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Full Planet, Empty Plates: the New Geopolitics of Food Security By Lester R. Brown, Published by W.W. Norton & Co, New York, Paperback, 144 pages, $16.95. ISBN 978-0-393-34415-8.
Although food has become a globalized commodity, availability is increasingly an issue of priorities and political decisions at the local and national levels. Lester Brown, well-known author and expert on world food and resources, warns in the preface of Full Planet, Empty Plates that we are moving toward serious trouble with food shortages that will likely cause large increase in prices, unrest, and political instability. Although the tide of globalization has been touted as a boon for everyone, a rising tide that would raise all ships, Brown proposes that the current system in fact is pushing us toward a "new geopolitics of food scarcity" and a food future where it is "every country for itself."
This thesis is supported by undisputed facts: continued increase in human population, improved diets for those who can afford them, competition between food and fuel, soil erosion and conversion of land to nonfarm uses, genetic plateaus in yields of major grain crop species, increasingly unpredictable and variable weather, scarcity of key production resources, and appropriation of fertile farmland by countries rich in capital but poor in land and water. These issues are explored in the first ten chapters of this well-researched and timely book.
Impressive gains in production and resulting food abundance due to the Green Revolution have given way to shortage, hunger,...