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For years — even decades — Earth Policy Institute president and Grist contributor
Lester Brown has issued Cassandra-like warnings about the global food
system. His argument goes something like this: Global grain demand keeps
rising, pushed up by population growth and the switch to more
meat-heavy diets; but grain production can only rise so much, constrained by limited water and other resources. So, a food crisis is inevitable.

In
recent years, two factors have added urgency to Brown’s warnings: 1)
climate change has given rise to increasingly volatile weather, making
crop failures more likely; and 2) the perverse desire to turn grain into car fuel has put yet more pressure on global grain supplies.

Brown’s
central metaphor — which he’s been using at least since the mid-€˜90s
— will be familiar to readers who’ve lived through the previous
decade’s dot-com and real-estate meltdowns: the bubble. The world has
entered a “food bubble,” he argues; we’ve puffed up grain production by
burning through unsustainable amounts of three finite resources: water,
fossil fuels, and topsoil. At some point, he insists, the bubble has to
burst.

Well, for the second time in three years, the globe is
lurching toward a full-on, proper food crisis, especially in places like
Haiti that have de-emphasized domestic farming and turned instead to
the global commodity market for food. In 2008, global food prices spiked
to all-time highs, and hunger riots erupted from Haiti to Morocco. Now
prices are spiking again, and have already surpassed the 2008 peak,

The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

As if on cue, Lester Brown has come out with another of his reports, this one titled (with that Brownianlight touch),

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. You can download the whole thing free here, grab the brief presentation on food [PDF] lifted from the book, or just read Brown’s own post today for Grist on the topic.