It is not only accurate, but agriculture is pretty much the worst case. The problem is that demand for food is rather inelastic. You are going to eat when you

It is not only accurate, but agriculture is pretty much the worst case. The problem is that demand for food is rather inelastic. You are going to eat when you are hungry, and if you're hungry enough you'll pay whatever you can for that next meal. But food production is highly variable. For example the 88-89 drought in the USA dropped food production by 29%. Therefore to have enough food in a bad year, we have to be willing to overproduce in a good year. Which means that we guarantee an excess supply, and therefore a very low free market price. How we get there is arbitrary. We can subsidize exports, we can buy up food to throw it away, we can pay farmers to not grow food in good years. All of these are done somewhere. There is no first world country that doesn't do at least one of these because everyone understands that it is a national security issue - if your people go hungry you're likely to get civil unrest. As a concrete demonstration, consider the Arab Spring. One of the contributing factors was that China had a severe drought. To ensure their political stability, they bought wheat on the international market. Thanks to the laws of supply and demand, the cost of wheat doubled. Poor people in Arab countries that couldn't subsidize their citizens suddenly went hungry. They revolted. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_Arab_Spring#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_Arab_Spring#Chin... to verify this sequence of events.