Full planet, empty plates

[polly7]

Published Sep 17 2012 by Earth Policy Institute, Archived Sep 17 2012

Full planet, empty plates: The new geopolitics of food scarcity (new book chapter)

by Lester Brown

"With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism?

Chapter 1. Food: The Weak Link

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 geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold." 1

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-17/full-planet-empty-plates-new-geopolitics-food-scarcity-new-book-chapter

[PATRICK]

1. Not for the first time

but certainly the most spectacular up to extinction event suicide levels this is the current state of geo economics. Food wars because we didn't take of any of the underlying issues except to make matters unsustainably worse. So out come the Four Horsemen, again, chafing at the bit while expensive measures for less apocalyptic "cures" will be strangled by short sighted politics and tunnel vision greed.

Armies and plutocrats plan and center on these things. Nothing is really done to manage or alleviate. Just exploit and control centers of power. And suddenly the people wake up and have to deal with the results- as they are permitted to do- by trying to be nomads in a gated world or joining armies to kill their starving competitors.

Making the transition from fed to starving without being allowed to connect the dots or changing the cyclical downfall. That is the fate of species that cannot exercise intelligence and foresight as they must. Fate, randomness, the myth of helplessness. The laws against seeing and acting except for useless greed and fraudulent power.

Nothing new or modern yet. When same old finally hits the wall it will be "dodo, dinosaur, man". Got it. That won't be much new either.

"Land is the new gold." What "gold" now stands for is death. Maybe that is new, maybe not.