ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with an overview of world agriculture and the important challenge of feeding the world’s population. It goes on to describe various environmental impacts associated with prosecution of food production. The discussion then turns to the economics of agriculture. For analytical purposes, this discussion divides growth in agricultural production into two phases, extensive and intensive production. In the latter phase, increased productivity has been enhanced in various ways, but especially through technological advances and good institutions. The discussion of technological advances complements the earlier discussion in chapter seven on technology and population growth. The discussion then expands on the idea that good institutions can promote food production by developing a property rights interpretation of agricultural productivity. This discussion shows how secure property rights in land and outputs have mostly promoted greater farm productivity in various settings, both in the past and the present day. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of public choice and the politics of agricultural subsidies. This is in two parts. It begins by addressing the empirical regularity that low-income countries tend to tax their farmers and high-income countries tend to subsidize their farmers, providing a coherent public choice explanation for this empirical pattern. It then focuses on the creation and expansion of agricultural subsidies in the United States. The discussion focuses on the origins of present-day subsidies in the depths of the Great Depression, the form that it took, and the persistence of those subsidy programs to this day.
