Outgrowing the Earth

There's been a lot of talk about global warming, peak oil, Armageddon, and a whole host of other problems that might be heading our way in the future. Just in case you don't have enough to worry about, the Earth Policy Institute has published a book by Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Tempertures. In a column adapted from Chapter Two, "Stopping at Seven Billion," Brown hits us with a new worry: peak grain. And that peak has already come and gone.

As land and water become scarce and as competition for these vital resources intensifies, we can expect mounting social tensions within societies, particularly between those who are poor and dispossessed and those who are wealthy, as well as among ethnic and religious groups. Population growth brings with it a steady shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person. That decline, which is threatening to drop the living standards of more and more people below survival level, could lead to unmanageable social tensions that will translate into broad-based conflicts.

Worldwide, the area in grain expanded from 590 million hectares (1,457 million acres) in 1950 to its historical peak of 730 million hectares in 1981. By 2004, it had fallen to 670 million hectares. Even as the world's population continues to grow, the area available for producing grain is shrinking.

Expanding world population cut the grainland area per person in half, from 0.23 hectares (0.57 acres) in 1950 to 0.11 hectares in 2000. (See Figure 2-1.) This area of just over one tenth of a hectare per person is half the size of a building lot in an affluent U.S. suburb. This halving of grainland area per person makes it more difficult for the world's farmers to feed the 70 million or more people added each year. If current population projections materialize and if the overall grainland area remains constant, the area per person will shrink to 0.07 hectares in 2050, less than two thirds that in 2000.

There's much more at the EPI homepage including a video and MP3s of Lester Brown's interviews, and there's an article by Danielle Murray, "Oil and Food: A Rising Security Challenge," that details how the problem is going to be exacerbated by the rise in oil prices.