optimistic for a moment: for the past 200 years, even as populations have increased and as natural disasters have come and gone, human standards of living have increased at unprecedented rates around the world. Why surrender to pessimism now?