Author Archive

Saving Civilization is Not a Spectator Sport

Earth Policy Institute: Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold. The world food situation is deteriorating. Grain stocks have dropped to a dangerously low level. The World Food Price Index has doubled in a decade. The ranks of the hungry are expanding. Political unrest is spreading. On the demand side of the food equation, there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night. And some 3 billion increasingly affluent people are moving up the food chain, consuming grain-intensive livestock...

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

Earth Policy Institute: “The U.S. Great Drought of 2012 has raised corn prices to the highest level in history. The world price of food, which has already doubled over the last decade, is slated to climb higher, ushering in a new wave of food unrest,” says Lester R. Brown, author of Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (W.W. Norton & Company). “This year’s corn crop shortfall will accelerate the transition from the era of abundance and surpluses to an era of chronic scarcity,” notes Brown,...