Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

By Joseph Romm, Climate Progress. Posted May 12, 2009.

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.

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