A New Areal Measure of Food Production Efficiency

Abstract

AM AN obtains nutritionally sound diets from a variety of plant and animal foods. These foods provide essential nutrients in amounts and ratios that vary according to the peculiar biology of the plant or animal. Efforts to make comparative analyses of food sufficiencies and production efficiencies have relied on units of mass, volume, price, single nutrients, and nutrient averages to evaluate the food economies of different populations. This paper holds that the employment of these tools rests on assumptions which limit their usefulness when they are applied to regional food comparisons, studies of microproduction and macroproduction efficiency, evaluations of agricultural programs, formulations of health policies, and economization of factor inputs into agriculture.I Instead, it will develop a set of areal nutrient relatives that reflects efficiency of food production and sufficiency of food supplies and that may be employed to optimize the use of natural resources to produce foodstuffs. The evaluation of production efficiencies in basic food constituents derived from a variety of foodstuffs produced under diverse socioeconomic and biotic environments is a central problem in the analysis of world food resources. A knowledge of output in these terms as related to geographic areas provides a guide to the coordination of agriculture and nutrition. National food policy based on the most efficient use of land resources can be linked to a nutritionally designed domestic and foreign program. In this way the food resource base can be organized to improve nutrition at the same or lower production costs, and to raise the level of real income while contributing to the relief of population pressure.