Lester R. Brown, “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?,” Scientific American, April 22, 2009

“Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy—most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible,” writes Earth Policy Institute President Lester Brown in this article about how global food shortages have the potential to disrupt civilization and increase the number of failed states, which in turn become “a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons, and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere.” Combined with depleted water sources, soil erosion and climate change, a “trend-driven” rise in world grain prices has exacerbated food shortages in many developing countries, according to Brown, who notes that “a fourth of this year’s U.S. grain harvest – enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians at current consumption levels – will go to fuel cars.” He warns that without drastic intervention, “a dangerous politics of food scarcity is coming into play: individual countries acting in their narrowly defined self-interest are actually worsening the plight of many.”

Brown ultimately urges governments to adopt a plan similar in “scale and urgency to the U.S. mobilization for World War II.” His approach relies on four components: “a massive effort to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent from their 2006 levels by 2020; the stabilization of the world’s population at eight billion by 2040; the eradication of poverty; and the restoration of forests, soils and aquifers.” Brown predicts that this plan to “save civilization” will cost “less than $200 billion a year, a sixth of current global military spending.” “We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mindset,” he concludes. “The thinking that got us into this bind will not get us out.”