I may have been on vacation for over a week, but the site was active with comments. On the limits-to-growth thread, Harold wrote,

Less land is required for agriculture every year. Even less would be if so many governments would not pay their farmers to farm marginal land.

This strikes me as an important point. If you got rid of farm subsidies, protectionist trade barriers such as the European ban on genetically-modified foods, and other distortions that reduce the efficiency of world agriculture, then it would seem to me that the world would have to devote even less land to food production than it does today. Hunger is declining, obesity is rising, and we still have farmland to waste. To continue the discussion, return to the original thread.