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

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
In the book Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, an outstanding economist in the field of global food policy, Lester Brown discusses the current situation with food resources. The author is known as one of the most influential thinkers of the world, guru of the environmental movement, and an intellectual giant. For nearly half a century, he has deliberately been exploring the issues of global food resources, population, and other key issues of human survival. In the book Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, Brown tries to alert people that the time of human civilization is running out. The fight for food resources deals with food scarcity that is a result of the erosion of soils, fall of water tables, and rise of temperatures. Consequently, the ability of growing food becomes a modern form of geopolitical strength.
Human Population Growth
In the book, Brown explores the tendency of population growth throughout the history. The global population reached 1 billion people only in 1804. In 1927, there were two million people on the planet. In 1960, the world population counted 3 billion people. Then, there was a tendency towards the acceleration of this pace. One more billion was added every 13 years. This situation lasted until 2011, when the global population reached 7 billion people.
This explosive growth of the population had a number of crucial consequences for the planet. One of the most important consequences was the fact that man’s demands began to overtake capacities of economical systems of natural support of forests, grasslands, fisheries, soils, and aquifers. This led to overfishing, overcutting, overpumping, overgrazing and overplowing. Consequently, the stability of global civilization was undermined. Multiplying of population number leads to an increasing need of water irrigation. It results in depleting aquifers. At the same time, the growth of the world population caused an increase of seafood demand. The expansion of the fish catch can be continued until the moment of its exceeding fishery’s productive capacity. If this happens, the fishery will shrink and collapse. It will create additional pressure on water and land resources. The growth of the human population also results in the growth of livestock. In turn, this deteriorates the planet’s ecosystem.
Nevertheless, there are counties that tend to be stable in the population growth. Thus, Brown argues that 44 countries, nearly all of which are part of the Eastern and Western Europe, have reached the stability of growth of human population. Their population counts about 970 million people, which is one seventh of the global population. Moreover, two other regions move towards stability too; East Asia that includes North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China counts over 1,5 billion people and is close to stabilizing the growth of the population. Moreover, Japan’s population is getting smaller. China’s population will reach its peak in 2026 and then start reducing. Due to a reduced level of poverty and free access to services of family planning, the growth of the population in Latin America is slowed down. In contrast, in sub-Saharan Africa and Indian subcontinent are likely to experience continuing population growth.
The demographic transition contributes to the understanding of peculiarities of population growth in individual countries in the process of their development. In 1945, Frank Notestein formed a three-stage demographic model that was aimed at illustrating the population growth dynamics. According to this model, pre-modern societies are characterized by high rates of birth and death, which in turn contributes to the reduced rates of population growth. Second stage is characterized by rising living standards and improved health care. This leads to the decline in death rates and acceleration of population growth. The third stage is reached when the birth rate starts declining because of female education. This results in reaching a balance of births and deaths and stabilization of population growth.
Consumption of Plant and Animal Products
Throughout the history, a man has been known as a hunter-gatherer. Human diet varied, depending on hunting skills, geographic location, and season of the year. In the process of development, countries’ demands for animal food have raised. The United States, China and other developed countries are the largest consumers of meat. In comparison with the consumption of plant products, animal food consumption requires more resources and land. There is high demand for water, land, and grain. With the increase of incomes, there will be intensifying the pressure on farmers with the demand to produce more grain, as well as soybeans for satisfying increasing appetites of livestock and poultry. As a result, an increase of meat consumption will lead to the scarcity of food resources.
Fuel and Food
The development of alternatives of oil leads to an increase of plant growing. This is considered one of the tragedies in human history. The rise of gasoline prices because of damages that were made by Hurricane Katrina caused the demand growth of fuel ethanol production, as it was highly profitable.
The massive leak of the grain to meet the needs of biofuel industry promoted the rise of food prices, causing consumers with low income suffer from food price inflation. In particular, in 2012, the prices on corn, wheat, and soybean doubled in terms of the historical levels. This contributes to the spreading of hunger.
Impact of Wind and Water Erosion
Topsoil thin layer was formed during long geological time because of exceeding of new soil formation over erosion rates. However, there has been a tendency of increasing the rate of soil erosion in the previous centuries. It even began to exceed the formation of new soil. Thus, soil, which has been formed on the scale of geological time, is getting lost on the scale of human time. Soil erosion by water and wind presents a global challenge. Water erosion has an indirect effect, which is referred to the silting reservoirs and muddying rivers that flow into the sea. Wind erosion evidence is represented by dust storms. As a result, increasing topsoil loss leads to the reduction of the earth’s inherent biological productivity.
Water and Food
Brown states that if humans are able to live for a long time without oil, he will “live for only a matter of days without water”. The problem is attributed to the fact that the humanity demands a vast amount of water for food production. About 70 percent of water use is directed towards irrigation. As the world faces the problem of water shortage, it is crucial to understand that further water shortage will cause food shortages in the future.
Grain Yields
Within the previous decades, area enlargement, which had been considered the primary source of the growth of global grain production, was substituted by rising yields. Japan was the first country to achieve a steady rise in grain yields. The timing and level of rainfall, as well as day length, solar intensity, and soil moisture are significant issues for crop yields. Today, India, the United States, and China are the biggest grain producers. At the same time, there is an increase of grain yields in sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, there is the lack of modern agriculture and infrastructure. The Gangetic Plain of India, Western Europe, and the North China Plain have inherently high fertility that contributes to grain yields.
Rising Temperatures
Agriculture has been developed under the conditions of climate stability. Today, climate change takes place because of the development of human civilization. Since 1970, the earth’s average temperature has risen more than 1 degree Fahrenheit. The rise of earth’s temperature influences agriculture. High temperature hinders pollination and diminishes photosynthesis of food crops. Moreover, high temperatures cause plants’ dehydration. As a result, these changes affect crop yields. In addition, water scarcity and melting mountain glaciers, which is resulted from climate changes, affect food production. In turn, the decline of harvests inevitably leads to the rise of food prices.
Impact of Food Scarcities on Control and Use of Farmland
In the previous years, world prices for grain and soybean have doubled. As a result of rising food prices, many exporting countries promoted the restriction on grain related trade in order to prevent inflation of food prices within the country. The negotiations on grain supply agreements were not successful for importing countries. Thus, they had to find other ways of solving the situation. They began to search for lands in other countries to produce food. Such land acquisitions represented a new stage in forthcoming geopolitics of food scarcity. They gained unprecedented pace and scale.
At the same time, the situation is worsened by the need of biofuel production because of rising prices for oil and energy insecurity. This contributed to land acquisitions. This issue has two possible outcomes: the purification of new croplands or making existing ones non-effective for food production. All these cause the beginning of a groundbreaking struggle for land, which goes beyond national boundaries. Being caused by energy and food insecurity, land acquisitions lead to water acquisitions. The claim of the land represents a claim of the water resources in the host country. Thus, the land acquisition causes challenges in water-stressed countries.
Preventing Food Breakdown
World agriculture is faced with unprecedented issues: falling water tables, plateauing grain yields, and rising temperatures, as well as soil erosion. This leads to the rise of world food prices, which, in turn, causes political instability. To prevent a collapse of the food system, it is needed to mobilize the entire society. The urgent goals include stabilizing the world population, eradicating poverty, reducing meat consumption, and reversing biofuel policies. The stabilization of the world population is closely connected with the elimination of poverty. To achieve these goals, it is crucial to contribute to family planning and reproductive health care. Poverty reduction can be reached by providing elementary school education and health care. All this will lead to stabilization of the population growth. This will provide a number of benefits to the modern civilization due to the reduction of people at the dinner table. In turn, these efforts and measures will promote a decline of food consumption throughout the world.
Many problems that take place in the modern world: diminishing of the land capacity, poverty, unstable population growth, and reduction of food supply. Every chapter of the book outlines crucial and depressing challenges. Nevertheless, expert’s conclusion and recommendations of possible ways of solving the situation are quite optimistic and uplifting. Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity is an important work for all people, who live in modern globalized world. It is a powerful reminder that if nothing is done to facilitate or eliminate current and future challenges dealing with the world’s food system, the majority of people, who are used to living comfortably, will be exposed to a risk of being deprived of the comfort in their lives. The author presents all this in a structured and logical manner that makes it easy to read the book. Brown conducted a great work that summed up the issues of the global situation and tied them together.
More articles of the witer, who conducted this article (Milly Jones), you can find at https://plagiarismsearch.com/