Is Famine Coming? This Is Not Just a Repeat of Past Crises

Paul Roberts says the global food shortage is already here.

HOLLY NOTE: As you read through today's "food articles", a distinct, unmistakable picture forms. Crops plantings were delayed due to a cool Spring, and if they are sowed as late as June 20, it reduces harvest by 50%. Where crops were already planted, cold stunted their growth and left them unable to cope with the flood. Weather, as we have warned for the past 6 months, has taken a terrible toll on crops. Floods, hail and tornadoes have hammered America's breadbasket. Drought is killing California's huge agriculture belt and hitting crops in the Southeast this year. Decimated bee populations have added to crop decline. Grain reserves are non-existent. Wheat that hasn't drowned or fried is being attacked by rust and head scab. Mysterious circumstances surround grain elevators burning and collapsing and escalate food costs It's not just corn, but wheat, soy, apples, rice, cotton, lettuce, potatoes, almond, tomatoes, and on and on and on. Daily news address rampant concerns over rice, wheat, corn and soybean shortages. And now food rationing and hoarding is creeping into reality... Riots and food protests have already hit many nations: South Africa, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza, Kenya, Nicaragua, Mexico, Bahrain, the Emirates, Italy, Russia, Indonesia, Egypt in addition to Haiti, Cameroon, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Bolivia, Peru, Thailand, Somali, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan, Yemen, India, and the Philippines. After the Mexican tortillas riots 6 months ago, corn tortillas are going up another 18%. With food shortages threatening to become the biggest crisis of the 21st century, you can bet food riots are coming to America. Stock up now - buy in bulk - and pack for long-term storage grain products, flour, rice, beans, powdered milk and any other foods you regularly consume. The longer you delay, prices are only going to escalate, your options will dwindle, along with selection. Please do this before your options close. When reading news articles, it is our hope you'll read beyond the headlines and hear the unspoken message - a quiet urging to prepare.

June 18, 2008
Paul Roberts

Today's question: Many experts believe we're heading for a major global food shortage this year. Are we? If so, what's the solution?

We're not "headed" for a major global food shortage this year -- it's already here. Because of a perfect storm of drought, booming demand from Asia and ill-considered energy policy, global grain reserves have fallen to their lowest level in half a century. The real question is whether today's crisis is short-term and, if not, what action needs to be taken.

Photo: Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize winning photo taken in 1994 during the Sudan famine. The picture depicts a famine stricken child crawling towards an United Nations food camp, located a kilometer away. The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat it. This picture shocked the whole world. No one knows what happened to the child, including the photographer Kevin Carter who left the place as soon as the photograph was taken. He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. Three months later, and only week after being bestowed with the Pulitzer, Kevin Carter committed suicide.

Conventional wisdom holds that these are both temporary and self-correcting: High prices will encourage the farm sector to bring on new supplies -- by planting more acres and by boosting per-acre yields with new technologies. That's how we've solved previous shortages -- as when we used Green Revolution seeds and fertilizers to avert famine in East Asia and Africa -- and, say optimists, that's what we'll do again, this time with a hot new stable of genetically modified, or GM, crops.

However, a growing number of skeptics, including myself, worry that the factors driving today's crisis make it much harder to solve.

Demand, for example, is much stronger than before. Not only is population soaring, but many of the newcomers are wealthy enough to eat meat, our most resource-intensive food -- it takes an average of eight pounds of grain to make a pound of meat. All told, we'll need to boost total grain output by 50% by 2030, and no one knows how, or even if, all that extra grain can be grown.

Farm land is increasingly scarce -- most of the readily arable land is already under cultivation, and much of what remains is in forest. Further, many of the inputs of industrial farming are much more expensive today than they were even a decade ago. Oil, the lifeblood of modern agriculture, costs more than 10 times as much as it did during the Green Revolution. Synthetically manufactured nitrogen fertilizers, which are responsible for 40% of the calories produced worldwide, have tripled in price in the last year. Water is increasingly scarce: One sixth of the populations of India and China, for example, are now fed using irrigation systems that are draining underground water systems.

And overlaying this is climate change, which is already reducing grain output not only in destitute Africa but in grain powerhouses like the United States. The "100-year" floods that are currently erasing the Midwest grain crops (and derailing the market's attempts to "correct" this crisis on its own) are precisely the kind of natural disaster that, under many climate forecasts, will become routine a few decades from now. In short, just as basket cases like sub-Saharan Africa, their populations swollen by earlier Green Revolution success, are in desperate need for our famous grain surpluses, we may not have as much to send them.

What can be done? In the near term, the U.S. and the European Union must step up relief efforts to afflicted regions while reducing subsidies for biofuels, which are draining off critical food supplies. Longer term, we'll need to commit serious money to developing alternative forms of agriculture that need less energy, water and fertilizers, and which can tolerate a changing climate. (And don't expect a GM silver bullet any time soon: Boosting yields "trans-genically" is much harder than most GM proponents will admit.)

Lastly, we must start a global conversation about meat. One needn't be a vegetarian (and I'm not) to realize that the current trend in global meat consumption simply cannot be sustained and that if we're to achieve a global per capita intake that is sustainable and equitable, countries like the United States will have to reduce their intake, which is currently 230 pounds a year.

None of these steps will be easy or appealing. Spending more on alternative farming will be politically challenging -- as will urging Americans, the world's top carnivores, to eat less meat. But sooner or later (and probably sooner, given how badly flooding is likely to hurt this year's grain crop), we'll need to face the fact that the current crisis isn't just a repeat of past crises and that to solve it, we will need new ways of making, and thinking about, food.

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Paul Roberts writes about the economics and politics of food, energy and other key "inputs." His most recent book, "The End of Food," has just been published by Houghton Mifflin.

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