Could Food Shortages End our Civilization as we Know it?

by: Ellinorianne

Thu Apr 23, 2009 at 09:55:54 AM PDT

That's the question that Lester R. Brown asks in his fascinating piece for Scientific American, Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?.  And it's a valid question, especially since those of us in America who have a vast abundance of over processed and cheap food could never even consider this a problem.

For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.

I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy-most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures-forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.

It's a long article and extensive but it's so important that we recognize this risk and continue to push for changes in how we think about food, water and energy creation.  They are all interlinked and our dependence on a diet rich in proteins that take far more calories and energy to produce than the most common carbohydrates, the staples of many diets, we can virtually change the direction in the choices we make as a society.

In contrast, the recent surge in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it unlikely to reverse without a reversal in the trends themselves. On the demand side, those trends include the ongoing addition of more than 70 million people a year; a growing number of people wanting to move up the food chain to consume highly grain-intensive livestock products [see "The Greenhouse Hamburger," by Nathan Fiala; Scientific American, February 2009]; and the massive diversion of U.S. grain to ethanol-fuel distilleries.

The extra demand for grain associated with rising affluence varies widely among countries. People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60 percent of calories, such as India, directly consume a bit more than a pound of grain a day. In affluent countries such as the U.S. and Canada, grain consumption per person is nearly four times that much, though perhaps 90 percent of it is consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals.

The potential for further grain consumption as incomes rise among low-income consumers is huge. But that potential pales beside the insatiable demand for crop-based automotive fuels. A fourth of this year's U.S. grain harvest-enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians at current consumption levels-will go to fuel cars. Yet even if the entire U.S. grain harvest were diverted into making ethanol, it would meet at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.
Emphasis mine

How can we with any sort of reasonability call this sustainable?  Not only is our diet killing us, it's jeopardizing our ability to sustain ourselves as a civilization by relying so heavily on factory farming that produces not only more pollution and the need for dangerous farming practices but we take for granted our ability to continue our lifestyles as they are now.  Meat and potatoes is still the stereotype and it just can't continue to be so.

Sure, we can grow as many vegetable gardens as we want but until we recognize our over dependence on meat as a means of surviving we can't address any of the other issues.  I'm an avid meat eater although I've reconsidered this recently since I was once a vegetarian.  But we can all certainly understand that cutting back is beyond healthful for our bodies but our very survivability as a civilization.

It was recently surmised that the rise of piracy in Somalia could be blamed on overfishing.  That's right.

Thousands of Somalis once made their living as fishermen. But Somalia has been without a central government for nearly two decades-so there's no active body that's able to effectively protect the country's rights to its coastline, and the once-abundant supply of fish it held. So now, due to the willingness of foreigners to exploit fisheries off Somalia's coast, and the lack of a governing body to stave them off, many of these fishermen are finding their nets empty.

It's estimated that $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from Somali waters altogether every year-a massive amount in any country, but even more so in one with such a depressed economy as Somalia's. Some local fisherman believe there will be no fishing industry to speak of if the practice goes on unchecked-so over-plundered are the fish populations in Somali waters.

A Path to Piracy
And without the ability to bring home even a sufficient amount of fish to eat, many of these fisherman justifiably grow desperate. But even from here, it's not a simple jump to pirating. Initially, many of the now-termed "pirates" were vigilante patrol squads, steering their boats to fishing vessels they found illegally snagging seafood or dumping toxic waste in Somali waters and demanding they pay a tax. After this proved ineffective, something closer to organized piracy developed.

It doesn't seem that far fetched now does it?  And this is the path that Brown argues on a much larger scale as entire countries collapse due to the lack of food.  We're aware of the fact that thousands of Indian Farmers have taken their own lives due to massive crop failures.  This is just another example of how we could see food shortages and the inability of the third world to sustain itself can eventually come to effect "more civilized" countries.  Don't we have a moral responsibility to see these connections?

Water Shortages Mean Food Shortages
What about supply? The three environmental trends I mentioned earlier-the shortage of freshwater, the loss of topsoil and the rising temperatures (and other effects) of global warming-are making it increasingly hard to expand the world's grain supply fast enough to keep up with demand. Of all those trends, however, the spread of water shortages poses the most immediate threat. The biggest challenge here is irrigation, which consumes 70 percent of the world's freshwater. Millions of irrigation wells in many countries are now pumping water out of underground sources faster than rainfall can recharge them. The result is falling water tables in countries populated by half the world's people, including the three big grain producers-China, India and the U.S.

Water, or lack there of, is a huge issue in California, not just in far off countries.  Not just this state but other states in the US are facing their own water shortages.  California has such a huge agricultural dependence on water supplies that it's become an emergency for our state.  And yet I can drive anywhere in my County and see wide swaths of green lawns!  We refuse to even discuss re-prioritizing our water use and encouraging water users to save has been so mealy mouthed and ineffective that it doesn't seem to even be taken seriously by many.

We turn on our water and it still comes out.  What's the problem?  We go to our supermarket and the vast, brightly lit isles bode a endless food supply that has little to no impact on anything else in our society.

Brown aptly sums up the issue and I will leave with his assessment (It's a six page article and I believe that what I've used in this piece still stays within the "fair usage" ideals).

It is hard to overstate the urgency of our predicament. [For the most thorough and authoritative scientific assessment of global climate change, see  Climate Change 2007. Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, available at www.ipcc.ch] Every day counts. Unfortunately, we do not know how long we can light our cities with coal, for instance, before Greenland's ice sheet can no longer be saved. Nature sets the deadlines; nature is the timekeeper. But we human beings cannot see the clock.

We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mind-set. The thinking that got us into this bind will not get us out. When Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, asked energy guru Amory Lovins about thinking outside the box, Lovins responded: "There is no box."

There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is to survive.