IELTS Academic Reading — Practice Test 28

By the middle of this century the planet will hold close to ten billion people, most of them wealthier than their grandparents and eating accordingly. As diets grow richer, demand for food could rise by half or more, with meat and dairy making up a larger share of every plate. Producing enough food for them is often presented as a simple matter of growing more, but the real challenge is subtler. The world already grows enough calories to feed everyone alive; hunger persists largely because food is distributed unequally and much of it is wasted or fed to animals rather than to people. The task, then, is not merely to increase output but to do so without exhausting the soil, draining the rivers or heating the atmosphere — and to make sure the extra food reaches those who need it.

The last time agriculture was transformed on a global scale was the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. New high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, bred by researchers such as the American agronomist Norman Borlaug, were combined with chemical fertiliser, irrigation and pesticides to raise output dramatically, especially in Asia. Famines that had been widely predicted did not occur, and India, once dependent on imported grain, became self-sufficient. For the achievement Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize, and the varieties he helped develop are often credited with saving hundreds of millions from starvation. The transformation was so sweeping that it reshaped rural economies across much of the developing world within a single generation.

The gains came at a price that has become clearer with time. The new farming was thirsty and chemical-hungry. Aquifers were pumped faster than rain could replenish them; fertiliser running off fields poisoned rivers and coastal waters; heavy machinery and continuous cropping stripped soils of their structure and fertility. Critics of the Green Revolution add that its benefits were unevenly shared: farmers who could afford the seeds, fertiliser and irrigation prospered, while poorer smallholders, unable to buy the whole package, were often left behind or forced off their land.

How to grow more without repeating these mistakes is now the central question. One influential answer goes by the name of sustainable intensification — the idea that more food should be coaxed from land already under cultivation, so that no further forests or grasslands need be ploughed up. Its supporters argue that, since agriculture is the largest single driver of deforestation, raising yields on existing fields is the surest way to spare wild habitat. Opponents counter that 'intensification' too easily becomes a licence for the same input-heavy methods that caused the damage in the first place, and that higher yields, by making farming more profitable, can actually encourage the clearing of yet more land.

Much hope, and much controversy, surrounds technology. Genetically modified crops, engineered to resist pests or tolerate drought, have been adopted rapidly in some countries and banned outright in others, often on grounds that owe more to public unease than to evidence of harm. Newer techniques of gene editing promise to make such changes faster and cheaper. Meanwhile precision agriculture — the use of sensors, satellite data and automated machinery to apply water and chemicals exactly where and when they are needed — offers to cut waste and pollution. Its proponents maintain that farming guided by data can be both more productive and gentler on the environment, though the equipment remains too costly for most of the world's smallholders.

Some researchers argue that the most promising gains lie not in the field but on the plate and in the bin. Roughly a third of all food produced is never eaten — lost to poor storage and transport in poorer countries, and thrown away by retailers and households in richer ones. Reducing that waste would ease the pressure to grow more without turning a single additional furrow. So, potentially, would a shift in diet. Producing meat, and beef in particular, uses far more land, water and energy per calorie than growing plants, and advocates of dietary change contend that even a modest reduction in meat consumption in wealthy countries would free up enormous resources.

What emerges from these debates is that there is no single lever to pull. Higher yields, less waste, changed diets, smarter technology and fairer distribution each address part of the problem and none of them all of it. Perhaps the most important shift is in how the question is framed. For decades food security was treated as a problem of production, to be solved by science in the field. It is increasingly understood as a problem of the whole system — of markets, transport, policy and habit — in which growing the food is only the first step. On this reading, the answer will require farmers, engineers, policymakers and consumers to act together rather than waiting for a single technological fix.

Over the past four decades, the gap between rich and poor has widened in most advanced economies. In the United States and Britain especially, the share of national income flowing to those at the very top has climbed back towards levels not seen since before the Second World War. Yet what looks at first like a single, well-defined trend dissolves, on closer inspection, into several distinct questions. Inequality of what — income earned in a year, or wealth accumulated over a lifetime? Inequality among whom — individuals, households, or nations? And is the inequality that matters the gap in outcomes, or the narrower question of whether people begin life with equal chances? Answers to these questions do not always point the same way, and much apparent disagreement among economists turns out to rest on their asking different ones.

Measuring inequality is harder than it sounds. The most widely used yardstick, the Gini coefficient, compresses an entire distribution into a single number between zero, where everyone has the same, and one, where a single person has everything. Its convenience is also its weakness: two societies can share an identical Gini while differing enormously in where the inequality lies — one with a comfortable middle and a destitute fringe, the other with a broad poor majority and a tiny, fabulously rich elite. For this reason many researchers prefer to track the share of income or wealth held by the top one per cent, a measure that captures the concentration at the summit that a single average conceals. Which measure one chooses can determine whether inequality appears to be rising, falling or holding steady.

On the causes, opinion divides. One long-standing explanation looks to impersonal economic forces. As technology has advanced, the argument runs, it has rewarded the highly educated and automated away many middle-ranking jobs, hollowing out the workforce into well-paid professionals at one end and low-paid service workers at the other. Globalisation is said to have deepened the split, as manufacturing migrated to countries where labour was cheaper, leaving workers in older industrial regions to compete with distant rivals. On this account, rising inequality is the largely unintended by-product of forces no government chose and none can easily reverse. Few dispute that these forces have played some part; the disagreement is over how large a part.

A rival school insists that this understates the role of deliberate choices. Countries exposed to much the same technology and trade have ended up with strikingly different levels of inequality, which suggests that policy, not fate, is decisive. Cuts to top tax rates, the decline of trade unions, the erosion of minimum wages and the loosening of financial regulation, on this view, did as much to concentrate income as any machine. The economist Thomas Piketty added a further claim: that whenever the return on wealth outpaces the growth of the economy as a whole, fortunes already amassed will expand faster than incomes earned through work, so that inherited wealth tends, unless checked, to pull ahead. Left to itself, he argued, capitalism does not naturally spread its rewards.

Why any of this should trouble us is itself disputed. A substantial body of research links high inequality to a range of ills: slower and less durable economic growth, reduced social mobility, and even poorer health and weaker social trust across a society as a whole. Economists have noted that countries with wider income gaps tend to be those in which a child's prospects are most tightly bound to the fortunes of its parents — a relationship sometimes called the Great Gatsby curve. If where you end up depends heavily on where you started, inequality of outcome in one generation becomes inequality of opportunity in the next. The evidence is not uncontested, however, and separating the effects of inequality itself from those of the poverty that often accompanies it has proved stubbornly difficult.

Not everyone is persuaded that inequality is, in itself, the problem. Some economists argue that a degree of inequality is not merely tolerable but necessary: the prospect of greater reward is what drives people to work hard, take risks and innovate, and a society that flattened all differences would blunt these incentives and end up poorer overall. What should concern us, they contend, is poverty rather than inequality — the absolute conditions in which the worst-off live, not the size of the gap between them and the rich. A poor family is no better fed because a billionaire has become slightly less wealthy. On this view the crucial distinction is between inequality that reflects genuine differences in effort and contribution, which is fair, and inequality that springs from inheritance, monopoly or privilege, which is not.

This last distinction points to where the argument may finally rest. It suggests that the bare measurement of a gap tells us rather little; what matters is how the gap arose and whether it hardens into a permanent feature passed from one generation to the next. A large disparity that people can traverse through their own efforts is a different thing from a smaller one that traps families in place for good. Ultimately, then, the quarrel over inequality is not only an empirical one, to be settled by better data, but a question of values — of what a society owes its members and what it is prepared to accept as the price of its prosperity. That is why, for all the sophistication of the statistics, the debate shows no sign of ending.