Given the current concerns about U.S. and world food supplies, it is worthwhile stepping back and putting these recent events in a wider historical context.

For most of recorded history, man’s existence on earth has been, to use the famous phrase of the 17th century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The vast majority of the human race lived lives barely above subsistence, and frequently endured severe famines that caused slow and agonizing deaths for tens of millions over the centuries.

This growth in food supplies has surely been a primary ingredient behind the increase in global population over the last 200 years. In 1800, the number of people in the world has been estimated to have been slightly less than 980 million. By 1900 that number had increased to 1.65 billion. In March 2008, the global population was estimated at 6.65 billion or a six fold increase in slightly over the last one hundred years.

Such a dramatic increase in humanity would have been impossible if men had not discovered the means to expand the global food supply through establishing relatively free market institutions that have created the incentives for people to produce so much food, and then deliver it to virtually to any corner of the planet.

One indication of this change for the better is the decrease in the percentage of people’s incomes devoted to purchasing various types of food. The most detailed data is, not surprisingly, available for the United States over the last century.

As the first chart below shows, in 1900 Americans devoted about 42.5 percent of their household income on food expenditures. This fell to 29.7 percent halfway through the century in 1950. By 2006 that number had dropped to 12.6 percent of household spending.

A significant part of this story has been the growth in food production in America relative to the number of people in the civilian work force employed in agriculture over the last one hundred years, as is shown in the second chart below. At the beginning of the 20th century, almost 50 percent of the U.S. civilian work force was employed in agriculture. By 1950 this number had decreased to just slightly over 25 percent of all jobs in the country. And by 2005, only between 2-3 percent of those working were employed in farming.

At the same time, agricultural production exploded during the last one hundred years. Using a weighted index of corn, oat, barley, wheat, and soybean, we see that in 1900 that 50 percent of the work force employed in farming produced about 750,000 bushels of food output. In 1950, the 25 percent of the work force then in occupied in agriculture generated one million bushels of foodstuffs. By 2005, the 2-3 percent of those employed in farming provided over 4,5 million bushels of agricultural output for the consumers of both America and the world.

The recent rise in food prices and the concerns about available supplies should be thought about in the context of these the longer-run historical trends, which have been in the direction of more and more food on the dinner tables of the world at a lower cost of manpower and income expenditure, especially here in the United States.