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Nation State Food Security: A Simulation of Food Production,
Population Consumption, and Sustainable Development
By Patricia M. Quinn and Min Li
Rockefeller State University of New Y ork at Albany
College Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy
\sigxke"" Public Administration Doctoral Program
Patricia M. Quinn at pm_quinn@yahoo.com
(Me}i{e(e};] London Business School
fsilsigiesc] PhD Programme - Business School
Decision Sciences
Min Li at MLI.PHD2001@london.edu
I. Introduction
The topic of food security has been deliberated by scores of individuals
over the last two centuries. Since Malthus first published his 1798 paper titled
“Essay on Population,” the world food equation has commonly been viewed as
a race between food and population. For Malthus, the prognosis was bleak
with famine, pestilence, and war outbreaks taking place for the reason that
“population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical ratio. Subsistence
increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” 1 A century later, Sir William Crookes’
food scarcity prediction, that all civilized populations would outstrip the
expansion of food production by 1931, was refuted by Joseph S. Davis who
emphasized “the wheat problem of 1931 was one of world surplus, not world
shortage, actual or impending.”2 Of late (1998), Frances Moore Lappé
reexamined the world hunger situation, identifying “twelve myths” surrounding
food scarcity with a focuson policies for redistributing world production.3
' John W. Mellor and Bruce F. Johnston, “The World Food Equation: Interrelations Among Development,
Employment, and Food Consumption,” Journal of Economic Literature, Volume 22, Issue 2 (June 1984), p. 532.
? Thid. See also Joseph S. Davis, “The Specter of Dearth of Food: History’s Answer to Sir William Crookes,” in On
Agricultural Policy 1926-1938 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1939), p. 4.
3 Frances Moore Lappé et al., World Hunger: Twelve Myths (New Y ork, NY: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1998).
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Environmental men and women - a recognizable elite contributing
research to organizations such as the Worldwatch Institute, the Institute for Food
and Development Policy (Food First), the World Bank, and universities -
dominate the recent discussion over sustainable food production and
population expansion. Essentially, there are three main camps, aspresented by
Homer-Dixon, to the active debate over food distribution and whether the
expansion of food production can keep pace with population growth.
Malthusians, who are often biologists or ecologists, claim that finite natural
resources place strict limits on the growth of human population and
consumption; if any of these limits are exceeded, poverty and social breakdown
result. Many neoclassical economists, in contrast, say that there need be few, if
any, strict limits to human population, consumption, and prosperity. Properly
functioning economic institutions, especially markets, provide incentives to
encourage conservation, resource substitution, development of new stores of
scarce resources, and technological innovation. Finally, analysts referred to as
distributionists acknowledge that there may be resource limits to human
population growth, but for them the real problem is the maldistribution of
resources and wealth. Poverty and inequality, in their view, are the cause, not
the consequence of high population growth rates and practices that deplete
resources.4
Given the Malthusian, neoclassical, and distributionist approaches as
contrasting points of departure, the goalsof the present paperare:
1) to develop and evaluate a system dynamics food
security model based upon a combination of
Malthusian, neoclassical, and distrib utio nist
“ Thomas Homer-Dixon, “The Ingenuity Gap: Can Poor Countries A dapt to Resource Scarcity?,” Population and
Development Review, Volume 21, Issue 3 (September, 1995), pp. 587-588.
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methodologies as they are used to study nation-state
food security behavior in a complex global arena; and
2) to infer from the evaluation of this model some
implications, or insights, for food security policies.
Our research is heavily grounded in the theory of nonlinear dynamics and
feedback control originally developed in mathematics, physics, and
engineering. Utilizing system dynamics methods and tools, we seek to explain
interactions between nation states by phenomena such as their prior behavior
within the structure of interrelated political, economic, and ecological systems.
Because leaming about these complex systems requires more than technical
tools to create mathematical models, dynamic simulation will be utilized to
bridge the physical and technical sciences with the cognitive psychology,
economics, and environmental specializations of the social sciences.
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