Book review: The Coming Famine

[Oscar]

Book review: The Coming Famine

http://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2010/09/14/
book-review-the-coming-famine.html

September 14, 2010 Nicole Eckersley

Author, journalist and science writer Julian Cribb has created a sobering text in The Coming Famine: The global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it, from CSIRO Publishing.

Cribb’s view of the global food crisis paints a frightening picture: demand for food slowly outstripping supply, food production and urbanisation draining the world’s fresh water resources, food products siphoned for biofuel, developing markets with a taste for more exotic, protein-rich and plentiful dinner fare, rising populations worldwide, climate instability and the role of food in economic markets all coming together. The result: water shortages, overfishing, land shortages, soil nutrient losses, unreliable harvests and, almost certainly, a worldwide food crisis.

“Despite the global food crisis of 2007-08, the coming famine hasn’t happened yet. It is a looming planetary emergency whose interlocked causes and deeper ramifications the world has barely begun to absorb, let alone come to grips with. Experts predict the crisis will peak by the middle of the twenty-first century; it is arriving even faster than climate change. Yet there is still time to forestall catastrophe,” says Cribb in his introduction.

Not just peak oil, but peak land, and even peak people, have and will continue create vast pressures on the food chain, with humanity running through every available resource - nutrients, fish stocks, arable land, usable water, fertilisers - without regard for the future.

Despite the bleak picture he paints, Cribb believes that human resourcefulness is more than a match for this particular problem, and sets out in each chapter his suggestions for beginning to fix each problem on a global scale, a farming scale and on a personal level.

Increased R&D for food security and efficient growing techniques, as well as good farming techniques, water management, reduced waste and sensible government could all make a difference, according to Cribb.

MORE: http://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2010/09/14/
book-review-the-coming-famine.html

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Seeing a Time (Soon) When We'll All Be Dieting

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/books/25book.html

By Mark Bittman The New York Times Saturday, Sep 4, 2010
Book review: THE COMING FAMINE - The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It, By Julian Cribb

Fifty years ago, a billion people were undernourished or starving; the number is about the same today. That's actually progress, since a billion represented a third of the human race then, and "only" a sixth now.
Today we have another worry: roughly the same number of people eat too much. But, says Julian Cribb, a veteran science journalist from Australia, "The era of cheap, abundant food is over."
Like many other experts, he argues that we have passed the peak of oil production, and it's all downhill from now on. He then presents evidence that we have passed the peaks for water, fertilizer and land, and that we will all soon be made painfully aware that we have passed it for food, as wealthy nations experience shortages and rising prices, and poorer ones starve.
Much of "The Coming Famine" builds an argument that we've jumped off a cliff and that global chaos - a tidal wave of people fleeing their own countries for wherever they can find food - is all but guaranteed. The rest of the book concentrates on catching an outcropping of rock with a finger and scrambling back up. The writing is neither personality-filled nor especially fluid, but the sheer number of terrifying facts makes the book gripping.

MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/books/25book.html

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Action Could Prevent Famine

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/innovations/st ... 994492.htm

13 September 2010

As Innovations celebrates 25 years on air; what of the next twenty five years. In this program we examine the risks and solutions for global food security
Contact: Julien Cribb
Julien Cribb and Associates
International Telephone: +61 2 6242 8770
Email: Julian.cribb(at)work.netspeed.com.au
Website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520260719
Website: http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6447.htm

TRANSCRIPT:

DESLEY BLANCH : In the coming half-century humanity faces a planetary crisis that will affect everyone of us. By 2050 the world's farmers will be asked to double global food production - using less water, less land, less energy, less fertiliser and less technology than they have today.

In a new book, "The Coming Famine" published by University of California Press and the CSIRO, Australian science writer, Julien Cribb raises major concerns about how the world will feed itself. His assessment is that urgent action is needed now to ensure global food security, or else we run the risk of regional famines, the tidal movements of tens of millions of refugees, and wars.

Julien has written the book as a wake-up call intended for anyone who eats or plans to in the future and has come up with practical solutions for each of the major challenges it raises.

I asked Julien Cribb who talks to us from ABC studios in Canberra, to give an overview of the problems that we as world citizens face and which are central to his book.

JULIEN CRIBB : Well, human population is continuing to grow. There will be about nine billion people in 2050, maybe ten or eleven billion in the 2060's and their demand for food is increasing because people have got more money and they can buy more high protein food. So that's going to double the world demand for food by the 2060s.

At the same time, as you mentioned in your introduction, everything that is needed to produce food is running out. We're running out of good farm land because the cities are taking it or it's being degraded. We're running out of water because the cities are taking it or the climate is changing. We're running out of oil; we know that the world is heading into peak oil and we need energy to produce our food. We're running out of fertiliser. The nutrients that we use on our farms are limited in supply and will become more limited towards the middle part of the century. We're running out of technology because we have not invested in it and of course the climate is changing. So, all of those things add up to big constraints to our ability to double the food production.

MORE: http://www.abc.net.au/ra/innovations/st ... 994492.htm