The Food Bubble

"Over the last few decades we have created a food production bubble—one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide," notes Lester R. Brown, author of World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, and president of the Earth Policy Institute."If we cannot reverse these trends, economic decline is inevitable. No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems. Nor will ours. The archeological records of earlier civilizations indicate that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their downfall."

The food bubble is based on the overuse of land and water resources. It is further threatened by the climate stresses deriving from the excessive burning of fossil fuels. When the food bubble bursts, food prices will soar worldwide, threatening economic and political stability everywhere. For those living on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder, survival itself could be at stake.

In the summer of 2010, record high temperatures scorched Moscow from late June through mid-August. Western Russia was so hot and dry in early August that 300 to 400 new fires were starting every day. The average temperature in Moscow for July was a scarcely believable 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm. Over 56,000 people died in the extreme heat. The record heat shrank Russia's grain harvest from roughly 100 million tons to 60 million tons. This 40-percent drop and the associated grain export ban helped drive world wheat prices up 60 percent in two months, raising bread prices worldwide. Crop ecologists estimate that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, grain yields decline by roughly 10 percent. In parts of Western Russia, the spring wheat crop was totally destroyed by the crop-withering heat and drought. As the earth's temperature rises, the likelihood of more numerous, more intense heat waves increases.

Brown warns that a similar weather event in the U.S. corn belt which produces several times more grain than Russian would be calamitous.If the 2010 heat wave centered in Moscow had instead been centered in Chicago, it could easily have reduced the U.S. grain harvest of 400 million tons by 40 percent, or 160 million tons. World carryover stocks of grain for 2011—the amount remaining in the bin when the new harvest begins—would have dropped to an all-time low of 52 days of consumption, well below the 62-day carryover that set the stage for the tripling of world grain prices in 2007-08.If the July temperature in Chicago were to average 14 degrees above the norm, as it did in Moscow, there would be chaos in world grain markets. Grain prices would quickly climb off the chart. Food prices would soar worldwide. Many grain-exporting countries, trying to hold down domestic food prices, would restrict or even ban exports, as they did in 2007-08. Oil-exporting countries would try to barter oil for grain. Low-income grain importers would lose out. The TV evening news would be running footage of food riots in low-income grain-importing countries and carry reports of spreading hunger, falling governments, and failing states. With governments collapsing and with confidence in the world grain market shattered, the global economy could start to unravel.

Nor is rising temperatures the only threat to world food security. So too is the depletion of aquifers from overpumping for irrigation. In Saudi Arabia, grain production is collapsing as aquifer depletion has reduced its wheat harvest by two thirds in three years. It is not alone. The Middle East is the first geographic region where the grain harvest has started to shrink as aquifers are depleted and as irrigation wells go dry. A World Bank study indicates that 175 million people in India are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. For China, the equivalent figure is 130 million people. Countries can overpump in the short run, but not over the long run.

"The new reality," says Brown, "is that the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos."

But there is no reason to plunge into suicidal anguish about an imminent global food crisis. A lot people across the world are thinking hard about how to grow sufficient food without sucking dry the global water supplies or burning through fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow as SOYMB blogged earlier.