Global Food Scare

The gloom-and-doom crowd is at it again. With the floods in Australia and problems with crops around the world, they are convinced that food riots will soon break out everywhere and you best pack your gun and head for the hills.

But here is reality:


I found that image in Andrew Revkin's blog on the NY Times. He documents an exchange he initiated between Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba analyst of just about every global risk and trend, and Lester Brown, who heads the Earth Policy Institute and has for decades warned of economic and environmental unraveling. I side with Smil:

There are always speculative food price currents and undercurrents but no end of days as so many of your fellow citizens, being the most scientifically illiterate people who ever lived, think. Just look at #1, China: imports less than 5% of its food and CONSUMES more food per capita than Japan!!!

Nothing has changed since I wrote that closing chapter of my 2000 feeding the world book: if China can do it, anybody (but Somalia) can [*]. Nor is India “starving.” Any food shortages are 95%+ a matter of poor or no governance, not any “extreme” climate and “gunwale inching”… Queensland does not grow wheat in any quantity, just check the wheatland map of Australia, and as always you newsie guys have exaggerated the story, both south and north of the state are open for business; no end of Australia.

There is much in this exchange to please both the doomsters as well as the those like myself who use Julian Simons, author of The Ultimate Resource, as a guide.