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

Author: Lester R. Brown
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344533
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Book Description
Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold. The world food situation is deteriorating. Grain stocks have dropped to a dangerously low level. The World Food Price Index has doubled in one decade. The ranks of the hungry are expanding; political unrest is spreading. On the demand side of the food equation, there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night. And some 3 billion increasingly affluent people are moving up the food chain, consuming grain-intensive livestock and poultry products. At the same time, water shortages and heat waves are making it more difficult for farmers to keep pace with demand. As grain-exporting countries ban exports to keep their food prices down, importing countries are panicking. In response, they are buying large tracts of land in other countries to grow food for themselves. The land rush is on. Could food become the weak link for us as it was for so many earlier civilizations? Lester Brown, one of the leading environmentalists of our time, explains why world food supplies are tightening and tells what we need to do about it.

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

Author: Lester R. Brown
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344150
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
With food supplies tightening, countries are competing for the land and waterresources needed to feed their people.

Who Will Feed China?

Author: Lester Russell Brown
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393038972
Category : Agricultural ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
To feed its 1.2 billion people, China may soon have to import so much grain that this action could trigger unprecedented rises in world food prices. In Who Will Feed China: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet, Lester Brown shows that even as water becomes more scarce in a land where 80 percent of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of cropland to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. When Japan, a nation of just 125 million, began to import food, world grain markets rejoiced. But when China, a market ten times bigger, starts importing, there may not be enough grain in the world to meet that need - and food prices will rise steeply for everyone. Analysts foresaw that the recent four-year doubling of income for China's 1.2 billion consumers would increase food demand, especially for meat, eggs, and beer. But these analysts assumed that food production would rise to meet those demands. Brown shows that cropland losses are heavy in countries that are densely populated before industrialization, and that these countries quickly become net grain importers. We can see that process now in newspaper accounts from China as the government struggles with this problem.

World on the Edge

Author: Lester Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113654075X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skilfully distils in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.

Breaking New Ground: A Personal History

Author: Lester R. Brown
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393241203
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
An inspirational memoir tracing Lester Brown’s life from a small-farm childhood to leadership as a global environmental activist. Lester R. Brown, whom the Washington Post praised as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” built his understanding of global environmental issues from the ground up. Brown spent his childhood working on the family’s small farm. His entrepreneurial skills surfaced early. Even while excelling in school, he launched with his younger brother a tomato-growing operation that by 1958 was producing 1.5 million pounds of tomatoes. Later, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Brown emphasized the need for systemic thinking. In 1963 he did the first global food supply and demand projections to the end of the century. While on a brief assignment in India in 1965, he pieced together the clues that led him to sound the alarm on an impending famine there. His urgent warning to the U.S. and Indian governments set in motion the largest food rescue effort in history, helping to save millions of lives. This experience led India to adopt new agricultural practices, which he helped to shape. Brown went on to advise governments internationally and to found the Worldwatch and Earth Policy institutes, two major nonprofit environmental research organizations. Both brilliant and articulate, through his many books he has brought to the fore the interconnections among such issues as overpopulation, climate change, and water shortages and their effect on food security. His 1995 book, Who Will Feed China?, led to a broad restructuring of China’s agricultural policy. Never one to focus only on the problem, Brown always proposes pragmatic, employable solutions to stave off the unfolding ecological crises that endanger our future.

Understanding Globalization

Author: Robert K. Schaeffer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442215283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
Understanding Globalization introduces students to the concept of globalization, providing an essential history, overview of key themes and theories, and a wealth of engaging examples. The fifth edition has been completely revised to connect with students today, opening with a discussion of the far-reaching causes and effects of the recent financial crisis and including new material on global migration patterns, ISIS, and more, while maintaining the book’s accessible and student-friendly style. The book begins by examining the roots of the recent global financial crisis, looking at the roles of inflation, the housing crisis, Wall Street, policy makers, and more. It also explores the varying impact of globalization—from democratization and equality in some countries to destabilization and inequality in others. The fifth edition of Understanding Globalization is a compelling and current introduction to the myriad influences of globalization in our lives.

Eating for Pleasure, People & Planet

Author: Tom Hunt
Publisher: Kyle Books
ISBN: 0857838040
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 573

Book Description
'If we could all live and eat a little more like Tom the world and the food chain would be in much better shape.' Anna Jones 'This book is like a hybrid of Michael Pollan and Anna Jones. It combines serious food politics with flavour-packed modern recipes. This is a call-to-arms for a different way of eating which seeks to lead us there not through lectures but through a love of food, in all its vibrancy and variety.' Bee Wilson Tom's mission is to teach a way of eating that prioritises the environment without sacrificing pleasure, taste and nutrition. Tom's manifesto, 'Root to Fruit' demonstrates how we can all become part of the solution, supporting a delicious, biodiverse and regenerative food system, giving us the skills and knowledge to shop, eat and cook sustainably, whilst eating healthier, better-tasting food for no extra cost.

Stuffed and Starved

Author: Raj Patel
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612191282
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
Completely updated and revised edition of one of the most widely-praised food books of recent years. It’s a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight. To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India’s wrecked paddy-fields and Africa’s bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea. What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa. Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

Food in World History

Author: Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317514513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
The second edition of this concise survey offers a comparative and comprehensive study of culinary cultures and food politics throughout the world, from ancient times to the present day. It examines the long history of globalization of foods as well as the political, social, and environmental implications of our changing relationship with food, showing how hunger and taste have been driving forces in human history. Including numerous case studies from diverse societies and periods, Food in World History explores such questions as: What social factors have historically influenced culinary globalization? How did early modern plantations establish patterns for modern industrial food production? Were eighteenth-century food riots comparable to contemporary social movements around food? Did Italian and Chinese migrant cooks sacrifice authenticity to gain social acceptance in the Americas? Have genetically modified foods fulfilled the promises made by proponents? This new edition includes expanded discussions of gender and the family, indigeneity, and the politics of food. Expanded chapters on contemporary food systems and culinary pluralism examine debates over the concentration of corporate control over seeds and marketing, authenticity and exoticism within the culinary tourism industry, and the impact of social media on restaurants and home cooks.

Empty Planet

Author: Darrell Bricker
Publisher: Signal
ISBN: 0771050895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
From the authors of the bestselling The Big Shift, a provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape. For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline. Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanization, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline--and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in. They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States is well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism and anti-immigrant backlash lead us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever before. Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.