The end of food inflation?

Will food be the channel through which unprecedented monetary intervention may drive inflation? Will the earth run out of land and freshwater in feeding a growing human population? Cropland after all is just 12 per cent of the earth’s land area, and pastures another 25 per cent: Ratios mostly unchanged for the past three decades, with limited further scope for multi-cropping at scale.

In addition to the steady growth in human population, rising incomes shift diets towards more expensive calories, like from fats, which have a much larger land and freshwater footprint. To …