37 Articles found
Earth Policy Institute Articles
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Can We Prevent A Food Breakdown?
By Lester R. Brown As food supplies have tightened, a new geopolitics of food has emerged—a world in which the global competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is fending for itself. We cannot claim that we are unaware ...
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Can the World Feed China?
By Lester R. Brown Overnight, China has become a leading world grain importer, set to buy a staggering 22 million tons in the 2013–14 trade year, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture projections. As recently as ...
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U.S.-India: Dealing With Monsoon Failure
The scene plays out in India. At a reception, I met the head of Indian operations for Esso (now ExxonMobil). When I asked him how business was, he said it was great. In particular, diesel sales to fuel irrigation pumps were nearly double the ...
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Many Countries Reaching Diminishing Returns in Fertilizer Use
When German chemist Justus von Liebig demonstrated in 1847 that the major nutrients that plants removed from the soil could be applied in mineral form, he set the stage for the development of the fertilizer industry and a huge jump in world food ...
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Moving Up the Food Chain
For most of the time that human beings have walked the earth, we lived as hunter-gatherers. The share of the human diet that came from hunting versus gathering varied with geographic location, hunting skills, and the season of the year. During the ...
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Rising Temperature, Rising Food Prices
Agriculture as it exists today developed over 11,000 years of rather remarkable climate stability. It has evolved to maximize production within that climate system. Now, suddenly, the climate is changing. With each passing year, the agricultural ...
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Grain Yields Starting to Plateau
By Lester R. Brown From the beginning of agriculture until the mid-twentieth century, growth in the world grain harvest came almost entirely from expanding the cultivated area. Rises in land productivity were too slow to be visible within a single ...
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Full Planet, Empty Plates: Chapter 2. The Ecology of Population Growth
Throughout most of human existence, population growth has been so slow as to be imperceptible within a single generation. Reaching a global population of 1 billion in 1804 required the entire time since modern humans appeared on the scene. To add ...
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New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed Civilizations
The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new ...
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Overfishing Threatens Critical Link in the Food Chain
The fish near the bottom of the aquatic food chain are often overlooked, but they are vital to healthy oceans and estuaries. Collectively known as forage fish, these species—including sardines, anchovies, herrings, and shrimp-like ...
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Global Grain Stocks Drop Dangerously Low as 2012 Consumption Exceeded Production
The world produced 2,241 million tons of grain in 2012, down 75 million tons or 3 percent from the 2011 record harvest. The drop was largely because of droughts that devastated several major crops—namely corn in the United States (the ...
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China’s Rising Soybean Consumption Reshaping Western Agriculture
Global demand for soybeans has soared in recent decades, with China leading the race. Nearly 60 percent of all soybeans entering international trade today go to China, making it far and away the world’s largest importer. The soybean was ...
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Book Byte: We Can Reforest the Earth
Protecting the 10 billion acres of remaining forests on earth and replanting many of those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health. Since 2000, the earth’s forest cover has shrunk by 13 million acres each year, ...
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How Much Will it Cost to Save Our Economy’s Foundation?
During the past two summers, Pakistan was hit with catastrophic floods. The record flooding in the late summer of 2010 was the most devastating natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. The media coverage reported torrential rains as the cause, ...
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Data Highlight: Arab Grain Imports Rising Rapidly
The Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa make up only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they take in more than 20 percent of the world’s grain exports. Imports to the region have jumped from 30 million tons of grain ...
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Bumper 2011 Grain Harvest Fails to Rebuild Global Stocks
The world’s farmers produced more grain in 2011 than ever before. Estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show the global grain harvest coming in at 2,295 million tons, up 53 million tons from the previous record in 2009. ...
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Rising Meat Consumption Takes Big Bite out of Grain Harvest
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights22 World consumption of animal protein is everywhere on the rise. Meat consumption increased from 44 million tons in 1950 to 284 million tons in 2009, more than doubling annual consumption ...
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Taxpayer dollars subsidizing destruction
One way to correct market failures is tax shifting—raising taxes on activities that harm the environment so that their prices begin to reflect their true cost and offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes. A complimentary way to achieve this ...
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Earth out of sync rising temperatures throwing off seasonal timing
A newly hatched chick waits with hungry mouth agape for a parent to deliver its first meal. A crocus peaks up through the snow. Rivers flow swiftly as ice breaks up and snows melt. Sleepy mammals emerge from hibernation, and early frog songs ...
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Plan B 4.0 by the numbers - data highlights on the global food supply
World agriculture today faces pressure from many sources. On the production side, the amount of unused arable and worldwide has dwindled. Overworked soils are becoming eroded and degraded, and overpumped aquifers are being depleted. Meanwhile, as ...