The Guardian view on food security: if the dreamers lose, we face a nightmare

By the time nations once again get round a table in Paris in December to discuss climate change, hunger should be on the menu. Researchers have just warned that a new and aggressive strain of yellow rust fungus is now a threat to Britain’s wheat harvest.

Another team has calculated that average yields of wheat per field, which only two decades ago were rising rapidly, are now down 2.5%, and barley by 3.8%. In each case, the scientists identify climate change as a contributing factor. Global warming has barely begun but climate scientists have been warning about the consequences for food security for 30 years.

The two latest bits of research into wheat yields are not isolated indicators of tomorrow’s troubles. The big heat has yet to arrive. It will be catastrophic. Another group has studied the consequences for harvests of extremes of heat and calculated that for each 1C notch in the thermometer, global wheat yields could fall by 6%. Some latitudes will benefit, but overall, world harvests could fall. This is very bad news: wheat is one of the world’s staples, and the world’s largest source of vegetable protein. There are other factors at play in the fields. Within a decade, 2.9 billion people in 48 nations will experience chronic water scarcity, another research team warns.

Agriculture consumes 70% of the world water supplies and action is needed “to pre-empt looming conflicts born of desperation”. Separately, US geologists have used historical analyses to work out what modern agriculture does to topsoil. When European settlers took the plough to the American heartlands, erosion accelerated one hundred-fold. At peak, an inch of soil was lost every 25 years. Before the Europeans, wind and water erosion took 2,500 years to remove the same thin layer. Because of erosion, overgrazing and drought, the planet’s farmland is being degraded at a catastrophic rate. An estimated 10m hectares are now abandoned each year; something the size of a family farm every minute. And as the food supply is threatened, demand will accelerate. There will be many more hungry people at the table.

In the last year, researchers re-examined UN population projections and decided that the global numbers may not peak at 9 billion. By 2100, the world could be home to 12 billion and still rising. By 2100, according to business-as-usual climate projections, temperatures will have risen by 4C and sea levels by a metre or so. So land that is ever less productive will be expected to deliver vastly more food at ever greater cost in fossil fuel energy to feed increasingly conflict-torn nation states.

Solutions exist but none are easy. All will require a generous adjustment between the haves and the have-nots and sustained global cooperation. That sounds like a dream, but the alternative is a nightmare. The enduring lesson of history is that drought and famine feed conflict, and conflict breeds more privation, and despair. Come December, each aspect of the climate challenge will have become more pressing, and more complex. Everything should be on the table in Paris except perhaps, symbolically, lunch. More

 

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Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

World agriculture is now facing challenges unlike any before. Producing enough grain to make it to the next harvest has challenged farmers ever since agriculture began, but now the challenge is deepening as new trends—falling water tables, plateauing grain yields, and rising temperatures—join soil erosion to make it difficult to expand production fast enough.

As a result, world grain carryover stocks have dropped from an average of 107 days of consumption a decade or so ago to 74 days in recent years.

World food prices have more than doubled over the last decade. Those who live in the United States, where 9 percent of income goes for food, are largely insulated from these price shifts. But how do those who live on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder cope? They were already spending 50–70 percent of their income on food. Many were down to one meal a day before the price rises. Now millions of families routinely schedule one or more days each week when they will not eat at all.

What happens with the next price surge? Belt tightening has worked for some of the poorest people so far, but this cannot go much further. Spreading food unrest will likely lead to political instability. We could see a breakdown of political systems. Some governments may fall.

As food supplies have tightened, a new geopolitics of food has emerged—a world in which the global competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is fending for itself. We cannot claim that we are unaware of the trends that are undermining our food supply and thus our civilization. We know what we need to do.

There was a time when if we got into trouble on the food front, ministries of agriculture would offer farmers more financial incentives, like higher price supports, and things would soon return to normal. But responding to the tightening of food supplies today is a far more complex undertaking. It involves the ministries of energy, water resources, transportation, and health and family planning, among others. Because of the looming specter of climate change that is threatening to disrupt agriculture, we may find that energy policies will have an even greater effect on future food security than agricultural policies do. In short, avoiding a breakdown in the food system requires the mobilization of our entire society.

On the demand side of the food equation, there are four pressing needs—to stabilize world population, eradicate poverty, reduce excessive meat consumption, and reverse biofuels policies that encourage the use of food, land, or water that could otherwise be used to feed people. We need to press forward on all four fronts at the same time.

The first two goals are closely related. Indeed, stabilizing population depends on eliminating poverty. Even a cursory look at population growth rates shows that the countries where population size has stabilized are virtually all high-income countries. On the other side of the coin, nearly all countries with high population growth rates are on the low end of the global economic ladder.

The world needs to focus on filling the gap in reproductive health care and family planning while working to eradicate poverty. Progress on one will reinforce progress on the other. Two cornerstones of eradicating poverty are making sure that all children—both boys and girls—get at least an elementary school education and rudimentary health care. And the poorest countries need a school lunch program, one that will encourage families to send children to school and that will enable them to learn once they get there.

Shifting to smaller families has many benefits. For one, there will be fewer people at the dinner table. It comes as no surprise that a disproportionate share of malnutrition is found in larger families.

At the other end of the food spectrum, a large segment of the world’s people are consuming animal products at a level that is unhealthy and contributing to obesity and cardiovascular disease. The good news is that when the affluent consume less meat, milk, and eggs, it improves their health. When meat consumption falls in the United States, as it recently has, this frees up grain for direct consumption. Moving down the food chain also lessens pressure on the earth’s land and water resources. In short, it is a win-win-win situation.

Another initiative, one that can quickly lower food prices, is the cancellation of biofuel mandates. There is no social justification for the massive conversion of food into fuel for cars. With plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars coming to market that can run on local wind-generated electricity at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 80¢ per gallon, why keep burning costly fuel at four times the price?

On the supply side of the food equation, we face several challenges, including stabilizing climate, raising water productivity, and conserving soil. Stabilizing climate is not easy, but it can be done if we act quickly. It will take a huge cut in carbon emissions, some 80 percent within a decade, to give us a chance of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. This means a wholesale restructuring of the world energy economy.

The easiest way to do this is to restructure the tax system. The market has many strengths, but it also has some dangerous weaknesses. It readily captures the direct costs of mining coal and delivering it to power plants. But the market does not incorporate the indirect costs of fossil fuels in prices, such as the costs to society of global warming. Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, noted when releasing his landmark study on the costs of climate change that climate change was the product of a massive market failure.

The goal of restructuring taxes is to lower income taxes and raise carbon taxes so that the cost of climate change and other indirect costs of fossil fuel use are incorporated in market prices. If we can get the market to tell the truth, the transition from coal and oil to wind, solar, and geothermal energy will move very fast. If we remove the massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, we will move even faster. 10

Although to some people this energy transition may seem farfetched, it is moving ahead, and at an exciting pace in some countries. For example, four states in northern Germany now get at least 46 percent of their electricity from wind. For Denmark, the figure is 26 percent. In the United States, both Iowa and South Dakota now get one fifth of their electricity from wind farms. Solar power in Europe can now satisfy the electricity needs of some 15 million households. Kenya now gets one fifth of its electricity from geothermal energy. And Indonesia is shooting for 9,500 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity by 2025, which would meet 56 percent of current electricity needs. More

 

© 2014

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

 

The New Geopolitics of Food Security

Rising Temperature, Rising Food Prices

Agriculture as it exists today developed over 11,000 years of rather remarkable climate stability. It has evolved to maximize production within that climate system. Now, suddenly, the climate is changing. With each passing year, the agricultural system is becoming more out of sync with the climate system. 1

In generations past, when there was an extreme weather event, such as a monsoon failure in India, a severe drought in Russia, or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt, we knew that things would shortly return to normal. But today there is no “normal” to return to. The earth’s climate is now in a constant state of flux, making it both unreliable and unpredictable. 2

Since 1970, the earth’s average temperature has risen more than 1 degree Fahrenheit. (See Figure 8–1.) If we continue with business as usual, burning ever more oil, coal, and natural gas, it is projected to rise some 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century. The rise will be uneven. It will be much greater in the higher latitudes than in the equatorial regions, greater over land than over oceans, and greater in continental interiors than in coastal regions. 3

As the earth’s temperature rises, it affects agriculture in many ways. High temperatures interfere with pollination and reduce photosynthesis of basic food crops. The most vulnerable part of a plant’s life cycle is the pollination period. Of the world’s three food staples—corn, wheat, and rice—corn is particularly vulnerable. In order for corn to reproduce, pollen must fall from the tassel to the strands of silk that emerge from the end of each ear. Each of these silk strands is attached to a kernel site on the cob. If the kernel is to develop, a grain of pollen must fall on the silk strand and then journey to the kernel site where fertilization takes place. When temperatures are uncommonly high, the silk strands quickly dry out and turn brown, unable to play their role in the fertilization process.

When it comes to rice, the effects of temperature on pollination have been studied in detail in the Philippines. Scientists there report that the pollination of rice falls from 100 percent at 93 degrees Fahrenheit (34 degrees Celsius) to near zero at 104 degrees, leading to crop failure. 4

High temperatures can also dehydrate plants. When a corn plant curls its leaves to reduce exposure to the sun, photosynthesis is reduced. And when the stomata on the underside of the leaves close to reduce moisture loss, carbon dioxide (CO2) intake is also reduced, further restricting photosynthesis. At elevated temperatures, the corn plant, which under ideal conditions is so extraordinarily productive, goes into thermal shock.

In a study of local ecosystem sustainability, Mohan Wali and his colleagues at Ohio State University noted that as temperature rises, photosynthetic activity in plants increases until the temperature reaches 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The rate of photosynthesis then plateaus until the temperature reaches 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Beyond this point it declines, until at 104 degrees Fahrenheit, photosynthesis ceases entirely. 5

All of these changes affect crop yields. Crop ecologists in several countries have been focusing on the precise relationship between temperature and crop yields. Their findings suggest a rule of thumb that a 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season lowers wheat, rice, and corn yields by 10 percent. Some of the most comprehensive research on this topic comes from the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Crop yields from experimental field plots of irrigated rice dropped by 10 percent with a 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature. The scientists concluded that “temperature increases due to global warming will make it increasingly difficult to feed Earth’s growing population.” 6

Stanford University scientists David Lobell and Gregory Asner conducted an empirical analysis of the effect of temperature on U.S. corn and soybean yields. They found that higher temperatures during the growing season had an even greater effect on yields of these crops than many scientists had reckoned. Using data for 1982–98 from 618 counties for corn and 444 counties for soybeans, they concluded that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature, yields of each crop declined by 17 percent. This study suggests that the earlier rule of thumb that a 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature would reduce yields by 10 percent could be conservative. 7

The earth’s rising temperature also affects crop yields indirectly via the melting of mountain glaciers. As the larger glaciers shrink and the smaller ones disappear, the ice melt that sustains rivers, and the irrigation systems dependent on them, will diminish. In early 2012, a release from the University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service indicated that 2010 was the twenty-first consecutive year of glacier retreat. They also noted that glaciers are now melting at least twice as fast as a decade ago. 8

Mountain glaciers are melting in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, and elsewhere, but nowhere does melting threaten world food security more than in the glaciers of the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau that feed the major rivers of India and China. It is the ice melt that keeps these rivers flowing during the dry season. In the Indus, Ganges, Yellow, and Yangtze River basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, the loss of glacial-fed, dry-season flow will shrink harvests and could create unmanageable food shortages. 9

In China, which is even more dependent than India on river water for irrigation, the situation is particularly challenging. Chinese government data show that the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau that feed the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers are melting at a torrid pace. The Yellow River, whose basin is home to 153 million people, could experience a large dry-season flow reduction. The Yangtze River, by far the larger of the two, is threatened by the disappearance of glaciers as well. The basin’s 586 million people rely heavily on rice from fields irrigated with its water. 10

Yao Tandong, one of China’s leading glaciologists, predicts that two thirds of China’s glaciers could be gone by 2060. “The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau region,” Yao says, “will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.” 11

The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia. China and India are the world’s top two wheat producers, and they also totally dominate the rice harvest. 12

Agriculture in the Central Asian countries of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan depends heavily on snowmelt from the Hindu Kush, Pamir, and Tien Shan mountain ranges for irrigation water. Nearby Iran gets much of its water from the snowmelt in the 18,000-foot-high Alborz Mountains between Tehran and the Caspian Sea. The glaciers in these ranges also appear vulnerable to rising temperatures. 13

In the Andes, a number of small glaciers have already disappeared, such as the Chacaltaya in Bolivia and Cotacachi in Ecuador. Within a couple of decades, numerous other glaciers are expected to follow suit, disrupting local hydrological patterns and agriculture. For places that rely on glacial melt for household and irrigation use, this is not good news. 14

Peru, which stretches some 1,100 miles along the vast Andean mountain range and is the site of 70 percent of the earth’s tropical glaciers, is in trouble. Its glaciers, which feed the many Peruvian rivers that supply water to the cities in the semiarid coastal regions, have lost 22 percent of their area. Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson reported in 2007 that the Quelccaya Glacier in southern Peru, which was retreating by 6 meters per year in the 1960s, was by then retreating by 60 meters annually. In an interview with Science News in early 2009, he said, “It’s now retreating up the mountainside by about 18 inches a day, which means you can almost sit there and watch it lose ground.” 15

Many of Peru’s farmers irrigate their wheat, rice, and potatoes with the river water from these disappearing glaciers. During the dry season, farmers are totally dependent on irrigation water. For Peru’s 30 million people, shrinking glaciers could mean shrinking harvests. 16

Throughout the Andean region, climate change is contributing to water scarcity. Barbara Fraser writes in The Daily Climate that “experts predict that climate change will exacerbate water scarcity, increasing conflicts between competing users, pitting city dwellers against rural residents, people in dry lands against those in areas with abundant rainfall and Andean mining companies against neighboring farm communities.” 17

In the southwestern United States, the Colorado River—the region’s primary source of irrigation water—depends on snowfields in the Rockies for much of its flow. California, in addition to depending heavily on the Colorado, relies on snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada range in the eastern part of the state. Both the Sierra Nevada and the coastal range supply irrigation water to California’s Central Valley, the country’s fruit and vegetable basket. 18

With the continued heavy burning of fossil fuels, global climate models project a 70-percent reduction in the amount of snow pack for the western United States by mid-century. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy did a detailed study of the Yakima River Valley, a vast fruit-growing region in Washington State. It projected progressively heavier harvest losses as the snow pack shrinks, reducing irrigation water flows. 19

Even as the melting of glaciers threatens dry-season river flows, the melting of mountain glaciers and of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is raising sea level and thus threatening the rice-growing river deltas of Asia. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would raise sea level 23 feet. The latest projections show sea level rising by up to 6 feet during this century. Such a rise would sharply reduce the rice harvest in Asia, home to over half the world’s people. Even half that rise would inundate half the riceland in Bangladesh, a country of 152 million people, and would submerge a large part of the Mekong Delta, a region that produces half of Viet Nam’s rice, leaving the many countries that import rice from it looking elsewhere. 20

In addition to the Gangetic and Mekong Deltas, numerous other rice-growing river deltas in Asia would be submerged in varying degrees by a 6-foot rise in sea level. It is not intuitively obvious that ice melting on a large island in the far North Atlantic could shrink the rice harvest in Asia, but it is true. 21

Scientists also expect higher temperatures to bring more drought—witness the dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the United States reported that the earth’s land area experiencing very dry conditions expanded from well below 20 percent from the 1950s to the 1970s to closer to 25 percent in recent years. The scientists attributed most of the change to a rise in temperature and the remainder to reduced precipitation. The drying was concentrated in the Mediterranean region, East and South Asia, mid-latitude Canada, Africa, and eastern Australia. 22

A 2009 report published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reinforced these findings. It concluded that if atmospheric CO2 climbs from the current level of 391 parts per million (ppm) to above 450 ppm, the world will face irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions. The study likened the conditions to those of the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Physicist Joe Romm, drawing on recent climate research, reports that “levels of aridity comparable to those in the Dust Bowl could stretch from Kansas to California by mid-century.” 23

Rising temperatures also fuel wildfires. Anthony Westerling of Scripps Institution and colleagues found that the average wildfire season in the western United States has lengthened by 78 days from the period 1970–86 to 1987–2003 as temperatures increased an average 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking forward, researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service drew on 85 years of fire and temperature records to project that a 2.9-degree-Fahrenheit rise in summer temperature could double the area of wildfires in the 11 western states. 24

In addition to more widespread drought and more numerous wildfires, climate change brings more extreme heat waves. One of the most destructive of these came in the U.S. Midwest in 1988. Combined with drought, as most heat waves are, this one dropped the U.S. grain harvest from an annual average of 324 million tons in the preceding years to 204 million tons. Fortunately, the United States—the world’s dominant grain supplier—had substantial stocks at that time that it could draw upon, allowing it to meet its export commitments. If such a drop were to occur today, when grain stocks are seriously depleted, there would be panic in the world grain market. 25

Another extreme heat wave came in Western Europe in the late summer of 2003. It claimed some 52,000 lives. France and Italy were hit hardest. And London experienced its first 100-degree-Fahrenheit temperature reading in its history. Fortunately the wheat crop was largely harvested when this late-summer heat wave began, so the losses in that sector were modest. 26

In the summer of 2010, Russia experienced an extraordinary heat wave unlike anything it had seen before. The July temperature in Moscow averaged a staggering 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm. High temperatures sparked wildfires, which caused an estimated $300 billion worth of damage to the country’s forests. In addition to claiming nearly 56,000 lives, this heat wave reduced the Russian grain harvest from nearly 100 million tons to 60 million tons. Russia, which had been an exporting country, suddenly banned exports. 27

Close on the heels of these unprecedented high temperatures in Russia was the 2011 heat wave in Texas, a leading U.S. agricultural state. In Dallas, located in the Texas heartland, the average temperature reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 40 consecutive days, shattering all records. It also forced many farmers into bankruptcy. More than a million acres of crops were never harvested. Many ranchers in this leading cattle-producing state had to sell their herds. They had no forage, no water, and no choice. The heat and drought in Texas broke almost all records in the state’s history for both intensity and duration. Agricultural damage was estimated to exceed $7 billion. 28

As the earth’s temperature rises, scientists expect heat waves to be both more frequent and more intense. Stated otherwise, crop-shrinking heat waves will now become part of the agricultural landscape. Among other things, this means that the world should increase its carryover stocks of grain to provide adequate food security. 29

The continuing loss of mountain glaciers and the resulting reduced meltwater runoff could create unprecedented water shortages and political instability in some of the world’s more densely populated countries. China, already struggling to contain food price inflation, could well see spreading social unrest if food supplies tighten. 30

For Americans, the melting of the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau would appear to be China’s problem. It is. But it is also a problem for the entire world. For low-income grain consumers, this melting poses a nightmare scenario. If China enters the world market for massive quantities of grain, as it has already done for soybeans over the last decade, it will necessarily come to the United States—far and away the leading grain exporter. The prospect of 1.35 billion Chinese with rapidly rising incomes competing for the U.S. grain harvest, and thus driving up food prices for all, is not an attractive one. 31 More

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity By Lester R Brown

Chapter 1. Food: The Weak Link

Over the next several weeks, the Earth Policy Institute will be releasing Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity by Lester R. Brown in installments. Look for a new chapter about every other week. Supporting data, videos, and slideshows are available for free download at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep.

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold. 1

 

The abrupt rise in world grain prices between 2007 and 2008 left more people hungry than at any time in history. It also spawned numerous food protests and riots. In Thailand, rice was so valuable that farmers took to guarding their ripened fields at night. In Egypt, fights in the long lines for state-subsidized bread led to six deaths. In poverty-stricken Haiti, days of rioting left five people dead and forced the Prime Minister to resign. In Mexico, the government was alarmed when huge crowds of tortilla protestors took to the streets. 2

After the doubling of world grain prices between 2007 and mid-2008, prices dropped somewhat during the recession, but this was short-lived. Three years later, high food prices helped fuel the Arab Spring. 3

We are entering a new era of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts. On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system. Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century civilization, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilizations whose archeological sites we now study?

This tightening of world food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century, when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. During that time, the world in effect had two reserves: large carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) and a large area of cropland idled under U.S. farm programs to avoid overproduction. When the world harvest was good, the United States would idle more land. When the harvest was subpar, it would return land to production. The excess production capacity was used to maintain stability in world grain markets. The large stocks of grain cushioned world crop shortfalls. When India’s monsoon failed in 1965, for example, the United States shipped a fifth of its wheat harvest to India to avert a potentially massive famine. And because of abundant stocks, this had little effect on the world grain price. 4

When this period of food abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people. Today it has 7 billion. From 1950 to 2000 there were occasional grain price spikes as a result of weather-induced events, such as a severe drought in Russia or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. But their effects on price were short-lived. Within a year or so things were back to normal. The combination of abundant stocks and idled cropland made this period one of the most food-secure in world history. But it was not to last. By 1986, steadily rising world demand for grain and unacceptably high budgetary costs led to a phasing out of the U.S. cropland set-aside program. 5

Today the United States has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land that is highly susceptible to erosion. The days of productive land ready to be quickly brought into production when needed are over. 6

Ever since agriculture began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of food security. The goal of farmers everywhere is to produce enough grain not just to make it to the next harvest but to do so with a comfortable margin. From 1986, when we lost the idled cropland buffer, through 2001, the annual world carryover stocks of grain averaged a comfortable 107 days of consumption. 7

This safety cushion was not to last either. After 2001, the carryover stocks of grain dropped sharply as world consumption exceeded production. From 2002 through 2011, they averaged only 74 days of consumption, a drop of one third. An unprecedented period of world food security has come to an end. 8

When world grain supplies tightened in 2007, there was no idled U.S. cropland to quickly return to production and there were no excess grain stocks to draw upon. Within two decades, the world had lost both of its safety cushions.

The world is now living from one year to the next, hoping always to produce enough to cover the growth in demand. Farmers everywhere are making an all-out effort to keep pace with the accelerated growth in demand, but they are having difficulty doing so.

Today the temptation for exporting countries to restrict exports in order to dampen domestic food price rises is greater than ever. With another big jump in grain prices, we could see a breakdown in the world food supply system. If countries give in to the temptation to restrict exports, some lower-income importing countries might not be able to import any grain at all. When could this happen? We are not talking about the distant future. It could be anytime.

Food shortages undermined earlier civilizations. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early civilizations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil as a result of a defect in their otherwise well-engineered irrigation system eventually brought down their food system and thus their civilization. For the Mayans, soil erosion was one of the keys to their downfall, as it was for so many other early civilizations. We, too, are on such a path. While the Sumerians suffered from rising salt levels in the soil, our modern-day agriculture is suffering from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And like the Mayans, we too are mismanaging our land and generating record losses of soil from erosion. 9

While the decline of early civilizations can be traced to one or possibly two environmental trends such as deforestation and soil erosion that undermined their food supply, we are now dealing with several. In addition to some of the most severe soil erosion in human history, we are also facing newer trends such as the depletion of aquifers, the plateauing of grain yields in the more agriculturally advanced countries, and rising temperature.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the U.N. Food Price Index was at 201 in June 2012, twice the base level of 100 in 2002–04. (See Figure 1–1.) For most Americans, who spend on average 9 percent of their income on food, this is not a big deal. But for consumers who spend 50–70 percent of their income on food, a doubling of food prices is a serious matter. There is little latitude for them to offset the price rise simply by spending more. 10

Closely associated with the decline in stocks of grain and the rise in food prices is the spread of hunger. During the closing decades of the last century, the number of hungry people in the world was falling, dropping to a low of 792 million in 1997. After that it began to rise, climbing toward 1 billion. Unfortunately, if we continue with business as usual, the ranks of the hungry will continue to expand. 11

Those trapped between low incomes and the doubling of world food prices are forced to eat less. Most of the nearly 1 billion people who are chronically hungry and malnourished live in the Indian subcontinent or sub-Saharan Africa. There are pockets of hunger elsewhere, but these are the two remaining regions where hunger is pervasive. India, which now has a thriving economy, should be experiencing a steady decline in the number who are hungry and malnourished. But it is not, presumably because rising incomes among the poor cannot keep up with rising food prices. 12

In a hungry world, it is children who suffer the most. Rising world food prices are leaving millions of children dangerously hungry. Some are too weak to walk to school. Many are so nutritionally deprived that they are physically and mentally stunted. Neither we nor they will ever know what their full human potential could be. The costs of this will be visible for decades to come. 13

As a result of chronic hunger, 48 percent of all children in India are stunted physically and mentally. They are undersized, underweight, and likely to have IQs that are on average 10–15 points lower than those of well-nourished children. 1

In early 2012, Adam Nossiter wrote in the New York Times about the effect of high food prices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country where hunger is common. Interviewing individual families in Kinshasa, he noted that three years ago everyone ate at least one meal a day. But today even families with both parents working often cannot afford to eat every day. It is now a given in many households that some days will be foodless, days when they will not eat at all. Selecting the days when they will not eat is a weekly routine. 15

The international charity Save the Children commissioned detailed surveys in five countries—India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Peru, and Bangladesh—to see how people were dealing with rising food prices. Among other things, they learned that 24 percent of families in India now have foodless days. For Nigeria, the comparable figure is 27 percent. For Peru it is 14 percent. Family size plays an important role in hunger. Almost one third of large families in all countries surveyed have foodless days. 16

Historically there have been two sources of grain demand growth. The oldest of these is population growth. Each year the world adds nearly 80 million people. Tonight there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table who were not there last night, many of them with empty plates. Tomorrow night there will be another 219,000 people. Relentless population growth is putting excessive pressure on local land and water resources in many countries, making it difficult if not impossible for farmers to keep pace. 17

The second source of growing demand for grain is consumers moving up the food chain. As incomes rose in industrial countries after World War II, people began to consume more grain-intensive livestock and poultry products: meat, milk, and eggs. Today, with incomes rising fast in emerging economies, there are at least 3 billion people moving up the food chain in the same way. The largest single concentration of these new meat eaters is in China, which now consumes twice as much meat as the United States does. 18

Now there is a third source of demand for grain: the automobile. Distillers use grain to produce fuel ethanol for cars, an activity that is concentrated in the United States and that has developed largely since 2005. In 2011, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain. Of this, 127 million tons (32 percent) went to ethanol distilleries. 19

With this massive industrial capacity to convert grain into automotive fuel, the price of grain is now more closely linked to the price of oil than ever before. As the price of oil rises, it becomes more profitable to convert grain into ethanol. This sets the stage for competition for the grain harvest between the affluent owners of the world’s 1 billion automobiles and the world’s poorest people. 20

Population growth, the rising consumption of livestock and poultry products, and the use of grain to fuel cars together raised the world growth in grain consumption from an average of 21 million tons per year from 1990 to 2005 to 45 million tons per year from 2005 to 2011. Almost overnight, the annual growth in grain consumption doubled. 21

At a time when the world’s farmers are facing this record growth in food demand, they continue to wrestle with the traditional threats to production such as soil erosion. But now they are also looking at three new challenges on the production front. One, aquifers are being depleted and irrigation wells are starting to go dry in 18 countries that together contain half the world’s people. Two, in some of the more agriculturally advanced countries, rice and wheat yield per acre, which have been rising steadily for several decades, are beginning to plateau. And three, the earth’s temperature is rising, threatening to disrupt world agriculture in scary ways. 22

The countries where water tables are falling and aquifers are being depleted include the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States. World Bank data for India indicate that 175 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. My own estimate for China is that 130 million people are being fed by overpumping. In the United States, the irrigated area is shrinking in leading agricultural states such as California and Texas as aquifers are depleted and irrigation water is diverted to cities. 23

Second, after several decades of rising grain yields, some of the more agriculturally advanced countries are hitting a glass ceiling, a limit that was not widely anticipated. Rice yields in Japan, which over a century ago became the first country to launch a sustained rise in land productivity, have not increased for 17 years. In both Japan and South Korea, yields have plateaued at just under 5 tons per hectare. (One hectare = 2.47 acres.) China’s rice yields, rising rapidly in recent decades, are now closely approaching those of Japan. If China cannot raise its rice yields above those in Japan, and it does not seem likely that it can, then a plateauing there too is imminent. 24

A similar situation exists with wheat yields. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—the three leading wheat producers in Europe—there has been no rise for more than a decade. Other advanced countries will soon be hitting their glass ceiling for grain yields. 25

The third new challenge confronting farmers is global warming. The massive burning of fossil fuels is increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, raising the earth’s temperature and disrupting climate. It is now in a state of flux. Historically when there was an extreme weather event—an intense heat wave or a drought—we knew it was temporary and that things would likely be back to normal by the next harvest. Now there is no “norm” to return to, leaving farmers facing a future fraught with risk. 26

High temperatures can lower crop yields. The widely used rule of thumb is that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season farmers can expect a 10-percent decline in grain yields. A historical study of the effect of temperature on corn and soybean yields in the United States found that a 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature reduced grain yields 17 percent. Yet if the world continues with business as usual, failing to address the climate issue, the earth’s temperature during this century could easily rise by 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit). 27

In recent years, world carryover stocks of grain have been, only slightly above the 70 days that was considered a desirable minimum during the late twentieth century. Now stock levels must take into account the effect on harvests of higher temperatures, more extensive drought, and more intense heat waves. Although there is no easy way to precisely quantify the harvest effects of any of these climate-related threats, it is clear that any of them can shrink harvests, potentially creating chaos in the world grain market. To mitigate this risk, a stock reserve equal to 110 days of consumption would produce a much safer level of food security. 28

Although we talk about food price spikes, what we are more likely starting to see is a ratcheting upward of food prices. This process is likely to continue until we succeed in reversing some of the trends that are driving it. All of the threatening trends are of human origin, but whether we can reverse them remains to be seen.

As food supplies tighten, the geopolitics of food is fast overshadowing the geopolitics of oil. The first signs of trouble came in 2007, when world grain production fell behind demand. Grain and soybean prices started to climb, doubling by mid-2008. In response, many exporting countries tried to curb rising domestic food prices by restricting exports. Among them were Russia and Argentina, two leading wheat exporters. Viet Nam, the world’s number two rice exporter, banned exports entirely in the early months of 2008. Several other smaller grain suppliers also restricted exports. 29

With key suppliers restricting or banning exports, importing countries panicked. No longer able to rely on the market for grain, several countries tried to negotiate long-term grain supply agreements with exporting countries. The Philippines, a chronically rice-deficit country, attempted to negotiate a three-year agreement with Viet Nam for 1.5 million tons of rice per year. A delegation of Yemenis traveled to Australia with a similar goal in mind for wheat, but they had no luck. In a seller’s market, exporters were reluctant to make long-term commitments. 30

Fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some of the more affluent countries, led by Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea, then took the unusual step of buying or leasing land long term in other countries on which to grow food for themselves. These land acquisitions have since grown rapidly in number. Most of them are in Africa. Among the principal destinations for land hunters are Ethiopia, Sudan, and South Sudan, each of them countries where millions of people are being sustained with food donations from the U.N. World Food Programme. 31

As of mid-2012, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated or were under negotiation, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2011 World Bank analysis of these “land grabs” reported that at least 140 million acres were involved—an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in the United States. This onslaught of land acquisitions has become a land rush as governments, agribusiness firms, and private investors seek control of land wherever they can find it. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate newly planted crops in Ethiopia, Sudan, or South Sudan, for instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries that Egypt must compete with for water. 32

The potential for conflict is high. Many of the land deals have been made in secret, and much of the time the land involved was already being farmed by villagers when it was sold or leased. Often those already farming the land were neither consulted nor even informed of the new arrangements. And because there typically are no formal land titles in many developing-country villages, the farmers who lost their land have had little support for bringing their cases to court. 33

The bottom line is that it is becoming much more difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the world’s rapidly growing demand for grain. World grain stocks were drawn down a decade ago and we have not been able to rebuild them. If we cannot do so, we can expect that with the next poor harvest, food prices will soar, hunger will intensify, and food unrest will spread. We are entering a time of chronic food scarcity, one that is leading to intense competition for control of land and water resources—in short, a new geopolitics of food.

ENDNOTES:

1. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Production, Supply and Distribution, electronic database, at www.fas.usda.gov/psdonline, updated 12 June 2012; U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “FAO Food Price Index,” at www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en, updated 5 July 2012.

2. Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) futures data from TradingCharts.com, Inc., “Oilseed & Grain Futures/Commodities Charts/Quotes,” at futures.tradingcharts.com/grains_oilseeds.html, viewed 5 June 2012; International Monetary Fund (IMF), “IMF Primary Commodity Prices,” at www.imf.org/external/np/res/commod/index.aspx, updated 6 July 2012; FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011: How Does International Price Volatility Affect Domestic Economies and Food Security? (Rome: 2011), pp. 44–47; Ian MacKinnon, “Farmers Fall Prey to Rice Rustlers as Price of Staple Crop Rockets,” (London) Guardian, 31 March 2008; Ellen Knickermeyer, “In Egypt, Upper Crust Gets the Bread,” Washington Post, 5 April 2008; James Bone, “UN Peacekeeper Killed in Haiti Riots Over Food Prices,” (London) The Times, 14 April 2008; Ronald Buchanan, “Mexico Protest Prompts Food Price Assurance,” Financial Times, 1 February 2007.

3. CBOT futures data from TradingCharts.com, Inc., op. cit. note 2; IMF, op. cit. note 2; Christian Parenti, “The Price of Bread: A Measure of Political Stability,” Mother Jones, 19 July 2011.

4. Douglas E. Bowers, Wayne D. Rasmussen, and Gladys L. Baker, History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Program, 1933–1985 (Washington, DC: USDA, 1984); Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 145–46; historical grain prices from IMF, International Financial Statistics, electronic database, at www.imfstatistics.org/imf, various years.

5. U.N. Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, electronic database, at esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm, updated 3 May 2011; historical grain prices from IMF, op. cit. note 4; USDA, op. cit. note 1; Bowers, Rasmussen, and Baker, op. cit. note 4.

6. Tadlock Cowan, Conservation Reserve Program: Status and Current Issues (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 22 January 2010), p. 1.

7. USDA, op. cit. note 1.

8. Ibid.

9. Sandra Postel, Pillar of Sand (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), pp. 13–21; Michon Scott, “Mayan Mysteries,” in National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Earth Science Data and Information Systems Project, Supporting Earth Observing Science 2004 (Washington, DC: 2004), pp. 37–43; Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin Group, 2005).

10. Figure 1–1 from FAO, op. cit. note 1; food expenditures from USDA, “Table 7: Food Expenditures by Families and Individuals as a Share of Disposable Personal Income,” at www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data/Expenditures_tables/table7.htm, updated 13 July 2011, from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), “Food Price Crisis and Financial Crisis Present Double Threat for Poor People,” press release (Washington, DC: 1 December 2008), and from Joachim von Braun, Food and Financial Crises: Implications for Agriculture and the Poor (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2008), p. 5.

11. FAO, op. cit. note 2, pp. 44–47.

12. Ibid.; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Economic Surveys: India 2011 (Paris: 2011).

13. Save the Children, A Life Free from Hunger: Tackling Child Malnutrition (London: 2012).

14. Ibid., p. iv; International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and Macro International, National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), 2005–06: India: Volume I (Mumbai, India: IIPS, 2007), p. 269; Susan Horton, “Opportunities for Investments in Nutrition in Low-income Asia,” Asian Development Review, vol. 17, nos. 1, 2 (1999), pp. 246–73.

15. Adam Nossiter, “For Congo Children, Food Today Means None Tomorrow,” New York Times, 2 January 2012; Deutsche Welthungerhilfe, IFPRI, and Concern Worldwide, 2011 Global Hunger Index: The Challenge of Hunger: Taming Price Spikes and Excessive Food Price Volatility (Bonn, Washington, DC; and Dublin: 2011), p. 17.

16. GlobeScan Inc., “Multi-country Nutrition Poll 2011 Topline Report,” as commissioned by Save the Children (London: 17 February 2012), pp. 5, 11, 12.

17. U.N. Population Division, op. cit. note 5.

18. FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2009 (Rome: 2009), p. 12; USDA, op. cit. note 1.

19. Lester R. Brown, “Exploding U.S. Grain Demand for Automotive Fuel Threatens World Food Security and Political Stability,” Plan B Update (Washington, DC: Earth Policy Institute, 3 November 2006); Lester R. Brown, “Distillery Demand for Grain to Fuel Cars Vastly Understated: World May Be Facing Highest Grain Prices in History,” Plan B Update (Washington, DC: Earth Policy Institute, 4 January 2007); F.O. Licht, World Ethanol and Biofuels Report, vol. 10, no. 16 (24 April 2012), p. 323; USDA, op. cit. note 1; USDA, Feed Grains Database, electronic database, at www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/feed-grains-database.aspx, downloaded 16 May 2012.

20. Ward’s Automotive Group, World Motor Vehicle Data 2011 (Southfield, MI: 2011).

21. USDA, op. cit. note 1.

22. Countries with water bubbles from Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 43; from Isam E. Amin et al., “Major Problems Affecting the Principal Aquifers in Lebanon,” in Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 40, no. 6 (2008), p. 471; from Dale Lightfoot, Survey of Infiltration Karez in Northern Iraq: History and Current Status of Underground Aqueducts (Paris: UNESCO, September 2009); from “Afghanistan: Groundwater Overuse Could Cause Severe Water Shortage,” Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) News, 14 September 2008; and from U.N. Population Division, op. cit. note 5.

23. USDA, op. cit. note 1; John Briscoe and R. P. S. Malik, India’s Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006); U.N. Population Division, op. cit. note 5; USDA, Census of Agriculture: Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey (Washington, DC: various years).

24. Lester R. Brown, Increasing World Food Output: Problems and Prospects (Washington, DC: USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS), 1965), pp. 13–14; USDA, op. cit. note 1.

25. FAO, FAOSTAT, electronic database, at faostat.fao.org, updated 23 February 2012.

26. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2; IPCC, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the IPCC (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 111–14.

27. John E. Sheehy, International Rice Research Institute, e-mail to Janet Larsen, Earth Policy Institute, 1 October 2002; David Lobell and Gregory Asner, “Climate and Management Contributions to Recent Trends in U.S. Agricultural Yields,” Science, vol. 299, no. 5609 (14 February 2003), p. 1,032; IPCC, Climate Change 2007, op. cit. note 26, p. 749.

28. USDA, op. cit. note 1; Brian Wright, International Grain Reserves and Other Instruments to Address Volatility in Grain Markets, Working Paper presented at the World Grain Forum 2009, St. Petersburg , Russia, 6–7 June 2009, p. 22.

29. USDA, op. cit. note 1; CBOT futures data from TradingCharts.com, Inc., op. cit. note 2; IMF, op. cit. note 2; Financial Times, “In Depth: The Global Food Crisis,” at www.ft.com/foodprices, updated 6 May 2008; USDA, ERS, “U.S. Rice Industry: Background Statistics and Information,” at www.ers.usda.gov/news/ricecoverage.htm, updated 30 April 2008; FAO, “Soaring Food Prices: Facts, Perspectives, Impacts and Actions Required,” paper presented at High-level Conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy, Rome, 3–5 June 2008.

30. Office of the President, Republic of the Philippines, “RP Assured of 1.5 Million Metric Tons of Rice Supply from Vietnam Annually,” press release (Manila: 26 March 2008); USDA, op. cit. note 1; “Yemen to Seek Australian Food Cooperation,” WorldGrain.com, 19 May 2008; “Bahrain to Own Rice Farms in Thailand,” TradeArabia News Service, 30 May 2008; Javier Blas, “Nations Make Secret Deals Over Grain,” Financial Times, 10 April 2008.

31. GRAIN, Seized! The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security (Barcelona: October 2008); Joachim von Braun and Ruth Meinzen-Dick, “Land Grabbing” by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries, Policy Brief No. 13 (Washington, DC: IFPRI, April 2009); Klaus Deininger and Derek Byerlee, Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? (Washington, DC: World Bank, January 2011); George C. Schoneveld, The Anatomy of Large-scale Farmland Acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Working Paper 85 (Bogor, Indonesia: Center for International Forestry Research, 2011); Fred Pearce, The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012); U.N. World Food Programme, “Countries,” at www.wfp.org/countries, viewed 17 June 2012.

32. Deininger and Byerlee, op. cit. note 31, p. 51; USDA, op. cit. note 1; Karen Frenken and Jean-Marc Faurès, Irrigation Potential in Africa: A Basin Approach (Rome: FAO, 1997), at http://www.fao.org/docrep/w4347e/w4347e00.htm

33. Deininger and Byerlee, op. cit. note 31, p. 49; John Vidal, “Fears for the World’s Poor Countries as the Rich Grab Land to Grow Food,” (London) Guardian, 3 July 2009.

Copyright © 2012 Earth Policy Institute

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Recalibrating Food Production in the Developing World: Global Warming Will Change More Than Just the Climate

Recalibrating Food Production in the Developing World: Global Warming Will Change More Than Just the Climate - Author: Thornton, P

Abstract: An analysis of the effects of climate change on 22 critical agricultural commodities and three important natural resources in the developing world reveals a number of cross-cutting themes: The world’s agricultural systems face an uphill struggle in feeding a projected nine to ten billion people by 2050. Climate change introduces a significant hurdle in this struggle.

- Securing and maintaining necessary levels of calories, protein and nutrients for populations around the world will be an exceptional challenge.

- Recalibrating agriculture in the face of climate change is more than planting crops that can tolerate warmer weather. Some commodities, for example, can grow in warm weather but cannot resist the insects and diseases whose prevalence will increase. Others can tolerate

a lack of water but not the sporadic flooding that occurs with more common weather extremes.

- Even as global deforestation continues, trees continue to be valued as a provider of agricultural commodities like nuts and fruit; as a mitigating resource that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; and also as a staple of adaptation—trees help stabilize soil erosion, better regulate water, as well as provide shade, firewood and fodder.

- Production of the most common commodity staples—wheat, maize and rice—will be challenged by new weather patterns. Adjustments in production, replacement with commodities that can tolerate the new conditions in different regions, and innovations in technology are key elements of adaptation.

- Raising livestock and catching fish and other aquatic products—two of the more common sources of protein—will also be challenged by a new climate. In some areas, different plants, breeds and species can provide substitutions, but in others, adaptation is critical.

- This recalibration of agriculture will eventually extend beyond what is grown and raised. The world’s many cultures must adapt to the changing dinner menu forced upon them due to climate change.

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