Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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>From the May 2009 Scientific American Magazine
Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in
poor countries to cause government collapse
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=civilization-food-shortages
By Lester R. Brown

Key Concepts

    * Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor
countries into chaos.
    * Such “failed states” can export disease, terrorism, illicit
drugs, weapons and refugees.
    * Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global
warming are placing severe limits on food production.
    * Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three
environmental factors, the author argues, a series of government collapses
could threaten the world order.

One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change.
Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past.
Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails
spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s
economic crisis.

For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate
probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously
about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What
evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about
responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely
catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a
wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and
Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!

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.

The Problem of Failed States
Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends
unwelcome support to my conclusion. And those of us in the environmental
field are well into our third de­­cade of charting trends of
environmental decline without seeing any significant effort to reverse a
single one.

In six of the past nine years world grain production has fallen short of
consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. When the 2008 harvest
began, world carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new
harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low. In
response, world grain prices in the spring and summer of last year climbed
to the highest level ever.

As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting
food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries
already teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their
own, hungry people take to the streets. Indeed, even before the steep climb
in grain prices in 2008, the number of failing states was expanding
[Purchase the digital edition to see related sidebar]. Many of their
problems stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations. But
if the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break
down at an ever increasing rate. We have entered a new era in geopolitics.
In the 20th century the main threat to international security was
superpower conflict; today it is failing states. It is not the
concentration of power but its absence that puts us at risk.

States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal
security, food security and basic social services such as education and
health care. They often lose control of part or all of their territory.
When governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to
disintegrate. After a point, countries can become so dangerous that food
relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted; in Somalia
and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in
jeopardy.

Failing states are of international concern because they are a source of
terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability
everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008 list of failing states, has
become a base for piracy. Iraq, number five, is a hotbed for terrorist
training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world’s leading supplier of
heroin. Following the massive genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, refugees from
that troubled state, thousands of armed soldiers among them, helped to
destabilize neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (number six).

Our global civilization depends on a functioning network of politically
healthy nation-states to control the spread of infectious disease, to
manage the international monetary system, to control international
terrorism and to reach scores of other common goals. If the system for
controlling infectious diseases—such as polio, SARS or avian flu—breaks
down, humanity will be in trouble. Once states fail, no one assumes
responsibility for their debt to outside lenders. If enough states
disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization
itself.

A New Kind of Food Shortage
The surge in world grain prices in 2007 and 2008—and the threat they pose
to food security—has a different, more troubling quality than the
increases of the past. During the second half of the 20th century, grain
prices rose dramatically several times. In 1972, for instance, the Soviets,
recognizing their poor harvest early, quietly cornered the world wheat
market. As a result, wheat prices elsewhere more than doubled, pulling rice
and corn prices up with them. But this and other price shocks were
event-driven—drought in the Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India,
crop-shrinking heat in the U.S. Corn Belt. And the rises were short-lived:
prices typically returned to normal with the next harvest.

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.

The recent merging of the food and energy economies implies that if the
food value of grain is less than its fuel value, the market will move the
grain into the energy economy. That double demand is leading to an epic
competition between cars and people for the grain supply and to a political
and moral issue of unprecedented dimensions. The U.S., in a misguided
effort to reduce its dependence on foreign oil by substituting grain-based
fuels, is generating global food insecurity on a scale not seen before.

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.

Usually aquifers are replenishable, but some of the most important ones are
not: the “fossil” aquifers, so called because they store ancient water
and are not recharged by precipitation. For these—including the vast
Ogallala Aquifer that underlies the U.S. Great Plains, the Saudi aquifer
and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain—depletion would spell
the end of pumping. In arid regions such a loss could also bring an end to
agriculture altogether.

In China the water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces
more than half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling
fast. Overpumping has used up most of the water in a shallow aquifer there,
forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep aquifer, which is not
replenishable. A report by the World Bank foresees “catastrophic
consequences for future generations” unless water use and supply can
quickly be brought back into balance.

As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China’s
wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8 percent since it
peaked at 123 million tons in 1997. In that same period China’s rice
production dropped 4 percent. The world’s most populous nation may soon
be importing massive quantities of grain.

But water shortages are even more worrying in India. There the margin
between food consumption and survival is more precarious. Millions of
irrigation wells have dropped water tables in almost every state. As Fred
Pearce reported in New Scientist:

Half of India’s traditional hand-dug wells and millions of shallower tube
wells have already dried up, bringing a spate of suicides among those who
rely on them. Electricity blackouts are reaching epidemic proportions in
states where half of the electricity is used to pump water from depths of
up to a kilometer [3,300 feet].

A World Bank study reports that 15 percent of India’s food supply is
produced by mining groundwater. Stated otherwise, 175 million

Indians consume grain produced with water from irrigation wells that will
soon be exhausted. The continued shrinking of water supplies could lead to
unmanageable food shortages and social conflict.

Less Soil, More Hunger
The scope of the second worrisome trend—the loss of topsoil—is also
startling. Topsoil is eroding faster than new soil forms on perhaps a third
of the world’s cropland. This thin layer of essential plant nutrients,
the very foundation of civilization, took long stretches of geologic time
to build up, yet it is typically only about six inches deep. Its loss from
wind and water erosion doomed earlier civilizations.

In 2002 a U.N. team assessed the food situation in Lesotho, the small,
landlocked home of two million people embedded within South Africa. The
team’s finding was straightforward: “Agriculture in Lesotho faces a
catastrophic future; crop production is declining and could cease
altogether over large tracts of the country if steps are not taken to
reverse soil erosion, degradation and the decline in soil fertility.”

In the Western Hemisphere, Haiti—one of the first states to be recognized
as failing—was largely self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago. In the
years since, though, it has lost nearly all its forests and much of its
topsoil, forcing the country to import more than half of its grain.

The third and perhaps most pervasive environmental threat to food
security—rising surface temperature—can affect crop yields everywhere.
In many countries crops are grown at or near their thermal optimum, so even
a minor temperature rise during the growing season can shrink the harvest.
A study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has confirmed a
rule of thumb among crop ecologists: for every rise of one degree Celsius
(1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the norm, wheat, rice and corn yields fall
by 10 percent.

In the past, most famously when the innovations in the use of fertilizer,
irrigation and high-yield varieties of wheat and rice created the “green
revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, the response to the growing demand
for food was the successful application of scientific agriculture: the
technological fix. This time, regrettably, many of the most productive
advances in agricultural technology have already been put into practice,
and so the long-term rise in land productivity is slowing down. Between
1950 and 1990 the world’s farmers increased the grain yield per acre by
more than 2 percent a year, exceeding the growth of population. But since
then, the annual growth in yield has slowed to slightly more than 1
percent. In some countries the yields appear to be near their practical
limits, including rice yields in Japan and China.

Some commentators point to genetically modified crop strains as a way out
of our predicament. Unfortunately, however, no genetically modified crops
have led to dramatically higher yields, comparable to the doubling or
tripling of wheat and rice yields that took place during the green
revolution. Nor do they seem likely to do so, simply because conventional
plant-breeding techniques have already tapped most of the potential for
raising crop yields.

Jockeying for Food
As the world’s food security unravels, a dangerous politics of food
scarcity is coming into play: individual countries acting in their narrowly
defined self-interest are actually worsening the plight of the many. The
trend began in 2007, when leading wheat-exporting countries such as Russia
and Argentina limited or banned their exports, in hopes of increasing
locally available food supplies and thereby bringing down food prices
domestically. Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest rice exporter after
Thailand, banned its exports for several months for the same reason. Such
moves may reassure those living in the exporting countries, but they are
creating panic in importing countries that must rely on what is then left
of the world’s exportable grain.

In response to those restrictions, grain importers are trying to nail down
long-term bilateral trade agreements that would lock up future grain
supplies. The Philippines, no longer able to count on getting rice from the
world market, recently negotiated a three-year deal with Vietnam for a
guaranteed 1.5 million tons of rice each year. Food-import anxiety is even
spawning entirely new efforts by food-importing countries to buy or lease
farmland in other countries [Purchase the digital edition to see related
sidebar].

In spite of such stopgap measures, soaring food prices and spreading hunger
in many other countries are beginning to break down the social order. In
several provinces of Thailand the predations of “rice rustlers” have
forced villagers to guard their rice fields at night with loaded shotguns.
In Pakistan an armed soldier escorts each grain truck. During the first
half of 2008, 83 trucks carrying grain in Sudan were hijacked before
reaching the Darfur relief camps.

No country is immune to the effects of tightening food supplies, not even
the U.S., the world’s breadbasket. If China turns to the world market for
massive quantities of grain, as it has recently done for soybeans, it will
have to buy from the U.S. For U.S. consumers, that would mean competing for
the U.S. grain harvest with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with fast-rising
incomes—a nightmare scenario. In such circumstances, it would be tempting
for the U.S. to restrict exports, as it did, for instance, with grain and
soybeans in the 1970s when domestic prices soared. But that is not an
option with China. Chinese investors now hold well over a trillion U.S.
dollars, and they have often been the leading international buyers of U.S.
Treasury securities issued to finance the fiscal deficit. Like it or not,
U.S. consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers, no matter how
high food prices rise.

Plan B: Our Only Option
Since the current world food shortage is trend-driven, the environmental
trends that cause it must be reversed. To do so requires extraordinarily
demanding measures, a monumental shift away from business as usual—what
we at the Earth Policy Institute call Plan A—to a civilization-saving
Plan B. [see "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization," at
www.earthpoli cy.org/Books/PB3/]

Similar in scale and urgency to the U.S. mobilization for World War II,
Plan B has four components: a massive effort to cut carbon emissions by 80
percent from their 2006 levels by 2020; the stabilization of the world’s
population at eight billion by 2040; the eradication of poverty; and the
restoration of forests, soils and aquifers.

Net carbon dioxide emissions can be cut by systematically raising energy
efficiency and investing massively in the development of renewable sources
of energy. We must also ban deforestation worldwide, as several countries
already have done, and plant billions of trees to sequester carbon. The
transition from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy can be driven by
imposing a tax on carbon, while offsetting it with a reduction in income
taxes.

Stabilizing population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. In fact,
the key to accelerating the shift to smaller families is eradicating
poverty—and vice versa. One way is to ensure at least a primary school
education for all children, girls as well as boys. Another is to provide
rudimentary, village-level health care, so that people can be confident
that their children will survive to adulthood. Women everywhere need access
to reproductive health care and family-planning services.

The fourth component, restoring the earth’s natural systems and
resources, incorporates a worldwide initiative to arrest the fall in water
tables by raising water productivity: the useful activity that can be wrung
from each drop. That implies shifting to more efficient irrigation systems
and to more water-efficient crops. In some countries, it implies growing
(and eating) more wheat and less rice, a water-intensive crop. And for
industries and cities, it implies doing what some are doing already,
namely, continuously recycling water.

At the same time, we must launch a worldwide effort to conserve soil,
similar to the U.S. response to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Terracing the
ground, planting trees as shelterbelts against windblown soil erosion, and
practicing minimum tillage—in which the soil is not plowed and crop
residues are left on the field—are among the most important
soil-conservation measures.

There is nothing new about our four interrelated objectives. They have been
discussed individually for years. Indeed, we have created entire
institutions intended to tackle some of them, such as the World Bank to
alleviate poverty. And we have made substantial progress in some parts of
the world on at least one of them—the distribution of family-planning
services and the associated shift to smaller families that brings
population stability.

For many in the development community, the four objectives of Plan B were
seen as positive, promoting development as long as they did not cost too
much. Others saw them as humanitarian goals—politically correct and
morally appropriate. Now a third and far more momentous rationale presents
itself: meeting these goals may be necessary to prevent the collapse of our
civilization. Yet the cost we project for saving civilization would amount
to less than $200 billion a year, a sixth of current global military
spending. In effect, Plan B is the new security budget.

Time: Our Scarcest Resource
Our challenge is not only to implement Plan B but also to do it quickly.
The world is in a race between political tipping points and natural ones.
Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to prevent the Greenland
ice sheet from slipping into the sea and inundating our coastlines? Can we
cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the mountain glaciers of Asia?
During the dry season their meltwaters sustain the major rivers of India
and China—and by extension, hundreds of millions of people. Can we
stabilize population before countries such as India, Pakistan and Yemen are
overwhelmed by shortages of the water they need to irrigate their crops?

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. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Lester R. Brown, in the words of the Washington Post, is "one of the
world's most influential thinkers." The Telegraph of Calcutta has called
him "the guru of the environmental movement." Brown is founder of both the
Worldwatch Institute (1974) and the Earth Policy Institute (2001), which he
heads today. He has authored or co- authored 50 books; his most recent is
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Brown is the recipient of many
prizes and awards, including 24 honorary degrees and a MacArthur
Fellowship.