Food Inc., continued

Comment on Parke Wilde's comment on Marc Gunther's review:

Point (b) is complicated by the fact that the majority of current meat consumption and the VAST majority of future growth in meat consumption takes place in the developing world. It’s easy to make a moral case for why an obese American should eat less meat; much harder for a poor Malawian farmer or Chinese laborer with a protein-deficient diet.

As far as I understand, the jury is still out on both the long-term environmental sustainability of the “Norman Borlaug” model (i.e. high fertilizer/pesticide/herbicide use, monocultures of GM seeds, etc.) and whether the “Michael Pollan” model (i.e. organic inputs, high crop rotation, etc.) can deliver sufficient yields on a large scale to feed a world population of 8-10bn people a nutritious diet without dramatically expanding land use (which causes deforestation, reduces biodiversity, etc.). I’d love to know if anyone is aware of balanced, authoritative academic research into these topics – most of what I’ve seen is fairly polemical from one side or the other.