Who Will Feed China

Twenty years ago, Lester Brown published an article in World Watch magazine entitled "Who Will Feed China?" A year later, he followed with a book of the same name.

The article and book generated an enormous outcry from China and dozens of conferences, seminars, and studies, as he writes in his autobiography, Breaking New Ground.

"In 1994 I wrote an article for the September/October issue of World Watch magazine entitled "Who Will Feed China?" The late August press conference releasing it generated only moderate coverage. But when the article was reprinted that weekend on the front of the Washington Post’s Outlook section with the title "How China Could Starve the World," it unleashed a political firestorm in Beijing. …

The World Watch article attracted more attention than anything I have ever written. In addition to appearing in our magazine’s five language editions—English, Japanese, Chinese (Taiwan), German, and Italian—it also appeared in abridged form in many of the world’s leading newspapers, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. It was syndicated internationally by both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Among the other major news organizations covering the analysis were the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, including the Asian edition. …

One of the most interesting responses was in Washington, DC, where the National Intelligence Council, the umbrella over all the U.S. intelligence agencies, analyzed the effect of China’s growing demand for grain on world agriculture and any security threats that it might pose. A panel of prominent researchers, led by Michael McElroy, then head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, produced a first-rate study of several hundred pages. …

Meanwhile, within China, every few weeks another study was released attempting to demonstrate why my analysis was wrong. These critiques came from such disparate sources as a scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, and an independent academic scholar. Not long after, an enterprising Chinese publisher took a copy of the original World Watch magazine article and a collection of the critiques of it and published them in a book entitled The Great Debate Between Lester Brown and China. …

Over time, China’s leaders came to both appreciate and acknowledge how Who Will Feed China? had helped change their thinking. A late 1998 issue of Feedstuffs, a weekly agribusiness newspaper, quotes Lu Mai, an agricultural economist and senior fellow at a government think tank in Beijing, as saying, "Brown seems to have been accorded guru status in high places. ‘He’s like the monk from outside who knows how to read the Bible.’" …

Lester proved prescient in his analysis. China is a leading importer of grain and it imports a staggering 60 percent of all soybeans entering world trade—and it looks like it will continue. The problem is not so much population growth, but China’s rising affluence, which is allowing its population to move up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock, poultry, and farmed fish.

Janet Larsen, EPI’s director of research, wrote last year on the Chinese purchase of Smithfield, the world’s leading pork producer. She has also written on how China’s meat consumption has grown to double that of the United States where meat consumption is falling.

Essentially, twenty years later, we are still wondering who will feed China?

Lester has written a number of articles over the last dozen years about China, which are available on Earth Policy Institute’s website. Below are some highlights. More

 

 

© 2014

U.S.-India: Dealing With Monsoon Failure by Lester R. Brown

Earth Policy Book Byte Release - February 12, 2014

The following is an excerpt from Lester Brown’s new autobiography, Breaking New Ground: A Personal History. The first in his family to graduate from elementary school, he reveals what inspired him—and millions of those who have read his books—to become environmentally active. For more, check out Chapter 1, now up on our website, and browse through photo albums and hear from Lester Brown himself in select videos.

The scene plays out in India in 1965.

At a reception, I met the head of Indian operations for Esso (now ExxonMobil). When I asked him how business was, he said it was great. In particular, diesel sales to fuel irrigation pumps were nearly double the previous year’s level. Why? Because farmers were pumping continuously to try to save their crops.

Soon after, I met an embassy staff person, an avid duck hunter. He usually took off a few weeks in the fall to go hunting on a lake up north. This year he had canceled his vacation because the lake was dry.

An agronomist who worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) traveled extensively in rural India and often stopped his car in the countryside to take soil samples. But he complained to me that he could no longer get good core samples: the soil was so dry it crumbled and fell out of his auger as he withdrew it.

This was something that I had never seen in my years of farming. I became convinced that India faced a huge crop shortfall.

It was the fall of 1965 and I had come to India because the USAID mission in New Delhi had asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for someone to help them with an agricultural analysis.

What caught my attention in New Delhi right away was the condition of that year’s grain crop. The Indian government officially estimated grain demand for 1965 would be 95 million tons. I soon began to wonder whether a harvest anywhere near this amount would materialize. I found reports of drought in virtually every corner of the country. The drought appeared to be almost everywhere.

Since the United States was the dominant world grain supplier—the only country that could even think about filling a deficit of this scale—this warranted an urgent cable to alert my boss, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. If a potential deficit of this magnitude was a real prospect, he needed the information as soon as possible.

However, if I were going to sound such an alarm, I needed to estimate the size of the deficit, despite having only fragmentary data. If my estimate of the deficit was too high, the United States would over mobilize and waste resources. But if my estimate was too low, that could lead to famine. I worked to strike the right tone in the cable to Freeman.

Off to Rome

The cable actually went to Washington on Wednesday, November 10. On Friday of the following week, I received a cable from Secretary Freeman. It was short and cryptic: “Please meet me in Rome tomorrow morning.” He would be in Rome attending the biennial conference of agricultural ministers organized by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

At that point, I asked to meet with India’s minister of food and agriculture, C. Subramaniam, to share my assessment with him. I urged him not to play it down when he got to Rome—unless he was convinced that it was off base. Otherwise, the U.S. government would not mobilize its grain aid quickly enough and the needed shipments might not arrive in time.

When I met Secretary Freeman on Saturday morning, he said he had shared my cable with President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ). My analysis played to one of LBJ’s deepest concerns: that India was neglecting its agriculture as it concentrated on industrialization. Its government simply seemed to assume that the United States would fill any grain deficits that India might face.

Creating dependency

If India continued on this path, it would become dangerously dependent on the United States in the event of any crop shortfalls. That was all the more problematic as this was a time when scores of other countries also depended on U.S. grain.

President Johnson and his team knew that if the recent agricultural trends in India continued, eventually India’s grain needs would exceed the United States’ capacity to meet them. When an Indian official was asked by a reporter about the adequacy of the country’s grain stocks, he responded, “Our reserves are in the grain elevators in Kansas.”

It was this casual thinking about food security in India, then a country with a population more than double that of the United States and growing by 10 million per year that alarmed the U.S. president. It led to what came to be known as the “short-tether policy” on U.S. food aid.

Constructive conditionality

LBJ had asked Secretary Freeman to get a commitment from the Indians to develop their agriculture—and fast. Any continuing food aid from the United States would be contingent on this.

India was facing a potentially massive famine. I wanted to make sure that both governments understood the gravity and urgency of the situation. Rarely have two governments been in a situation where the stakes, measured in human lives, were so high.

Freeman, Subramaniam and I met on Monday morning to discuss the situation. They asked me to draft an agreement between the two countries based on our discussion. At the end of the day, I had a draft. The agreement was short, three pages double-spaced.

I knew what India had to do. The government’s food price policy, which catered to the urban population by imposing ceiling prices on wheat and rice, had to be replaced. What was needed was a floor price guarantee for the farmers growing these grains. Fertilizer supplies had to increase rapidly. This meant shifting fertilizer production from the public sector to the private sector.

There were high-yielding dwarf varieties of wheat. Initially developed in Mexico by Norman Borlaug and his colleagues with support of the Rockefeller Foundation, they had been tested in India and performed very well. India needed to accelerate the dissemination of these high-yielding wheats.

Creating linkages across borders

Once we had negotiated the agreement that contained these essential points, Freeman cabled a draft to LBJ for approval. The president approved it immediately and Secretary Freeman signed the agreement. In essence, he committed the United States to providing massive food assistance—as long as India adopted the reforms.

The Indian government’s original five-year agricultural plan was a much longer, detailed bureaucratic document. My new draft was only a few pages on the key initiatives needed. Its strength was that it linked the movement of wheat from the United States to the implementation of a new food production strategy in India. The monsoon failure and the massive looming grain deficit had changed everything.

Inside the Indian government, Agriculture Minister Subramaniam took all the necessary steps. In effect, he said: Our agriculture is in trouble. We could be facing a huge grain deficit, a potentially massive loss of life. We have to reform our agriculture. Here is what we need to do.

You reform, we deliver

One thing the Indians did not anticipate was the extent to which the Johnson Administration was going to use food aid to force the Indian government to follow through on every measure in the agreement. If the Indian government did not accomplish certain measures, the ships would stop leaving U.S. ports.

It took the Indians a while to realize that LBJ was dead serious about the reforms. Several times in the months ahead, the ships stopped sailing because India had not fulfilled its part in implementing the bilateral agreement. They would move again only when India had met its commitments.

The greatest challenge was actually importing the 10 million tons of grain in a single year when India previously had never imported anywhere near this amount before.

To assess whether—and how—this massive amount could be moved in time, Secretary Freeman called on logistics specialists in the USDA, men who had served in the Army Quartermaster Corps in World War II. During the war, they had become masters of moving equipment and arms from point A to point B. Their ingenuity was boundless.

Yankee ingenuity to help India

What they did to greatly increase India’s port capacity was to lease one of the largest supertankers afloat at the time, the Manhattan. They then anchored the massive ship in the Bay of Bengal and used it as a port.

On one side, ships from the United States arrived with grain that was pumped on board and then unloaded on the other side into small, flat-bottomed, local boats called dhows, which were about 30 feet long.

Thousands of dhows were used to move the grain up the Ganges River and its tributaries to reach the parts of the country where the drought was most severe and the risk of starvation the greatest. It was remarkably successful.

The result

Final data on the 1965 Indian harvest showed it coming in at 77 million tons of grain—18 million tons below the Indian government’s original estimated consumption. In the effort to stave off famine, the United States that year shipped a fifth of its wheat harvest to India.

At that time, it was the largest movement of food ever between two countries. Some 600 ships, nearly two a day, left U.S. ports laden with wheat for India. Measured by the number of ships used in a single logistical operation, it ranks high on the all-time list. This record flow of food from the United States to India avoided what could have been one of history’s most devastating famines.

With the new agricultural development strategy, India doubled its wheat harvest in seven years, a record for growth in production of a food staple in a major country. No country, not even the United States, had ever managed such rapid growth.

For the United States, this was one of our finest moments. And not just because millions of lives were saved, but because our government had seen a rare opportunity to restructure India’s agriculture by dramatically boosting land productivity. More

Could a similar scene play out again on the sub-continent due to a spike in oil prices or changes in monsoon? Editor

# # #

This essay is an adapted excerpt from Breaking New Ground: A Personal History, by Lester R. Brown, New York, W.W. Norton, 2013, and originally appeared in The Globalist on February 6, 2014. Photo albums, videos, and additional resources are available for free download at www.earth-policy.org/books/bng.

Feel free to pass this information along to friends, family members, and colleagues!

Media Contact: Reah Janise Kauffman (202) 496-9290 ext. 12 | rjk@earthpolicy.org

Research Contact: Janet Larsen (202) 496-9290 ext. 14 | jlarsen@earthpolicy.org

 

Farmers worldwide suffer as extreme weather wreaks food havoc

To address the crisis, farm ministers from around the world are gathering in Berlin Saturday to discuss climate change and food production.

BOSTON — Volatile weather around the world is taking farmers on a wild ride. Too much rain in northern China damaged crops in May, three years after too little rain turned the world’s second-biggest corn producer into a net importer of the grain. Dry weather in the U.S. will cut beef output from the world’s biggest producer to the lowest level since 1994, following 2013’s bumper corn crop, which pushed America’s inventory up 30 percent. British farmers couldn’t plant in muddy fields after the second-wettest year on record in 2012 dented the nation’s wheat production.

“Extreme weather events are a massive risk to agriculture,” said Peter Kendall, president of the British National Farmers Union, who raises 3,953 acres of grain crops in Bedfordshire, England. “Farmers can adapt to gradual temperature increases, but extreme weather events have the potential to completely undermine production. It could be drought, it could be too much rain, it could be extreme heat at the wrong time. It’s the extreme that does the damage.”

Farm ministers from around the world are gathering in Berlin Saturday to discuss climate change and food production at an annual agricultural forum, with a joint statement planned after the meeting.

Fast-changing weather patterns, such as the invasion of Arctic air that pushed the mercury in New York from an unseasonably warm 55 degrees Fahrenheit on Jan. 6 to a record low of 4 the next day, will only become more commonplace, according to the New York-based Insurance Information Institute. While the world produces enough to provide its 7 billion people with roughly 2,700 calories daily, and hunger across the globe is declining, one in eight people still don’t get enough to eat, some of which can be blamed on drought, the United Nations said.

“There’s no question, while there’s variability and volatility from year to year, the number and the cost of catastrophic weather events is on the rise, not just in the U.S., but on a global scale,” said Robert Hartwig, an economist and president of the insurance institute. “It’s all but certain that the size and the magnitude and the frequency of disaster losses in the future is going to be larger than what we see today.”

The number of weather events and earthquakes resulting in insured losses climbed last year to 880, 40 percent higher than the average of the last 30 years, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer.

Research points to a culprit: an increase in greenhouse gases, generated by human activity, that are forcing global temperatures upward, said Thomas Peterson, principal scientist at the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The warmer the air the more water it can hold, he said.

“What we’re finding worldwide is that heavy precipitation is increasing,” Peterson said.

Flood waters in Passau, Germany, in May and June reached the highest level since 1501, Munich Re said. That was the year Michelangelo first put a chisel to the block of marble that would become his sculpture of David. High water did $15.2 billion in damage in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, according to Munich Re.

A July hailstorm in Reutlingen, Germany, led to $3.7 billion in insured losses, according to Munich Re. Hailstones the size of babies’ fists cracked the windshield of Marco Kaschuba’s Peugeot.

“Two minutes before the storm started you could already hear a very loud noise,” said Kaschuba, a 33-year-old photographer. “That was from hailstones hitting the ground in the distance and coming closer.”

In 2012, Britain had its second-highest rainfall going back to 1910, according to Britain’s meteorology office. England and Wales had its third-wettest year since 1766. More

 

Less Than 3 Percent of Oceans in Marine Parks Despite Recent Growth

In May 1975, rising concerns about overfishing and deteriorating ocean health prompted scientists and officials from 33 countries to meet in Tokyo for the first global conference on marine parks and reserves.

Noting the need for swift action to safeguard more of the sea, the delegates were unanimous in calling for the creation of a global system of marine protected areas (MPAs)—zones explicitly managed for the conservation of aquatic ecosystems.

Today, with oceanic resources more threatened than ever, the world is far from that envisioned MPA network. Although coverage has doubled since 2010, just 2.8 percent of the ocean surface—some 10 million square kilometers (4 million square miles), roughly the size of the United States—is now in designated MPAs. And the level of protection varies. Some MPAs allow seabed mining, for instance, and most MPAs allow at least some fishing. In others, fishing and other destructive activities are off-limits entirely. These “no-take” MPAs, also called marine reserves, are thought to provide the greatest conservation value, yet they account for less than half of the world’s marine protected area.

A wealth of experience and scientific research shows that by protecting all habitats and marine life within their borders, well-managed no-take zones effectively preserve biodiversity and can restore adjacent fisheries, greatly benefiting both ecosystems and the people dependent on them. In general, fish populations increase after a reserve is established, and individual fish grow larger. Heavily overfished species usually show the greatest gains, and the positive results can come quickly.

While there are often concerns that closing fishing grounds will negatively impact access to food and livelihoods, evidence suggests that reserves often have the opposite effect. Because there is no physical boundary, fish may venture out of the MPA to areas where anglers can catch them. Older, larger fish have more offspring, which also can leave the reserve as eggs or larvae, eventually replenishing depleted stocks. The potential to support fisheries has great implications for food security: worldwide some 3 billion people get at least 20 percent of their animal protein from fish, but close to 90 percent of fish stocks are being fished at or beyond sustainable levels. There are also non-fishery benefits. Protected areas can attract more tourist dollars, helping offset MPA management costs. (See Table.)

Surveys of people living near reserves in Fiji, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands, support this point. Summarized in a report by The Nature Conservancy called Nature’s Investment Bank, the surveys pointed to improved fish catches outside MPA boundaries, increased protein intake, and even poverty alleviation—especially from new jobs in tourism.

Thus marine reserves are widely seen as a crucial tool in the conservation toolkit—one that is sorely needed as pressures on the world’s oceans continue to mount. Take the highly productive coral reefs that provide nurseries for fish, protect shorelines, and support the livelihoods of millions of people. Some 75 percent of the world’s coral reefs are threatened by overfishing, pollution, warming waters, and a host of other hazards. A 2013 study in Belize showed that protection from fishing and industrial activity bolsters reef resilience: coral reefs in marine reserves there may be six times more likely than unprotected ones to regrow after major disturbances such as hurricanes.

The world’s largest coral reef system, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, is home to probably the best known MPA, which opened in 1979. Spanning some 340,000 square kilometers, this park boasts incredible biodiversity, including more than 1,600 fish species, and brings in some $4 billion a year from tourism. Zoning plans developed in the 1980s made a scant 4.5 percent of the MPA off-limits to fishing and provided very uneven habitat protection. But in 2004, it was rezoned to better protect all 70 of its distinct habitat types—30 of them reef habitats, and the rest non-reef types such as mangroves. Now at least 20 percent of each of these “bioregions” is no-take and, all told, fishing is banned in one third of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

Nearly all no-take MPAs to date have been small and near to shore, but calls are growing for more set-asides of hundreds of thousands or even millions of square kilometers to create vast buffers around islands and to protect open ocean wilderness areas—and with them, conceivably, the entire life cycles of far-ranging marine species like sea turtles, sharks, and tunas. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Global Ocean Legacy project has been a prominent champion of the idea, working with scientists and both national and local governments to establish “the first generation of great marine parks around the globe by 2022.” It was integral, for example, in the U.S. designation of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in 2006, which protects 362,000 square kilometers around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. At the time this was by far the largest no-take marine reserve in the world.

Then in 2010 it was surpassed by another Pew-backed park when the United Kingdom declared a 640,000-square-kilometer reserve—larger than the United Kingdom itself—in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. In 2012, after an aggressive public outreach campaign led by Pew, Australia declared a 1-million-square-kilometer MPA adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea, half of it no-take. And Pew is also proposing a park around the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, another U.K. territory, that would add 830,000 square kilometers to the global no-take area.

Not all recent attempts to create large reserves have succeeded. In early November 2013, Russia, Ukraine, and China—worried about possible harm to their fishing interests—scuttled international talks on two massive proposed reserves in the Southern Ocean. This was the third time in a year that countries reached an impasse on the proposals, which would have banned fishing in 2.8 million square kilometers in Antarctic waters. Although proponents will resubmit the reserves for consideration in 2014, prospects look grim after this latest setback.

In addition to expanding the number and area of MPAs worldwide, another marine conservation priority is improving the effectiveness of existing parks. Most MPAs to date lack the trained staff and funding needed to properly manage them, making monitoring and enforcement of restrictions difficult and leading many to be dubbed “paper parks” (that is, protected on paper only). One encouraging attempt to address this problem is the Caribbean Challenge Initiative. With the backing of a $42-million endowment—funded by The Nature Conservancy, the Global Environment Fund, and the German Development Bank—10 Caribbean nations are developing national trust funds to be used solely to improve management of existing parks (land and marine) and to establish new ones that are effective from the start. Funds are set to be disbursed beginning in early 2014, as the countries move ahead on their overall goal of having at least 20 percent of their near-shore marine and coastal area in well-managed MPAs by 2020.

What would it take to run a global network of MPAs? In 2004, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the potential costs of administering a worldwide network that would conserve 20 percent or more of the world’s oceans. Based on data for over 80 existing MPAs, the authors conservatively estimated that such a network might cost $12.5 billion annually. What they concluded nearly a decade ago is still true today: we could protect a large chunk of our marine ecosystems for much less than the estimated $20 billion that governments spend to subsidize overfishing each year.

Well-designed and managed MPAs are only part of the puzzle in restoring fisheries and ocean ecosystems. Other important steps include putting stricter catch limits on fisheries, removing harmful fishing subsidies, and dramatically reducing the pollution entering the sea from farms, cities, and industry. Cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming, will also be essential to minimize the rise in temperatures and changing chemistry already undermining ocean ecosystems. Only by tackling all of these problems simultaneously will we have a decent chance at reversing marine decline. More

 

Into the Fire: Food in the Age of Climate Change

Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, points out that earlier civilizations often collapsed because of food shortages brought on by unsound agricultural practices.

The Sumerian civilization sank because their soil was ruined by rising salt levels, the result of a design flaw in their irrigation system. The Mayan empire fell due to soil erosion, caused by excessive land clearance to feed their population. We now stand in a similar position, facing an acute threat to our own food system, and the immediate danger comes from a changing climate. But there is a major difference between our civilization and earlier ones: we have a clear scientific understanding of the roots of the crisis and are thus in a better position to respond to it. Collapse is not inevitable. The big question we face is not a “why” but a “whether”: whether we will act effectively before it’s too late.

Brown also says, in the same context, that economic and social collapse was almost always preceded by a period of environmental decline. This indicates that there is generally a margin of time in which we can pull back from the brink. We’re now in that phase of decline, and the need to act promptly and decisively to preserve the world’s food system cannot be overemphasized. We’ve already delayed too long. At present close to a billion people suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition. If the food system fails to produce enough food to feed the planet, millions more, mostly children, will be consigned to a life of perpetual want, even to death by starvation. In countries stricken with food shortages, social chaos will erupt and food riots will break out. Migration will increase from poor countries to more affluent ones, triggering a backlash of resentment. States in the poorest regions will totter and fail, perhaps unleashing more waves of violent terrorism.

Avoiding such a fate requires rapid changes to our energy system, a transition from an economy driven by fossil fuels to a leaner economy powered by benign sources of energy. At the same time, we must promote greater equity between the global North and South in a collaborative effort to end hunger everywhere. Such changes, however, could not be easily implemented on the basis of our present scale of values, which exalts profits and economic expansion even by ripping apart the natural systems on which the economy depends. Our culture will have to change in its fundamentals: from one that celebrates luxury, power, and consumption to one that honors sufficiency, generosity, social justice, and the integrity of the biosphere.

The problem of food security is exacerbated by the projected rise in global population from 7 billion to 9.3 billion people by 2050. A growing population exerts more pressure on the world’s food supply not only because there will be many more mouths to feed, but also because more of those mouths will be eating higher on the food chain. As people in developing economies rise in social status they choose a diet rich in meat and dairy over one based primarily on plants. Since it takes several pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, grain stocks that would otherwise go to feed hungry people would instead be used to feed livestock in order to provide meat and dairy for the affluent. According to a recent report from the World Resources Institute, unless the affluent restrain their demand for animal products, worldwide food calories will need to increase by about 60 percent from 2006 levels if we’re to feed everyone adequately.

But while agriculture must be empowered to feed a larger population, it will have to employ methods of cultivation that minimize its negative impact on the environment. Modern industrial agriculture harms the environment in at least three ways: (1) by the degradation of ecosystems, particularly through deforestation and loss of biodiversity; (2) by its demands on the world’s sources of fresh water, 80 to 90% of which is used by agriculture; and (3) by emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases, which aggravate climate change. At present, agriculture accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. These include methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilizer use, and carbon dioxide from machinery, transport, and land use change. Meat and dairy production emits far higher amounts of greenhouse gases than crop cultivation, ranging from 16 times more for beef to 4.6 times more for chicken. This provides another strong argument for reducing consumption of meat. More

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: Quick Facts

With falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures making it difficult to feed growing populations, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Here are a few of the many facts from the book to consider:

 

• There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night—many of them with empty plates.
• As a result of chronic hunger, 48 percent of all children in India are undersized, underweight, and likely to have IQs that are on average 10-15 points lower than those of well-nourished children.
• Food prices are rising dramatically. The U.N. Food Price Index in June 2012 was twice the base level of 2002-04.
• More than half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling as aquifers are being depleted.
• A startling 80 percent of oceanic fisheries are being fished at or beyond their sustainable yield.
• Between 2005 and 2011, the amount of grain used to produce fuel for cars in the United States climbed from 41 million to 127 million tons—nearly a third of the U.S. grain harvest.
• In 2011, China consumed 70 million tons of soybeans, 56 million of which had to be imported. Almost all went into livestock feed.
• Today, with incomes rising fast in emerging economies, there are at least 3 billion people moving up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock and poultry products.
• Data for India indicate that 175 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. For China, there are 130 million in the same boat.
• In Ethiopia, a prime target for foreign land acquisitions yet also a major food aid recipient, an acre of land can be leased for less than $1 per year.
• The 464 land acquisitions identified by the World Bank in 2010 totaled some 140 million acres—more than is planted in corn and wheat combined in the United States.
• It’s not all bad news: 44 countries have reached population stability as a result of gradual fertility decline over the last several generations.

“In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.” – Lester R. Brown

 

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity is available for purchase online. Get a sneak peek by checking out Chapter 1: Food the Weak Link or watch the five minute video below and hear from Lester Brown himself about the main issues raised in the book.