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My name is Lester Brown. I live in Washington, D.C. I head the Earth Policy Institute, a
small research organization, a think tank, as we call them, in Washington, that is working
to design an economy for the future and a plan to create that. We call it Plan B. If
you go to the Earth Policy website, you can see the "Plan B" book online and get a sense
of what the principal components of Plan B are. Plan B, of course, being the alternative
to Plan A, which is, business as usual. Business as usual is no longer a viable option.
Today, the world is in transition from an era dominated by surpluses to one that will
be dominated by scarcity. There are a number of trends at work on both the demand side
and the supply side, that are leading to a tightening of world food supplies, and rising
food prices. This current situation is not temporary. This is part of a long term transition
from surpluses to scarcity. On the demand side of the equation, we have
population growth. That's not new. 80 million a year, we've been adding 80 million a year
for the last few decades. That means that, tonight, there will be 219,000 people at the
dinner table who were not here last night, and tomorrow night there will be another 219,000
people at the dinner table. Population growth is continuing. It is relentless.
The second factor that is generating demand for food is rising affluence. As incomes rise,
people everywhere move up the food chain, consuming more livestock and poultry products.
People have a taste for animal protein, and when their incomes increase enough, they begin
eating more animal protein. Just to give a sense of what this translates
into in a country like India, which consumes relatively little animal protein, annual grain
consumption is about 400 pounds per year. That's roughly a pound a day. In the United
States, by contrast, on the other end of the economic spectrum, we consume about 600 pounds
of grain per person per year. Only maybe 200 pounds of that is consumed directly as bread
and pastry and breakfast cereals. The great bulk of it is consumed in the form of meat,
milk and eggs. These are two major sources of growing demand
for grain in the world. One is population growth, the second is rising affluence. Now
there's also a third one, which is the use of grain to provide fuel for cars. In the
United States, we harvest about 400 million tons of grain per year. Last year, 129 million
tons of that 400 million went to ethanol distilleries to produce fuel for cars.
We've set up this competition between affluent automobile owners and low income consumers
around the world for the same grain supply. On the supply side, we're running into new
constraints on production. One is water shortages. World agriculture has expanded dramatically
over the last 60 years. It has more than tripled. But we're now having difficulties sustaining
that rapid growth. One of the reasons is shortages of water.
Half of us now live in countries that are over pumping aquifers, that is the underground
water resources, in order to expand irrigation. The World Bank, for example, estimates that
in India, 175 million people are being fed with grain produced by over pumping. My estimate
for China is that 120 million Chinese are being fed with grain produced by over pumping.
We have a similar situation in the United States where we are over pumping throughout
all of the states in the southwestern United States, including leading agricultural states
like Texas and California. Water is emerging as a constraint on efforts to expand food
production. There's a lot of land in the world that could be used to produce food if we had
water to go with it, but we don't have the water.
A second challenge facing farmers is climate change. The generation of farmers now on the
land is the first to face climate change on a sustained basis. Farmers have always faced
the vagaries of weather. There might be drought, there might be heat waves, there might be
flooding. But what farmers face now is a continuing rise in temperature. The rule of thumb is
that for each one degree Celsius rise in temperature, we can expect a 10 percent decline in grain
yields. Farmers are facing water shortages, they're
facing climate change, and keep in mind that agriculture as it exists today has evolved
over an 11,000 year period of rather remarkable climate stability. Agriculture as we know
it today is designed to maximize production with that climate system.
But that climate system is no more. The climate system is changing. With each passing year,
the agricultural system and the climate system are more and more out of sync with each other.
Farmers are uncertain about the future now in a way they never have been before. They
don't know what to plan for, because they don't know what, exactly how and when climate
is going to be changing. They only know that it will change.
We have water shortages, climate change, soil erosion is becoming a huge problem in some
countries around the world. Worldwide, we're losing topsoil much faster than topsoil forms
under natural conditions. We have a huge dust bowl forming in Northern China, for example,
where the land because of over ploughing and particularly over grazing, they destroyed
all the vegetation so there's nothing to hold the soil down.
When the wind starts blowing in late winter and early spring, after the snows are gone,
the soil just blows. We have a huge dust bowl in China, we have another huge dust bowl forming
in Central Africa, again because of over grazing and also over ploughing. These dust bowls
will make it impossible for agriculture to continue in the areas where they're blowing
the soil away. We have water shortages, climate change, soil
erosion, all making it more difficult for farmers to expand production fast enough to
keep up with demand. Then the question is, what do we do about
these threats to future food security? Well, one of the obvious things is, we have
to get the brakes on population growth. We have to accelerate the shift to smaller families.
We can't continue adding 80 million a year, or we will be in serious trouble. Indeed,
I would argue we are already in the early stages of trouble on the food front.
We are seeing, for example, the effect of the doubling of grain prices in recent years,
seeing the effect of that on low income segments of low income societies. In countries like
Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, for example, a substantial share of families now routinely plans foodless
days. They cannot afford enough food to eat every day, so on Sunday evening, for example,
they'll decide that this week they will not eat on Wednesday and Saturday.
This represents a deepening of hunger in the world. We've been concerned with the spread
of hunger. This represents a deepening of hunger. We have millions and millions of families
in Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, Peru, for example, who can no longer afford to eat every day,
so they now literally plan foodless days. This is obviously not a healthy situation.
It's one that I don't even think most people are aware of yet, but it is a serious threat
to future political stability, as people reach the point where they can't manage anymore.
We've got to get the brakes on population growth. The other thing we have to do is stabilize
climate. We have to cut carbon emissions fast. Political
leaders like to talk about cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, but by 2050
the game will be over. We have to cut carbon emissions, we think at the Earth Policy Institute,
80 percent by 2020. This is really more like a wartime mobilization.
We have to restructure the world energy economy, shifting away from fossil fuels, to renewable
sources of energy, total restructuring of the energy economy.
It is not unlike the restructuring of the US industrial economy in 1942, when we entered
World War II. We had very little in the way of armaments when the war began because we
had not expected or planned to be in the war. What President Roosevelt did was, he banned
the sale of new cars in the United States, forcing the automobile companies to produce
tanks and planes. He announced, at the beginning of 1942, he said, "We're going to produce
45,000 tanks and 60,000 planes." People couldn't imagine how we could do that,
but the key was banning the production of cars, so our industrial capacity focused on
building tanks and planes, and in the end we exceeded those arms production goals. Indeed,
instead of producing 60,000 planes, we produced 129,000 planes.
Even today, I find it difficult to imagine how to produce 129,000 planes, but we did
it, and it didn't take decades to restructure the US industrial economy, it didn't take
years. We did it in a matter of months. We are now faced with the need of restructuring
the world energy economy, not in decades but within the next matter of years. We have to
do it quickly, or climate change will spiral out of control and we will not be able to
ensure future food security. One of the ways of slowing the growth in demand
is for the more affluent peoples of the world, like in the United States and, to a lesser
degree, here in Italy, is to move down the food chain, consuming less grain intensive
livestock products, less pork and poultry and beef and eggs and cheese, and eat more
vegetables and whole grains. If we did that, most of us would be healthier
in the more affluent societies, certainly in the United States, and the planet would
be healthier. It would lighten the demand on the Earth's land and water resources, and
that's something we have to think about now. We've discovered that the Earth is not infinite,
it is finite, and the amount of land and water available to produce food is limited.
One of the recent developments we've seen is what I call the "new geopolitics of food."
We've seen this emerge over the last several years. When grain prices doubled between late
2007 and early 2008, grain exporting countries began restricting exports to try to control
their domestic food prices, because food prices were rising throughout the world.
Exporting countries like Argentina, exporting wheat, Russia, exporting wheat, both restricted
or banned wheat exports, to keep their domestic food prices down, making the situation much
worse, of course, in the rest of the world. Vietnam, the world's leading rice exporter,
banned rice exports for several months to keep its food prices down.
At this point, the importing countries suddenly realized they could no longer count on the
market. They would not necessarily have access to supplies in exporting countries, and they
panicked, as one might expect they would do. They began looking for land in other countries,
that they could buy or lease, on which to grow food for themselves to ship back home.
This initiated this modern land rush, if you will, or land grab movement.
According to a World Bank tabulation a year ago, there were 396 land acquisitions, some
of them relatively small, thousands of hectares, some of them hundreds of thousands of hectares.
The total area in these land grabs was equal to the area in wheat and corn combined, in
the United States. It was a large chunk of land.
We have this competition, now, among countries to see who is going to control land and water
resources. We've seen land prices rising at twice the rate of the Dow Jones Industrial
Index, for example. There is a land rush on now, and I've said
that land is the new oil. Food is the new gold, and the geopolitics associated with
this tightening of land and water resources, and therefore of food, is becoming a dominant
influence in shaping the world food economy, and who controls production in various parts
of the world. When we look at the trends in the world today,
whether it's population, climate, soil erosion, water shortages, it's clear that we cannot
continue as we now are. We need to change. We need to restructure the global economy.
We need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. What we're talking about
now is we're talking about the future of civilization itself. Our civilization cannot survive the
ongoing destruction and disruption of the Earth's natural resources, whether it's forest
or grasslands or fisheries, or croplands, or the climate system, or what have you.
It will not be easy to restructure the world economy to convert it into a sustainable economy,
but that's what we have to do, and it's going to take a huge political effort.
Very often, when I'm giving talks, people raise their hand and ask the question, "What
can I do?" I think they expect me to say, "Recycle your
newspapers, get the new highly efficient light bulbs, and so forth." Those things are important,
but we now have to become politically active, because we have to change the system.
I'm not talking about a political revolution. I'm talking about restructuring the world
economy, and putting pressure on our leaders through our activism, and through our voices,
to get them to see not only that they need to change, but that we support that change.
The world is faced with an enormous educational challenge, helping people to understand why
we have to make these huge changes. The traditional educational system is not going to be sufficient
to do that, because there, we teach a generation of teachers, who teach a generation of students,
who a generation later become policymakers, but by that time the game will be over.
We have to move fast now, so we're going to have to rely much more on the communications
media to raise the level of awareness and understanding. That's why things like this
filming are, I think, essential to creating the understanding and generating the political
action that will support the changes we need to make.
Let me just add that, and this is something for you individually to do, pick an issue
that's important to you. Stabilizing world population or closing coal fired power plants,
pick an issue that's important to you. Find some friends who share your concerns and begin
to mobilize. Meet with your political representatives in the legislature. From there, you can begin
to bring about these changes. Just very briefly, the world is not going
to change unless we force it to change. We all, or many of us have children. Some of
us have grandchildren, and we have to have them in mind as we make this effort. We won't
get another chance. If we don't succeed in making the changes now, it's not something
we can do a generation from now. It's our generation that has to make these changes,
for the sake of future generations. The challenge to you is to get involved in
this educational process. Help other people understand why we need to make these changes
and why we need to make them quickly.
p.