Customer Reviews

Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures

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this is an excellent and well written overview of the many challenges facing the world as it faces increasing demands for food and decreasing food supplies due to factors such as urbanization, global warming, increased population, water shortages. the author presents the issues in a factual and articulate manner without seeking to be too alarmist or anti-business. the book is short on rhetoric but full of relevant data from which the reader can form his/her own conclusions. it makes you think about food in an entirely new perpsective.

Quite the volume to approach the essential and much misunderstood issue of food security. Critical reading to develop an argument for policy chance and avoid, or lessen, the crisis. The book is dated 2004 and like it suggests there is a strong feeling to expand and update figures and analysis in the face of recent developments. Much of that update points to the Earth Policy Institute where Lester Brown is President, but there is much from him, and plenty other authors to add to the debate.

While one is left with little doubt about the severity of the demands on the earth's capacity, something is lacking by way of helping to make a strong public argument, one that will raise actual social awareness. But that is not so much a flaw of the book as a challenge of a topic that for its importance seems to be placed on the periphery of public concern.

On a personal planning note, I am particularly intrigued by the validity of the argument offered by food security regarding urban density. Urban density has been typically misconstrued as an ideological necessity, either romanticizing the idea of the city to support it, or defending individual liberty against central planning to defend sprawl. Here not only the environmental argument is strengthen, but a solid line of thinking emerges since sprawl is an essential cause of the decrease of croplands in particular by the paving for roads, highways, parking lots and its related lifestyle. Density would be a remedy to that, although that would be far from solving on its own the huge sustainability challenges that urbanization faces.

Excellent work as all of this author's are. This book should be required reading for all government ministers of all stated globally.
Nick Robson, South Asian Strategic Stability Institute.

"Outgrowing the Earth" is another great contribution by Lester Brown. In ten concise chapters the author reviews the relationship between continuing human population growth and the finite land and water resources of the planet. I found the discussion of falling water tables especially interesting and important. I was also glad to see the increasing food needs of China as well as the potential for increasing food production in Brazil were both covered from several angles. There were also extensive endnotes and a decent index, both of which I found useful. In summary, this is another important and well-researched publication for anyone interested in issues of food security in these times of diminishing fuel reserves, rising temperatures, and falling water tables.

This is an outstanding work, highlighting the very likely risk of future global food shortages and food price inflation. During most of our western-world memory there was on oversupply of basic food and governments were concerned about too much grain and prices dropping too low. Lester Brown makes a very convincing case that the opposite is likely to happen in the future. His opinions are very well documented and based on plenty of statistics.

I'm not a scienttist. I recently became interested, however, in the issue of the sustanability of the human race. Much of my concern has been due to political uncertainties, but I also wondered about some fundamental environmental issues.

Since I have not read much in the field of environmentalism, I can not say for certain how solid Brown's facts are, but it does appear he presents many claims, in this book and in the web site that the book refers to, which would enable his claims (and priorities) to be tested. It would be unusual for one person to have everything right on such complex issues but if Brown has presented what he sees clearly and verifiably, that seems a great help to us all. It seems a big help to me personally.

Brown does not focus on catastrophe in this relatlively subdued 2005 book: it is clearly instead stated many times to be about food security. He is concerned, but doesn't speculate, as to how polticians and nations will react if the food security challenge is not met. Beyong warming, which dominates the news, Brown raises concerns about issues I was less familar with such as the water tables.

I definitely plan now to read Brown's "Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble" which does sound more alarmist. Even if scientists ran the world, it seems we might be in grave danger but with our current set of politicians, how can we feel confident? This may be a time when every good world citizen sets aside national boundaries and steps forward to seek a solution to the earth's woes for the sake of the future of our descendants.

Brown's thesis is that humanity is outgrowing the earth and putting world food security at risk. One might assume that Brown would support his thesis with charts and statistics on hunger, starvation, famine, nutrition and food prices... but one would be wrong. Outgrowing the Earth eschews all of this and instead focuses on global warming, dust storms, grain stocks, water tables and world population which are only indirectly related to food security.

The key to understanding world food security, Brown argues, is to understand world grain production. For example, the "Japan Syndrome" is a pattern of rapid industrialization followed by rising grain consumption, shrinking grainland and falling grain production (p10). Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have all followed this pattern and today they are heavily dependant on grain imports. Brown predicts that very soon China will also tumble down this path and that the world will be unable to produce enough grain to feed 1.2 billion Chinese. Brown warns that catastrophic starvation looms large in China's future.

Brown presents his discussions of water and livestock also in terms of grain production. Livestock is analyzed in terms of "protein efficiency." Fish are the most efficient at converting grain feed into live weight whereas steer are the least efficient (p44). Therefore, diets will need to shift from less efficient livestock to more efficient livestock as grain becomes increasingly scarce in the near future. In the chapter on water tables, Brown argues that when nations import grain they are, in a sense, importing water "since it takes a thousand tons of water to produce one ton of grain" (p111).

Brown's ideas about the Japan Syndrome, protein efficiency, and grain markets (i.e. water markets) are among the highlights of Outgrowing the Earth. Unfortunately, these are overshadowed by a fundamentally flawed thesis.

The problem with Brown's thesis is that recent history does not indicate an impending food catastrophe. The past 50-100 years have produced trends of falling food prices, better diets, improved nutrition, better access to clean water, less hunger, less famine and ever increasing agricultural productivity and efficiency. Brown concedes all of this but he chooses to wave such facts aside and treats his own tenuous predictions of future catastrophe as more compelling than the current real-life long-term trends of declining hunger and improving diets.

Often, Brown's ideas are plain silly. Brown believes that we can use arable land for either cropland or roads but not both. Hence, to preserve cropland Brown argues for more bicycles, more public transportation and less automobiles. He even engages in some class warfare: the competition between roads and cropland is "a struggle between the rich and the poor-between those who can afford automobiles and those who are struggling to get enough food to survive" (p93). Brown argues that wind erosion is carrying away precious topsoil and depositing it in the ocean. Wind erosion is such a serious problem in Africa that it is literally "draining the continent of its fertility" (p85). Apparently, Brown has no trouble believing that wind can carry away an entire continent's worth of topsoil! Fortunately, Brown has a solution: "for areas with strong winds and in need of electricity, such as northwestern China, wind turbines can simultaneously slow wind speeds and provide cheap electricity" (p93).

Over the past decades, plant breeders have greatly increased crop productivity by breeding hardier and pesticide resistant crops. Brown concedes that this is a good thing but he laments that plant breeders have been unable to "fundamentally improve the efficiency of photosynthesis." In fact the photosynthesis of today's crops "remains unchanged from that of their wild ancestors" (p62). Brown believes that this bodes ill for world food security.

Drip irrigation is more water efficient that current methods of irrigation, but alas, it's also very labor intensive (p113). Undeterred by the labor needs, Brown proposes that drip irrigation is well suited to countries suffering from both water shortages and high unemployment! Other deep thoughts from Outgrowing the Earth are that there are no substitutes for water and that people can "live for only a matter of days without water" (p99). Brown believes that governments should "coordinate population policy with water availability" and he's bewildered that "there appears to be no effort to do so" (p105). Notice that Brown's argument is not that water policy should be based on population but that "population policy" should be based on water availability! "Population policy" sounds like a euphemism for government restrictions on family size but Brown declines to go into specifics. In all seriousness, Brown proposes that wind power and bicycles are good for food security whereas automobiles are bad for food security. By the time Brown claims that water prices are "irrational" (p114) this reviewer was laughing out loud. I imagine that much of the world appears "irrational" to Brown.

The bulk of Outgrowing the Earth consists of many such imaginary problems and Brown's fanciful solutions. If you would also like to worry about paving over cropland, the stagnant efficiency of photosynthesis, and the soil-pilfering wind then I recommend Outgrowing the Earth for you.