‘Food is weak link in civilisation’

While the world focuses on the emergency food summit in Rome this week, Lester Brown, the planet's leading environmental expert, is in China to bring food security concerns to the globe's most populous country and to promote his latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

Current food security concerns are connected to the rising cost of oil and to global warming, he said.

"We have never faced such a massive threat as the melting of glaciers," Mr Brown told a packed audience in Beijing. "Scientists had never seen anything like this before."

From the Arctic to the Tibetan plateau, ice is melting at a fast clip and threatening such rivers as the Ganges in India and the Yangtze in China, both major rice-growing countries. "What happens to glaciers in these countries affects wheat and rice in these countries," he said. And as rivers overflow, the land will be flooded and hundreds of millions of people will be driven from their homes with no viable means of surviving, he said.

Like those attending the summit in Rome, Mr Brown is very worried about food security. As president of the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research organisation he founded in 2001, the former farmer from New Jersey is looking to provide a road map for achieving an environmentally sustainable world economy.

Food is the weak link in civilization, he said. But, increasingly, the world is watching governments fail to provide food security for their people: Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and Pakistan just to name a few. "Failing states," Mr Brown said, "are an early sign of a failing civilisation."

The lessons of history have shown that such early civilisations as the Mayans and Sumerians failed when they created an ecological imbalance resulting in the inability to produce enough food.

Going one step further, he said that famines have been geographical. And although global warming and production of food are geographical, the ability of people to buy food is not. The famines of the future will be related to class and price, meaning that even in countries that produce a lot of food, those people might not be able to afford to eat. The poor will be hit hardest as food gets more expensive.

Besides failing governments, there are additional stresses on food security, namely rising oil prices and the devotion of ever larger shares of the US grain harvest to biofuel for vehicles. "While China and India are increasing consumption [of grain] by two million tonnes per year, the United States is consuming 20 million more tonnes per year because of biofuel production," he said.

~ more... ~