Will climate change burst the global ‘food bubble’?

By Damian Carrington
Friday 28 January 2011 Lester Brown argues the pressures of rising population, consumption, water stress and global warming will pose the first serious challenge to civilisation through our food The world is in the midst of a “food bubble” that could burst at any time: that’s the conclusion of the eminent environmentalist Lester Brown, who I met yesterday to discuss his latest book. He argues we are “one bad harvest away from chaos” and that “food has become the weak link in our civilisation”. Here’s my summary of his reasoning. The bubble exists because food is being produced by the unsustainable use of its key resource, water. The most striking example is Saudi Arabia where, Brown says, the looming exhaustion of a major acquifer is moving the nation from self-sufficiency in grain just a few years ago to zero production in 2012. Statistics trip off Brown’s tongue as easily as water drips off the crops he is describing. There are 175 million people in China and 130 million people in India who live on food grown from unsustainable water supplies, according to Brown’s Earth Policy Institute. Half the world lives in countries where the water table is falling, he notes. Add to the water problem the growing demand for food, from rising population, consumption and biofuels, and you see how the bubble forms. The so-called land grabs, in which countries and corporations are buying up farmland in Africa, is another sign of the bubble, he says, as is the growing activity of speculators in the food commodity markets. So how might the bubble burst? Brown thinks one seriously bad harvest could provide the pin. World grain reserves are at an all time low, he says, with only India out of the top four producing nations having healthy stocks: the others are the US, China and Russia. The type of extreme weather projected to increase with global warming devastated the 2010 Russian harvest, with 40% of the usual 100m tonnes lost in wildfires and droughts. Another disaster in a big grain producing region would see grain prices “going off the top of the chart”, Brown predicts. At that point, nations ban exports, pushing prices higher and oil is bartered for food. …