Worldwide Crisis: Falling Yields, Failing States

related: Part 1: The Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
Global Food Catastrophe 2009

February 11, 2009
By Lester Brown
Spiegel

The deteriorating world food situation is not occurring in a vacuum: it comes at a time when there is a growing backlog of unresolved problems, many of them associated with a failure by developing countries to slow population growth. Continuing population growth on a planet already overburdened with human demands is politically weakening scores of countries. Under stress, internal social conflicts develop between differing religious, ethnic, tribal, and racial groups, sometimes leading to genocide as in Rwanda and Sudan.

Nearly all of the projected 2.4 billion people to be added to world population by mid-century will be born in countries where agriculture's natural support systems are already deteriorating in the face of excessive demands. As water tables fall, soils erode, and temperatures rise in countries like India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Mexico, the risk of social collapse grows. We have entered a new era in international affairs: In the last century it was heavily armed superpowers that threatened security, but today it is failing states. It is not the concentration of power but its absence that now threatens us.

PLAN B: OUR ONLY OPTION

Business as usual is no longer a viable option. The current world food crisis can be alleviated only by altering the trends that are causing it. We need to go to Plan B. This involves extraordinary measures such as stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring agriculture's natural support systems, including soils and aquifers.

Plan B has four components: cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020, stabilize the world population at eight billion by 2040, eradicate poverty, and restore forests, soils, and aquifers. The 80 percent cut in net carbon dioxide emissions can be achieved by systematically raising energy efficiency throughout the world economy, investing massively in the development of renewable sources of energy, banning deforestation worldwide, and planting billions of trees to sequester carbon. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is driven by tax restructuring, namely raising the tax on carbon while offsetting it with a reduction in income taxes.

Stabilizing population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. The key to accelerating the shift to smaller families is eradicating poverty. This means ensuring education for all children, girls as well as boys. It means providing rudimentary, village-level health care so that people can be confident their children will survive to adulthood. And it means giving women everywhere access to reproductive health care and family planning services.

The fourth component, restoring the earth's natural systems and resources, encompasses a worldwide initiative to arrest the fall in water tables by raising water productivity, similar to the highly successful worldwide initiative to raise land productivity that was launched a half century ago and that has nearly tripled grain yield per hectare. Raising water productivity means shifting to more efficient irrigation systems and to more water-efficient crops. In some countries this means, for example, more wheat and less rice. And for industries and cities, it means continuously recycling water. As industries and cities recycle water, more will be available for irrigation. This component also includes a worldwide soil conservation effort, with such measures as terracing, planting tree shelter belts, and adopting minimum tillage practices.

Within the environmental community, we have talked for decades about saving the planet. But now we have a new challenge: to save civilization itself. To adopt Plan B is to embrace hope. We can continue with business as usual, leaving the next generation a world where failing states multiply until civilization descends into chaos. Or we can start working now to leave our children a better world, a world that is more secure, not less so.

Lester R. Brown is president of the Washington, D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute and author of "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,606937-2,00.html