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Lester Brown on rising temperatures and rising food prices
by Joe Romm
Published Aug 10 2010 by Climate Progress, Archived Aug 10 2010
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53739

Media Advisory for 11 am: Lester Brown on Rising Temperatures and Rising Food 
Prices

"If we continue with business as usual on the climate front, it is only a 
matter of time before what we are seeing in Russia becomes commonplace.”

    ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2010, at 11 a.m. EDT, in advance of the U.S. 
Department of Agriculture’s world grain harvest estimate on Thursday, 
environmental analyst Lester Brown will discuss the heat and drought 
currently decimating Russia’s grain crops, what Russia’s loss on grain 
exports means for world food prices and how this calamity foreshadows future 
climate-related crises.

Brown is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the connection between 
climate and agriculture (see Ponzi redux: Scientific American asks “Could 
Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization? excerpted below).

Details on the press call below. If a tape and transcript become available, I 
will post it.

    Prices for basic farm commodities – wheat, corn, and soybeans – are 
actually somewhat higher in August of this year than they were in August of 
2007 at the start of the record-breaking 2007-08 run-up in grain prices that 
led to food protests and riots in some 30 countries. Meanwhile, it is 
estimated that Russia could lose nearly 30 million tons of grain this summer.

    “The global balance between grain supply and demand is fragile and 
depends largely on climate, ” Brown says. “With 80 million more mouths to 
feed each year and with increasing demand for grain-intensive livestock 
products, the rise in temperature only adds to the stress. If we continue 
with business as usual on the climate front, it is only a matter of time 
before what we are seeing in Russia becomes commonplace.”

    Brown will discuss the outlook for the Russian grain crop and how it is 
expected to affect food prices worldwide in the months ahead. He will also 
discuss the effect of climate change on the global food supply and what can 
be done in response.

    WHAT: Teleconference on “Rising Temperatures and Rising Food Prices”

    WHO: Lester Brown, president and founder of the Earth Policy Institute 
and author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

    WHEN: Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. EDT

If you want to join this call, email Kristina Taylor at 
ktaylor@earthpolicy.org.

Here are some excerpts from two posts I did on Brown:

    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.

It’s not news that Lester Brown is warning about our unsustainable approach 
to feeding the planet. But it is news that Scientific American has run a 
major article by him on how “The biggest threat to global stability is the 
potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.”

Brown’s “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.

Brown’s warnings, ignored for too long, are now being repeated at the highest 
levels. For instance, I previously blogged on the UK government’s chief 
scientist, Professor John Beddington, who laid out something very close to 
this collapse scenario in his speech yesterday to the government’s 
Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster (see “When the global 
Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green“):

    You can see the catastrophic decline in those [food] reserves, over the 
last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not 
growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves….

    I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events 
come together….

    I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? 
Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough 
energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate 
change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are 
going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need 
investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very 
seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Brown’s whole piece is worth reading. I’ll excerpt the key points, trends and 
quotable facts here:

    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).

Brown continues:

    … 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; 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.

And then there’s water:

    … 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….

    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.

Finally, there’s global warming:

    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.

That’s an especially chilling statistic when you consider that we are facing 
warming of 4°C to 5°C or more this century on the business as usual emissions 
path.

Is there another techno-fix to the global food problem? Brown says, not 
likely.

    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.

You can get Brown’s detailed solution, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save 
Civilization, at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/. I’ve discussed at length the 
energy and climate strategies in this blog. Here is his short discussion of 
some other key measures:

    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.

But as always, the first step is to realize that there is no silver bullet 
and there is no quick escape from the Ponzi scheme.

Brown ends with a terrific quote about thinking outside the box from my old 
boss Amory, which bears repeating, :

    Lovins responded: “There is no box.”

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