Why won't the "feed the world" myth ever die?

(New essay in Spectre)

In the recent New Yorker article titled “Do We Need Another Green Revolution?”, environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert echoes an increasingly familiar refrain: if organic or regenerative farming practices reduce yields, they may actually harm the planet. As she puts it, “To hold the globe’s food supply steady, not to mention increase it, any drop in one farm’s output has to be made up somewhere else. And that somewhere may well turn out to be a field cut out of a rain forest.”¹

This logic rests on a seductive but flawed premise: that the only way to nourish humanity is to intensify agricultural production. It’s the same logic that underpins a recent open letter sponsored by the notoriously agribusiness-inflected World Food Prize signed by Nobel Laureates, including Jennifer Doudna, co-developer of CRISPR gene-editing technology. The letter warns that “we are not on track to meet future food needs. Not even close,” and calls for a sharp rise in food production by mid-century.

The logic of the need to “feed the world” is powerful. It litters the introductions of countless published articles and sustainability provocations. It drives agricultural policy and motivates intensive farmers. Yet, the premise abstracts the politics of hunger into a problem that singularly concerns yields, naturalizing industrial production and muzzling promising alternatives.

The donors of the World Food Prize Foundation resembling an agribusiness trade show

In an essay published in Spectre, written with colleagues from the Agroecology Research Action Collective, we show that the “feed the world” narrative is not a neutral or humanitarian goal—it’s a tired myth with deep colonial-capitalist roots. It has long served to justify the expansion of industrial agriculture, not to end hunger, but to secure profits, control land, and marginalize alternative food systems.

Today, this myth is being rebranded in the language of sustainability. Visions like “sustainable intensification,” “climate-smart agriculture,” and “Abundance” promise that we can produce more food on less land, saving an anonymous nature while feeding an faceless humanity. Central to this green rebranding of the feed-the-world myth is the land sparing hypothesis, the idea that intensifying production in some places will allow other lands to be “saved” for nature.

This worldview has gained traction not just in journalism and think tanks, but in the policies of institutions like the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Resources Institute. It merges the legacy of the Green Revolution with a greenwashed techno-utopianism.

There is no global stomach. Yields only play a part of the story of hunger, where systems of inequality, dispossession, and political neglect are much more salient. The more the myth lives on that “feeding the world” is inevitably accomplished through intensification, the more we hold back the alternative: a world that feeds itself².

Read the full essay, The Enduring Fantasy of Feeding the World in Spectre, written with Maywa Montenegro de Wit, Alastair Iles, and Ben Iuliano.

1. As a useful exercise, list the assumptions in this sentence.

2. The phrase “A world that feeds itself” is borrowed from Michael Bell in Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability. Twentieth Anniversary Edition (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2024).