Anthony Pratt Quotes
I believe we have the potential to quadruple Australia's food exports to Asia.
Pratt, Anthony. "Food Is the New Mining." The Australian, News Corp Australia, 2013.
While this was somewhat hyperbolic at the time, it became true during the century.
Slogan of U. S. Food Administration during World War I. Herbert Hoover, then its Director, coined the slogan for the agency.
Hoover headed the American Food agency early in his career. In a sense, he was right. Without American Food, the Allies in Europe woul;d have collapsed, and after the war, Amerocan feed kept the peace.
From a technical and production point of view, there is no practical limit to population size that is imposed by food production. We can produce sufficient food for the world even if population increases dramatically. None the less, even today we have some starvation and much malnutrition problems. These however are political, economic and tend to be distributional. We can produce the food. Morris does NOT advocate large population growth. Although food need not be a problem with an expanding population, job availability, medical care, energy, land, natural resources, ethnic hatred, migration, violence, and other problems are produced by population growth.
New agricultural techniques like drip irrigation and hydroponics lend themselves to factory style agriculture which can function in cities. At the time, Israel already did some on a commercial basis. In addition to having fresher food where the population is, the cost of transportation and use of energy for same is reduced, but may be needed for the new agricultural techniques themselves.
For many nations, it is an important objective to be totally self-sufficient in their food supply—so that they would not have to depend in other nations in what might be a world famine or food supply. For those nations agricultural subsidies are useful if their farmers cannot produce as cheaply and efficiently as other nations do. In the United States, with the most efficient agriculture in the world, subsidies are a waste of public money {633243} and the result of lobbying and special interest pressure and or corruption {633245}.
Anthony Joseph Pratt, an Australian businessman and billionaire, is the Executive Chairman of Visy Industries and Pratt Industries in America, which is the world's largest privately owned packaging and paper company. Pratt is the son of the late Richard Pratt, a former manufacturing magnate and former president of the Carlton Football Club, and Jeanne Pratt AC, a philanthropist.
