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My article in Sunday’s paper about the world’s food supply offered portents of a more difficult human future.

Factors like population growth, improved diets in developing countries and biofuel production are raising the global demand for food and feed. This rising demand is already colliding with factors that limit the expansion of the food supply, including climate change, competition for scarce water and a shortage of land that can be converted for farming.

Many experts fear this clash is only going to intensify, and the result could be a lasting shift to higher food prices, even beyond the spikes of recent years. Such a trend would fall especially hard on the world’s poorest people.

Oxfam, the international relief group, laid out such a troubling situation in a recent report. It found that food prices could more than double from today’s high level by 2030, with climate change being a major reason.

In the article, I allude to a compensatory factor that is worth discussing in greater depth. By raising the rewards for innovation, won’t those higher prices prompt creative efforts by companies and farmers to break the barriers and produce more food?