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Across
Frontiers - 2005 Edition
Outgrowing the
Earth
Preface
of: Brown, LR (2004) Outgrowing the Earth. Norton. pp. xii
– xiv, New York, New York.
On hearing his political opponent described
as a modest chap, Winston Churchill reputedly responded that
“he has much to be modest about.” Having just completed
a book dealing with the increasingly complex issue of world
food security, I too feel that I have a lot be modest about.
Assessing the world food prospect was once
rather straightforward, largely a matter of extrapolating,
with minor adjustments, historically recent agricultural supply
and demand trends. Now suddenly that is all changing. It is
no longer just a matter of trends slowing or accelerating;
in some cases they are reversing direction.
Grain harvests that were once rising everywhere
are now falling in some countries. Fish catches that were
once rising are now falling. Irrigated area, once expanding
almost everywhere, is now shrinking in some key food-producing
regions.
Beyond this, some of the measures that
are used to expand food production today, such as over pumping
aquifers, almost guarantee a decline in food production tomorrow
when the aquifers are depleted and the well go dry. We have
entered an era of discontinuity on the food front, an era
where making reliable projections is ever more difficult.
New research shows that a 1 degree Celsius
rise in temperature leads to a decline in wheat, rice, and
corn yields of 10 percent. In a century where temperatures
could rise by several degrees Celsius, harvests could be devastated.
Although climate change is widely discussed,
we are slow to grasp its full meaning. Everyone knows the
earth’s temperature is rising, but commodity analysts
often condition their projections on weather returning to
“normal,” failing to realize that with climate now
in flux, there is no normal to return to.
Falling water tables are also undermining
food security. Water tables are now falling in countries that
contain more than half the world’s people. While there
is a broad realization that we are facing a future of water
shortages, not everyone connected the dots to see that a future
of water shortages will be a future of food shortages.
Perhaps the biggest agricultural reversal
in recent times has been the precipitous decline in China’s....
to be continued
in the next issue
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