Book review: The Coming Famine
By Nicole Eckersley
September 14, 2010
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. …
