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Beware of the 'Food Bubble'
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— By Kate Sheppard
| Fri Jan. 14, 2011 1:44 PM PST

Experts worry that the world is facing a looming food crisis, one that we
are currently not well prepared to deal with.

In his new book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and
Economic Collapse, Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown looks at the state
of the world's resources, warning that the outlook does not look good when
it comes to feeding the world's population. Brown warns that the "food
bubble" may be about to burst in both the book and a new piece in Foreign
Policy this week, laying out why there is good reason to believe that the
new year may be disasterous on this front:

    But whereas in years past, it's been weather that has caused a spike in
commodities prices, now it's trends on both sides of the food supply/demand
equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are
population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On
the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to
nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing
of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and—due to climate
change —crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice
sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater
toll in the future.

Already, there are reasons to be concerned: food riots in Algeria, soaring
wheat prices in the United Kingdom, an 18 percent inflation rate on food
prices in India, and the Mexican government trying desperately to fend off
rising corn prices in order to prevent a recurrence of the so-called
"tortilla riots" of 2007, among others.

Last week, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization reported
that food prices hit an all-time high in December—higher than even the
spike between 2007 and 2008, a rise that caused a global food crisis. There
are many reasons for the spike, and unfortunately, two of the major ones
aren't getting better any time soon. The first is population: We gain
219,000 fellow humans every year. Sometime in late 2011, we will number 7
billion as a global population. (See our population special for more.) The
rate of population growth has slowed, but we're pretty much guaranteed to
keep expanding.

The second reason is equally intractable: Many of the current environmental
factors driving constraints on food resources, including heat waves,
drought, and severe weather, are only going to get worse as the climate
changes. This is on top of the water resource depletion and soil erosion
that were already underway. And unlike previous rises in food prices, there
is probably no turning back from this one. "We can no longer expect that
things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a rapidly
changing climate system there is no norm to return to," writes Brown. (See
Tom Philpott and Geoffrey Lean for more on the subject.)

The rising food prices serve as a powerful reminder that we humans are
inextricably linked to our environment, and when it suffers, we suffer.
It's also a reminder that development and environment issues cannot and
should not be treated as separate. As Gawain Kripke, policy director for
Oxfam America noted last week, unless we address both the underlying issues
of both climate and development, "we will find ourselves perpetually on the
knife's edge of disaster."