Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

The 24/7 news cycle brings us a daily dose of disaster. This is nothing new. The news was filled with stories of disaster when the news service consisted of anguished “reporters” dashing from cave to cave back at the dawn of civilization. Cavepersons were being eaten by lions and tigers and bears in those days, and not just occasionally. There was famine and disease and pestilence and floods, too, as well as war and crime and riots. Somewhere along the way the “press” began reporting on predicted disasters as well. The folks on “that” side of the mountain were savaged by wild beasts, so it’ll probably happen on “this” side next. It’s nothing new.

According to a recent ag-press story (Drovers, Aug. 10, 2018), Sara Menker says a worldwide food crisis will be here in 2027 – less than a decade from now.

“Unless we can commit to some type of structural (agricultural) change,” she said. She said global food demand will surpass our global capacity to produce food, creating a 214-trillion-calorie shortage. People could starve and governments may fall, she said. The good news is that “big data” supplied by her company, Gro Intelligence, can avert the looming disaster.

Scarcely a week goes by without a new pending disaster story, complete with lurid headlines, featuring prominently in the major media. Over time, similar stories have become ever more common in the ag press as well.

The widespread famine prediction is nothing new either. As early as the 1790’s Thomas Malthus predicted that a growing population would outpace agriculture’s ability to produce food, causing mass starvation, failure of civilization, a depopulated human race to be reduced to scattered tribes of wandering hunter-gatherers. His theory of a geometric population explosion leading to disaster has echoed down the years and has made for lurid predictions of pending disaster for more than 200 years.

In this week’s latest disaster prediction news, we really have to ask, who is Sara Menker, and how can she predict widespread famine and propose a lifesaving change to prevent people from starving and governments from falling?

As to the first question, according to the Drovers story, Menker lived with her family in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, and that experience prompted her to do something about world hunger. In college she studied economics and African Studies at Mount Holyoke College and the London School of Economics, where she was awarded degrees in those subjects. She also got her MBA from Columbia University. Before she was 30 years old she was a vice president in Morgan Stanley’s commodities group, where she specialized in risk management and trading commodities.

It was while working on Wall Street – again according to the Drovers story – that Menker decided to attack the problem of world hunger by trying to determine, through data analysis, whether a so-called “tipping point” could be identified where world food demand would begin outstrip food supply.

In 2014 Menker launched Gro Intelligence. Her company is intended to “bridge the information gap” in agriculture by providing agriculturalists with actionable strategies derived from empirical analyses of worldwide agricultural data.

“I realized how broken the system was, and how very little data was being used to make critical decisions,” she said. “The world lacked an actionable guide on how we can avoid a food crisis. Everyone talks about the importance of big data, often without a tangible way of getting good information. What we do at Gro is make big data analysis possible because we are helping our clients make sense of the fragmented, messy, large world of agricultural data.”

So far it’s an heroic story just right for Hollywood. And just as in all movie productions, this is a story long on fantasy and short on reality.

I’ve no doubt whatsoever that Menker means well, no doubt that she’s concerned with population and famine. However, in answering the second part of the question -- how she can predict and fend off widespread famine and starvation -- well, there’s a problem with that.

First of all, while widespread famine is always a possibility, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that the cause could be Malthusian-style overpopulation. The rate of world population growth is slowing markedly. Thirty years ago, when world population topped 6 billion, many population scientists guaranteed that we would see 20 billion by 2020. Today, in 2018, world population stands at 7.6 billion. Demographic trends indicate that we might see an increase of a further billion souls by 2050, and then we’re likely to see some level of population decline before humanity’s footprint reaches a lower, more stable number.

There are a lot of factors going into population stabilization, and ironically, the major factors are increasing wealth across populations and increasing quantity and security of food production and supply.

Given the present trends, there’s no convincing evidence that rising population will shatter agricultural food production and lead to mass starvation.

Which leaves us wondering what magic Menker plans to bring to the table to fix a problem that is most likely already fixing itself.

Menker’s plan, in a nutshell, is data analysis. Her company will gather, analyze, and sell a world’s worth of agricultural data, which will allow farmers large and small to be more productive, and allow governments to better plan and undertake food distribution. The plan has a nice, world-saving ring to it.

The thing is, though, that it’s a plan in search of a real problem. Present demographic and agricultural production trends point to a homeostatic or self-righting natural feedback loop where population stress is easing and food production is growing already.

The final problem with Menker’s proposal is the notion that quantifying and disseminating data is the same thing as producing food. It’s a nice idea, and information can certainly be a boon to both farmers and governments. But information is not farming, nor is it food distribution. Information can help, but information cannot produce a crop or arrange for food distribution. The ones and zeros in a computer are not the same thing as growing crops or transporting food. The world doesn’t work that way.

It’s easy to be panicked into thinking the sky is falling when we hear people identified as experts propound disaster theories. Just as easily we can be fooled into believing that other experts have the solution and can save the day.

In the case of this week’s disaster story, it’s pretty clear that a compelling case hasn’t been made. It’s important that people -- especially here in the free world -- to examine and think through these weekly disaster tales. Acting precipitously and in the wrong fashion can have dire consequences for people in the real world. We humans have often been very good at fooling ourselves, often with disastrous results.