Our failure to win a steady proportion of consumers' real incomes has contributed to our declining prosperity ranking.
Yet if the correlation between New Zealand's relative prosperity and food prices as a percentage of disposable income is robust in decline, will it be so in ascent? Possibly; between 2008 and 2009, our prosperity ranking rose from 21st to 18th, while domestic real food prices rose 8.2 per cent.
Rabobank provisionally estimates that by 2020, unless globally either every farmed hectare increases productivity by 33 per cent (relative to 2010) or nearly 80 per cent of remaining 'available, unexploited' land comes into production, then real food prices will rise, implying food producers will be in a stronger negotiating position with supermarkets and intermediaries.
Moreover, whilst global population will rise by about 25 per cent by 2060, growth in wealth in India and China relative to the United States between 2010 and 2030 will be 200 and 300 per cent respectively.
This rise in numbers and affluence will exceed that of productivity growth in food production and consumption (wastage), placing upward pressure on real food prices.
We are living through perhaps the greatest accumulation of mammalian biomass and wealth this planet will experience, bourne of the discovery and utility of high density energy, the subsequent synthesis of nitrogenous fertilisers, the consequential breeding of plants to exploit this and, concomitantly, the widespread human consumption of antibiotics.
For New Zealand it is even more momentous than that. Close to half the world's humans live on about US$2 per diem and subsist on diets largely comprising plant carbohydrates and proteins. As this sum increases over US$10 per diem, individuals introduce animal-derived foods.
Annual meat consumption has peaked at 110kg per capita in the United States. It is far below that in India, China and other "developing" countries, so demand growth will be massive.
Basically, the planet's human population is gaining affluence more rapidly than farming and fishing can produce a commensurate volume and mix of food; humanity is applying inanimate technologies much faster than it can adapt and apply animate ones in food production.
But if the future bodes well for New Zealand, it will be in a different world to the 1950s.
Sustained rises in the real price of food will create significant social unrest, occurring as global warming acutely pressurises the great food bowls of continental land masses.
Our food and fibre will be increasingly desired yet calorifically, given its present volume and mix of foods, New Zealand can feed about 25 million people -- one in 400 in a world of 10 billion.
Perhaps it is time to differentiate our food and fibre products by genuinely and durably targeting the wealthiest consumers whilst concomitantly exporting New Zealand food production systems overseas, adapted to meet the requirements of sub-tropical and tropical environs?
To achieve this, we will rely on sufficient education and training, and research and development.
Unfortunately at 1.27 per cent of GDP, we don't invest sufficiently in R&D relative to our competitors.
Nor do we produce and then employ sufficient of appropriately-educated people; for example, seven researchers per 1000 employed compared to 14 in Denmark.
It is a truth that we are not a knowledge-based economy by any reasonable comparison.
Rising demand to feed more people is only going to last so long -- maybe just 60 years -- before human population recedes.
Given all the factors at long last are going our way, will we continue selling to the not so rich or are we going to sell to the richest, with this of necessity underpinned by relative levels of R&D and numbers of scientists employed typical of Denmark or Finland ?
Do we have the wisdom and the confidence to change our investment horizons and targets, our skills mix and, ultimately, our culture?
