Living On Earth: How Close are we to the Edge

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=11-P13-00007&segmentID=6

How Close are we to the Edge

Air Date: Week of February 18, 2011

…

GELLERMAN: A recent World Bank study notes that food prices have soared nearly 30 percent just in the past year. Meanwhile, many autocratic regimes in the Middle East that have ruled for decades have suddenly become unstable - as citizens take to the streets, demanding change.

This is not a coincidence says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute. He writes that rich nations are adding to the social instability when they buy up land in poor nations to guarantee their own food supply. Lester Brown is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of more than 50 books. His latest is "World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse." He spoke with Living On Earth's Steve Curwood.

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BROWN: On the demand side, we now have three sources of growing demand for grain. One - population growth. The second thing is rising affluence. There are probably close to three billion people in the world today who want to move up the food-chain and consume more grain in terms of livestock products - meat, milk and eggs.

The third thing is - we're now converting substantial quantities of grain into oil - i.e. ethanol. And what we're seeing now is that the world's farmers are having trouble keeping up with the growth and demand. But, on the supply side...climate change. It used to be that if we had a weather event someplace - a monsoon failure in India or drought in the former Soviet Union, or what have you - we knew that if we could get through the next year that things would go back to normal. But there's no norm to go back to now. The world's climate is in a constant state of flux.

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(Full transcript and audio at the link.)

[KurtNYC]

1. some of this reminds me of how the railroad ultimately made poor

germans even poorer in the 1800s. Once the railroads were built local crops could be sold to the highest bidders within a much larger area -- basically however far you could ship a fresh crop before it spoiled. In Germany/Prussia this meant that grain crops got shipped and cabbage stayed. And the cabbage had to be pickled for it to have any shelflife.

150 years later the whole planet is 19th Century Germany.

[ensho]

2. we are about an inch from the precipice

nt

[guardian]

3. DOOM DOOM DOOM

nt

[4dsc]

4. End ethanol and biofuel production

food for fuel is immoral.