The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World”
July 15, 2025
In a widely circulated op-ed for the New York Times, author Michael Grunwald laments that the phrase “‘industrial agriculture’ is “used to signify ‘bad,’ evoking toxic chemicals, monoculture crops, confined animals, the death of the small family farm and all kinds of images people don’t like to associate with their food.” Critics of this model, he argues, focus too narrowly on the problems of industrial farming without recognizing that agriculture has been transforming the planet for twelve thousand years. What the handwringers need to understand, he explains, is that “industrial agriculture in particular has one real upside: It produces enormous amounts of food on relatively modest amounts of land. And that will be agriculture’s most vital job in the coming decades. The world will need even more enormous amounts of food by 2050, about 50 percent more calories to adequately feed nearly 10 billion people.” The inconvenient truth, Grunwald opines, “is that factory farms are the best hope for producing the food we will need without obliterating what’s left of our natural treasures and vaporizing their carbon into the atmosphere.”1Michael Grunwald, “Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food,” New York Times, December 13, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/opinion/food-agriculture-factory-farms-climate-change.html. Max Roser, founder of the think tank Our World in Data, similarly suggests that “we can achieve a future without hunger and a future in which the planet’s wildlife rebounds if we can further increase the productivity of agricultural land.”2Max Roser, “Why is improving agricultural productivity crucial to ending global hunger and protecting the world’s wildlife?” Our World in Data, March 4, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-productivity-crucial.
While it has not always been couched in the language of sustainability, the preoccupation with “feeding the world” through increased agricultural productivity is not new; it has structured struggles over the food system (and tickled the imperialist imagination) for over two centuries. The core premise of this discourse is that the caloric needs of a growing population necessitate an agriculture oriented around ever-increasing yields. In this productivist frame, the remedy for global hunger is greater output, cheaper crops, and cheaper food.
Yet, as critics have repeatedly shown, there is no global stomach to which to deliver calories and no simple association between yield rates and food security.3See, for example: Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981), available at https://archive.org/details/povertyfamineses0000sena/mode/2up. Rather, hungry people access food through specific politics of distribution, rather than an anonymous global grain warehouse as the trope implies. In fact, increased productivity accounts for only a small share of hunger reduction—reducing malnutrition is more strongly associated with social and institutional factors such as improved access to clean water, sanitation, and gender-equitable education.4L. C. Smith, and L. Haddad, “Reducing Child Undernutrition: Past Drivers and Priorities for the Post-MDG era,” World Development 68 (2015):180–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.11.014.
If “feeding the world” has always been an impossibility, what explains the continued dominance of the feed-the-world concept in organizing agricultural and food policy? Why does this idea continue to seduce farmers, journalists, think tanks, foundations, businesses, and policymakers alike? The deeper truth is that “feeding the world” is not actually about combatting global hunger. Although plenty of well-intentioned people have taken up the mantra under the banner of liberal humanitarianism and plenty more have believed in the intrinsic social value of agricultural production, both the humanitarian frame and the productivist frame emerge from the old colonial-capitalist roots of economic and epistemic domination: a hubristic faith in progress, the patronization of a distant other in need of aid, and the justification of colonial control over land and labor. While the façade of feeding the world may take novel forms, the foundations of this discourse remain the same. And it is a discourse that has had real-world consequences: nothing less than remaking the purpose of producing food into securing profits instead of nourishing people and sustaining landscapes.
Through a historical, empirical, and conceptual critique of the feed-the-world myth, we argue that the productivist framework that underwrites it both enables capitalist extraction and undermines its purported aim of addressing hunger. Crucially, the feed-the-world trope is being reinvented through a logic of sustainability that functions to obstruct alternative approaches to the food system—including land sovereignty and agroecology—that challenge the colonial-capitalist relations upon which our current food system is built.
Feeding the Poor or Fearing the Poor?
The origins of “feed the world” date back to the English economist Thomas Malthus, who in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population theorized that natural rates of human reproduction, if left unchecked, would lead to exponential increases in the number of bodies on the planet. Agricultural production, by contrast, would only increase linearly; “the power of population,” he argued, is “indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” In order to prevent wider starvation, therefore, population had to be kept in check; and because the poor were simply incapable of exercising moral restraint, war and famine were regrettably necessary positive checks. “To act consistently, therefore,” he wrote, “we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operation of nature in producing this mortality.…Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.”5Thomas Malthus, An essay on the principle of population and other writings (London: Penguin UK, 1862 [2015]).
Malthus thus sealed class warfare into theories of global hunger and famine that have dominated for roughly two centuries. While their class project is less overt, boosters of industrial agriculture pick up where Malthus leaves off. Their basic premise is that Malthus was right about the population part, but didn’t anticipate the power of technology to transform global production. Tech-centered agriculture, for its advocates, allows society to overcome Malthus’s prophesied earthly limits, supercharging soils and seeds to meet population demand.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, new alliances between bankers, agribusiness, land grant universities, and large-scale farmers united under what sociologists dubbed “productivism,” the “doctrine that increased production is intrinsically socially desirable, and that all parties benefit from increased output.” Productivist approaches like the Green Revolution, however, have yet to provide any evidence of working to feed the world population adequately or stably.
By the early twentieth century, scientific breakthroughs in nitrogen fixation and chemical weaponry turned explosives and poisons from battlefields abroad into synthetic fertilizers and pesticides for farm fields at home. Joining militarism at the hip with industrial agriculture, wartime production also went to feed a new generation of seeds: “high-yielding varieties” bred to depend on heavy applications of nitrogen and water. These “Green Revolution” technologies also successfully anointed an anticommunist paradigm of postwar production, which the United States refined before delivering it to many Global South countries—beginning with Mexico, India, and the Philippines between the 1940s and ‘70s.6Raj Patel, “The Long Green Revolution,” Journal of Peasant Studies 40 , no. 1 (2012):1–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.719224. The seed-chemical-debt packages of the Green Revolution forever changed the economies, cultures, and landscapes of Indigenous and peasant farming, forcing many farmers to adopt monoculture practices instead of strengthening their native (and highly sustainable) diversified farming systems. Such interventions were deeply racist, as anthropologists have documented, ushering in high-yielding seeds to “improve” what US philanthropists, scientists, and policymakers viewed as primitive farming systems performed by poor people in their raw state of nature.7Lakshman Yapa, “What Are Improved Seeds? An Epistemology of the Green Revolution,” Economic Geography 69, no. 3 (1993): 254–73, https://doi.org/10.2307/143450; Aaron Eddens, “White Science and Indigenous Maize: The Racial Logics of the Green Revolution,” Journal of Peasant Studies 46, no. 3 (2019): 653–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1395857.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, new alliances between bankers, agribusiness, land grant universities, and large-scale farmers united under what sociologists dubbed “productivism,” the “doctrine that increased production is intrinsically socially desirable, and that all parties benefit from increased output.”8Frederick H Buttel, “Ever Since Hightower: The Politics of Agricultural Research Activism in the Molecular Age,” Agriculture and Human Values 22, no. 3 (2005): 275–83, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-005-6043-3.
Productivist approaches like the Green Revolution, however, have yet to provide any evidence of working to feed the world population adequately or stably. Decades of data from the World Health Organization, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the World Food Programme make this failure evident. Despite farms continuing to crank out calorie production that exceeds per capita nutritional requirements, the problem of hunger and food insecurity persists.9“Food balance sheets 2010–2022. Global, regional and country trends,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, June 19, 2024, https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights-detail/food-balance-sheets-2010-2022-global-regional-and-country-trends/en. According to the latest UN data, about 2.4 billion people (29.6 percent of the global population) were moderately or severely food insecure in 2022.10FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023: Urbanization, agrifood systems transformation and healthy diets across the rural–urban continuum (Rome, FAO, 2023), https://doi.org/10.4060/cc3017en. Global hunger is still far above prepandemic levels and was not on a clear downward trajectory even before 2020. The failure of excess yields to address global hunger has led institutions like the FAO engage to adopt frameworks that extend well beyond agricultural yields when addressing food security—frameworks that encompass not only availability, but also accessibility, adequacy, acceptability, sustainability and agency.11Paola Termine, ”Ensuring food security: why agency and sustainability matter,” CFS: Committee on World Food Security (fao.org), March 12, 2024, https://www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe/insights/news-insights/news-detail/ensuring-food-security–why-agency-and-sustainability-matter/en.
In addition to failing to feed the world adequately, productivism has also floundered ecologically. Mountains of scientific studies have documented industrial agriculture’s expansion of capital-intensive monocultures across the globe. The maintenance of these monocultures degrades soils, pollutes waterways and oceans, generates massive carbon emissions from land-clearing and fossil fuel use, and destroys wildlife through habitat disruption.12D. Tilman, “Global environmental impacts of agricultural expansion: the need for sustainable and efficient practices,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96, no. 11 (1999): 5995-6000, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.96.11.5995; IPES-Food (International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems), From uniformity to diversity: A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems (Brussels: iPES Food, 2016), http://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/UniformityToDiversity_FULL.pdf. It also undermines crop genetic diversity by displacing traditional, native, and Indigenous seeds systems, leading to less dietary diversity and a less resilient food system overall in times of crisis.
However, Green Revolution approaches did succeed in stoking the demand for alternatives. Communities around the world have resisted the imposition of commodified seeds and fertilizers; they have held fast to practices that regenerate ecological processes—like pollination and soil nutrient cycling—on-farm, rather than becoming compulsory customers of increasingly high-priced and polluting inputs. In fact, almost as soon as Green Revolution technologies touched down in places like Mexico and India, peasant and Indigenous movements responded by refortifying seed-saving systems, farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing, and practices of commoning land.13Steve Gliessman, “Agroecology: Growing the Roots of Resistance,” Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 37, no. 1 (2013): 19–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/10440046.2012.736927. At the same time, the scientific community has both meticulously documented the social and ecological harms of industrial agriculture and moved toward a wide array of alternatives, including organic, regenerative, and agroecological approaches.14Claire Kremen, Alastair Iles, and Chris Bacon, “Diversified farming systems: an agroecological, systems-based alternative to modern industrial agriculture,” Ecology and Society 17, no. 4 (2012): 44, http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05103-170444; HLPE (High Level Panel of Experts), Agroecological approaches and other innovations for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition. A report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security (Rome: CFS–HLPE, 2019), http://www.fao.org/3/ca5602en/ca5602en.pdf; John Reganold and Jonathan Wachter. “Organic agriculture in the twenty-first century.” Nature Plants 2, no. 2 (2016): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.221. Researchers increasingly call attention to the need to address power imbalances at the heart of the food system instead of prioritizing new techniques of production.15IPES-Food (International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems), Too big to feed: Exploring the impacts of mega-mergers, consolidation, and concentration of power in the agri-food sector (Brussels: iPES Food, 2017), http://www.ipes-food.org/images/Reports/Concentration_FullReport.pdf.
Feeding the World to Save the Planet?
The growing recognition that industrial agriculture fails to address hunger combined with the development of promising alternatives presents a threat to the status quo. In response agroindustrialists have come up with a new strategy with various monikers, including “sustainable intensification” and “climate-smart” or “ecomodern” agriculture. Irrespective of the designation adopted, these approaches all equate the intensification of production with sustainability. This identification rests on the claim that technology can intensify production allowing for similar yields on a smaller land footprint, thereby saving the planet and feeding the world. The core legitimization strategy at the center of this revised fantasy is a hypothesis known as land sparing. Land sparing asserts that an increase in production intensity meets the global demand for food with less land, therefore freeing space for carbon-sequestering ecosystems elsewhere.
The argument rests on a worldview that separates humanity from nature and implies an inevitable dematerialization of food production. As Max Roser claims, “as we protect the world’s environment, we also have to find ways to produce the food needed to end hunger and malnutrition. But…these two goals are no longer at odds with one another. For our ancestors they were at odds with one another: our ancestors had to take natural land and convert it into agricultural land if they wanted to produce more food. This is not the case for us today: we can produce more from less.”16Roser, “Why is improving agricultural productivity crucial to ending global hunger and producing the world’s wildlife?” According to the land sparing hypothesis, destabilizing rural livelihoods to overproduce cheap food has an ecological upside as the abandoned land freed up from extirpated farmers can somehow be returned to “nature.” In this view, one should celebrate rather than lament the loss of agrarian livelihoods. Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute explains in Foreign Policy: “Ultimately, improving the U.S. food system will require, first, appreciating it for the social, economic, and technological marvel that it is. It feeds 330 million Americans and many millions more around the world. It has liberated almost all of us from lives of hard agricultural labor and deep agrarian poverty. It has allowed forests to return across much of the United States while also sparing forests in many other parts of the world.”17Ted Nordhaus, “Big agriculture is best, ” Foreign Policy, April 18, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/18/big-agriculture-is-best/. Nordhaus, Roser, and Grunwald are far from idiosyncratic voices in this debate; the land-sparing argument has seen widespread uptake in international policy and practice. The Nature Conservancy, the World Resources Institute, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, and the World Bank, among others, all advance land-sparing logics in their work, effectively merging old Green Revolution institutions with conservation organizations in a well-funded network of research, advocacy, journalism, and policy.
This has far-reaching consequences for agriculture everywhere, but especially for Global South countries who’ve been made dependent on these institutions for loans, development aid, agricultural extension, conservation funding, and more. An influential 2018 report by WRI illustrates the point. Written for a wide audience of policymakers and publics, it portrays the challenge of creating a sustainable food future by 2050 as a simple formula: “How do we feed 10 billion? (We will need 56% more food) + Without using more land (We need to prevent agriculture from expanding to save an area of forests nearly 2X the size of India) + While lowering emissions? (We can lower emissions with innovative technology…like plant-based burgers.)”18Janet Ranganathan et al, “How to Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People by 2050, in 21 Charts.” World Resources Institute, December 15, 2018, https://www.wri.org/insights/how-sustainably-feed-10-billion-people-2050-21-charts, (part of a full report: Creating a Sustainable Food Future).
Agribusiness has also been quick to adopt this type of formula to justify their productivist practices. For example, Syngenta’s 2022 Environmental, Social and Governance Report states that “reducing the amount of arable land needed per unit of crop is key to feeding a growing population. Productivity gains allow leaving existing untouched land in its natural state.”19Syngenta AG group, ESG Report 2022 (Basel: Syngenta AG, 2023), https://www.syngenta.com/sites/default/files/sustainability/reporting-sustainability/Syngenta-AG-ESG-Report-2022.pdf. The “untouched land” in Syngenta’s PR revives the colonial imaginary of terra nullius while romanticizing intensive input-dependent monocultures as a sustainability marvel. This narrative entrenches a false binary between nature and farmland that ignores their interdependence. It’s also highly alluring to policymakers seeking “win wins” as it suggests that high yields in one place leads to habitat conservation in some (always anonymous) elsewhere.
Economically, while agricultural intensification is supposed to enable conserving habitat for biodiversity, increases in local production efficiency frequently do the exact opposite: increasing the expansion of farmland by making deforestation “economical.”
However, the story breaks down when subjected to scrutiny. On the environmental front, most global biodiversity does not exist in vast tracts of pristine wilderness, but is dispersed across fragmented rural landscapes. Ecological theory and empirical evidence show that most species survive not by staying in one place, but traversing between “islands” of habitat embedded in an ocean of agriculture.20Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer, “The agroecological matrix as alternative to the land-sparing/agriculture intensification model,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 13 (2010): 5786–91, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0905455107; Juan Pablo Ramírez-Delgado et al., “Matrix condition mediates the effects of habitat fragmentation on species extinction risk,” Nature Communications 13, no. 1(2022): 595, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28270-3. Yet not all agriculture is uniform. Ecological sacrifice zones, such as the pesticide-drenched monocultures of industrial agriculture, undermine the ability of wildlife to complete their journeys. Biodiversity, in other words, needs a healthy matrix of habitat between the islands, not a toxic moat that imperils population-level survival.
Economically, while agricultural intensification is supposed to enable conserving habitat for biodiversity, increases in local production efficiency frequently do the exact opposite: increasing the expansion of farmland by making deforestation “economical.”21Fernando F. Goulart et al., “Sparing or expanding? The effects of agricultural yields on farm expansion and deforestation in the tropics,” Biodiversity and Conservation 32 (2023): 1089–1104, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-022-02540-4. In order to deliver new waves of intensification, a de facto extensification occurs, as roads, infrastructure, water, and housing systems must accompany capital intensive farming that requires mechanization, seasonal labor, and complex regimes of fertilizer and pesticide applications. This paradox of efficiency is analogous to the observation that increased fuel efficiency leads to more cars on the road and more miles driven overall, as drivers believe they can travel further at lower cost.
Similarly, in pursuing higher yields, many countries now face crises of overproduction. Stockpiles of commodity meat and grains are expensive to maintain and market. Low prices and infrastructure constraints force farmers to dump (read: waste) their products, and gratuitous new markets (like biofuels) must be constructed to absorb oversupply. In an ironic twist, cheap food from United States oversupply often gets dumped into poor countries as “aid,” undercutting local producers and increasing poverty and malnutrition.
The Food System Is Not Algebra
This land-sparing variant of the feed-the-world myth may have some alluring new trappings, but it remains fundamentally implausible. The argument rests on a reductionist algebrification of the food system—claiming that, because of the resulting land efficiency, increasing production through industrial techniques is the inevitable sustainable pathway. It therefore celebrates landscapes like the nitrogen-soaked US Midwest and the Netherlands—biodiversity wastelands with polluted waters—as leaders of food systems sustainability. Once primarily trafficked by agricultural lobbyists, the myth now also intoxicates a new coalition of ecomodernists, abundance liberals, and techno-optimists, who embrace the Orwellian conclusion that agricultural intensification equals sustainability despite the scientific evidence to the contrary. Land sparing, as a repackaging of feed-the-world productivism, encourages us to believe that we must invest in all manner of yield-boosting technologies—from driverless tractors to petri dish meat—in order to “decouple human development from environmental impacts.”22John Asafu Adjaye et al., An Ecomodernist Manifesto (Berkeley CA: The Breakthrough Institute, 2015), https://thebreakthrough.org/ecomodernism. According to this plan, those who got us into this mess will be the ones to save us.
Of course, rural communities around the world know that the relation between producing more food and feeding more people doesn’t reduce to a simple calculation that divides the number of available calories by the number of bodies. Depending on the context, increasing production may have a positive effect on addressing hunger, or it may have no effect. More troubling, increasing production can lead increase hunger by exacerbating rural poverty. For example, the yield-boosting production introduced to India as part of the Green Revolution contributed to price collapse, indebtedness, and pest outbreaks as insects evolved resistance to heavy chemical applications. While larger-scale farmers in the wealthier regions like Punjab were able to stay ahead of falling prices, the majority could not, leading to mass urban migration.23Raj Patel, “The Long Green Revolution,” 1–63. Those hungry mouths found in cities across the globe? They are often former displaced farmers.
People authentically committed to ending hunger and stewarding biodiversity should rely on empirical evidence to understand the origins of hunger and its relation to the conditions of production. Land sparing has a logic, but one unsuited to feeding hungry people. Because it reduces the food system to a binary of yields on one side and acres required for agriculture on the other, much of the scientific community has largely abandoned land sparing as a useful concept to organize land-use policy.24Claire Kremen, “Reframing the land-sparing/land-sharing debate for biodiversity conservation,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1355, no. 1 (2015): 52–76, https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12845.
In places where land sparing has been implemented as policy, it has fueled the engines of extraction rather than prevented forest degradation. For example, in his book Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World, environmental geographer Gregory Thaler follows the implementation of land sparing policy in the Brazilian Amazon.25Gregory Thaler, Saving a rainforest and losing the world (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024).
In this case, NGOs, government agencies, and agribusiness collaborated from the early 2000s to around 2015 to intensify soy and cattle production on existing farmlands in the Cerrado and Amazon, claiming land sparing as the scientific rationale. They did so through a combination of creating new protected areas, regularizing land titles, enforcing forest rules, and funding sustainable initiatives. For a while, Brazil seemed to increase its yields while tempering the drive to further extract timber from its biodiverse forests. However, years of land sparing policy invited new agribusiness capital and modernized cattle and soy production techniques to forest frontiers. While a muscular industrial complex became even more efficient at exploiting habitats for profit, small farmers and Indigenous peoples did not evenly share in those spoils and, in many cases, were forced off their land. Although national conservation policies initially confined industrial actors within Brazil, they continued chasing surplus profits across the border in Bolivia, transforming forests there into soy and cattle fields. When the Bolsonaro administration later loosened forest conservation restrictions in the Brazilian Amazon, the soy and cattle enterprises quickly expanded production into forestland to further increase their profits.
Thus, the land sparer’s assumption that production and conservation policy are intrinsically connected proves to be a critical flaw. The case of Brazil demonstrates that forest policy can easily be reversed while agribusiness proliferates. It also illustrates leakage, with capital chasing profits globally to where conservation policies are laxest. Thaler’s lesson, in sum, is that we ought to be concerned about how capital—on a world-system scale—responds to efforts to shape the food system. Prioritizing intensive farming techniques in the name of forest conservation sharpens the tools of extraction and hastens agribusiness’ capacity to exploit without addressing the root causes of hunger. This is why Thaler calls land sparing an “alibi for ecocide.” While purporting to offer a “win-win” solution, in fact it offers agribusiness the dividends of surplus production while increasingly commodifiying nature with carbon offsets and biodiversity derivatives.
True Alternatives Emerge When “Feeding the World” Is Not the Priority
Seeing past the myopia of needing to “feed the world” reveals that agriculture can and should provide much more than only calories. Alternative principles like health, sense of place, relations to land, and care are more promising starting points to nurture the future of food.
Land-sparing advocates assume that organic or agroecological farming are underproductive, and cannot possibly meet the worlds’ caloric needs. Yet a careful look at the evidence reveals this is far from certain. Globally, small farms…have more wildlife species, greater crop diversity, and higher yields.
For example, agroecology is an alternative framework that seeks to analyze and transform food systems for a more holistic sense of sustainability and justice. It takes a place-based, contextual approach to food and farming and puts the interdependence of people and nature front and center, rather than trying to cleave them apart. It supports the fundamental redesign of farming systems based on ecological science and traditional knowledge to produce sufficient yields by enhancing interactions amongst all organisms—humans included—in the agroecosystem. And it advocates for a social and political program that puts the needs of local people before the whims of multinational corporations.
Farms that mimic the structure of native ecosystems can facilitate the journeys of wandering wildlife by serving as temporary refuges between habitat patches. Some agroecological practices, such as agroforestry, can also help draw down carbon and slow climate change. Agriculture benefits from such practices too, as many of the species that dance across the habitat matrix—beetles, birds, bats, bees, and many more—recycle nutrients, control pests, and pollinate crops. Through land sparing, we ironically lose out on these yield-enhancing services and replace them with industrial inputs, creating a vicious cycle of intensification and biodiversity loss.
Land-sparing advocates assume that organic or agroecological farming are underproductive, and cannot possibly meet the worlds’ caloric needs. Yet a careful look at the evidence reveals this is far from certain. Globally, small farms—which tend to be less capital intensive and managed with fewer inputs—have more wildlife species, greater crop diversity, and higher yields. For example, a recent meta-analysis presenting evidence from 118 studies from fifty-one countries and regions found that, contrary to popular belief, yield (as a measure of production per unit of land) is typically lower on larger farms: 79 percent of studies reported that smaller farms have higher yields.26Vincent Ricciardi et al., “Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms,” Nature Sustainability 4 (2021): 651–57, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00699-2. Moreover, another new review examined 24 studies in eleven countries across 2650 farms and found additional benefits from the greater diversity on smaller farms: those farms can also contribute to healthy ecosystem services, human well-being, and higher food security—all of which large industrial farms tend to shrivel.27Laura Rasmussen et al, “Joint environmental and social benefits from diversified agriculture.” Science, 384, no. 6691 (2024): 87-93, http://doi.org/10.1126/science.adj1914.
Intensification boosters like to point out that in large meta-analyses, yields from organic fields are about 20 percent lower than those from chemically intensive agriculture. But when cropping systems are managed ecologically (through diversification, rather than crude input substitution), the yield gap nearly vanishes.28Lauren Ponisio,et al., “Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B.282, no. 1799 (2015): http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1396; Catherine Badgley , “Organic agriculture and the global food supply,” Renewable agriculture and food systems 22, no. 2 (2007): 86–108, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742170507001640. Traditional practices like intercropping can result in high yields per unit of land area even with minimal inputs. These yield outcomes and broad benefits exist even with a contemporary research funding bias toward industrial agriculture; they could increase even more if this disparity is reversed, thus producing as much food at a lower ecological and social cost.29Marcia S. DeLonge, Albie Miles, and Liz Carlisle, “Investing in the transition to sustainable agriculture,” Environmental Science & Policy 55 (2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2015.09.013/.
A World That Feeds Itself
The enduring fantasy of feeding the world persists because it is convenient to the status quo. It weaponizes global hunger to silence the voices of agrarian change, laundering the horrors of the industrial food system into a normative (yet empty) good of “feeding the hungry” through increased production. It enshrines industrial farmers and their agribusiness partners as rural protagonists who, though they may degrade soil and poison the environment, do so heroically to bring food to the faceless poor. In reality, rather than an authentic call to nourish people, it has been a powerful ideological tool in capitalists’ efforts to maintain and extend control over nature and subaltern humans.
The continued deployment of the feed-the-world myth in its sustainability variant works to suppress the real alternative: “a world that feeds itself.”30Michael Bell, Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability. Twentieth Anniversary Edition (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2024). Approaches like agroecology envisage a broader agrarian transition to a food system based on local sovereigntry, where smallholders globally regain access to their means of production. Agroecological techniques offer the power of ecology, rather than capital, to give back autonomy to farmers. The class-based politics of redistribution embedded in the ideals of agroecology threatens agricultural capital, which justifies its existence through the assumed social function of feeding the hungry.
The promotion of productivism through the land-sparing hypothesis delivers a double victory for the ruling class: on one hand, the continuing existence of agribusiness is legitimized by focusing on yields; on the other hand, the imperialist fantasy of terra nullius is fulfilled by enclosing Indigenous forested land as private property. In Marxist terms, the feed-the-world myth ensures accumulation in the countryside and primitive accumulation on forested frontiers.
A debate on the structure of the agrarian sector should certainly welcome diverse viewpoints, including a conversation about productivity. But it cannot be straitjacketed by the feed-the-world premise, which is consistently used as a cudgel to silence alternative farming and nourishment strategies that do not put yield maximization, efficient production, and cheap food as the primary goals. Dropping the confines of the mindset of feeding an anonymous hungry mass can unlock deeper pathways towards an agriculture model that produces enough, while also serving the environmental, cultural, and political values of both producers and eaters.
In its place, values marginalized by productivist paradigms of control, management, and conquest can finally take root. If land sparing demands that humans and nature must be separated, imagine a food system that recognizes they are inseparable. If the feed-the-world myth demands that hunger be resolved through ever expanding industrial monocultures, envision a world where hunger is addressed through land relations of care instead of domination.
Drawing inspiration from Indigenous practitioners past and present, we might recognize that land does not solely work for us (an idea embedded in “production”) nor exist for us to steward it, but rather that in a very material sense, we are Land.31We intentionally capitalize “Land” here, following Styres & Zinga and Liboiron to denote its relational and spiritual character, in contrast with “land” as a colonial resource. Sandra Styres and Dawn Zinga, “The Community-First Land-Centred Theoretical Framework: Bringing a ‘Good Mind’ to Indigenous Education Research?” Canadian Journal of Education 36, no. 2 (2013): 284–313;Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). In the words of Dr. Max Liboiron: Land is “about the relations between the material aspects some people might think of as landscapes—water, soil, air, plants, stars—and histories, spirits, events, kinships, accountabilities, and other people that aren’t human.”32Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, 43. These are the relationships that colonialism directly exploits and that a transformative story and politics of food systems must fight to sustain.