Who Will Feed China? Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet

Who Will Feed China? Wake-Up Call For a Small Planet, Lester R. Brown, W.W. Norton, 1995

This book uses China as an example of how the ability of countries to feed their people is going to become a major problem in the next few decades.

Why should the average person care about China's ability to feed itself? When China starts importing grain, in quantities of hundreds of millions of tons, prices around the world are going to rise very dramatically. The world will enter a period of food scarcity, where there simply isn't enough to go around. Political and economic instability will become an issue, not to mention simple survival for much of the Third World.

China has several 'strikes' against it in the area of food production. The vast majority of the land cannot grow anything because it is all mountains and desert. The cultivable land is in the east and south, the same place where the industrialization is happening. All those factories and highways are built on what was farmland. Over three-quarters of the farmland is irrigated, and water is becoming scarce, as the rapidly growing cities make their demands on the water supply. Food production per acre is stagnating or dropping, no matter how much water or fertilizer is used. As China industrializes, its residents are moving up the food chain. No longer content with a rice diet, they are more interested in consuming red meat, which, by itself, takes lots of grain. Underlying all of this is China's rapidly growing population.

This is a fascinating book. The author does not mean to 'pick on' China, but to show that with a growing population worldwide, especially in Asia, and food production stagnant or dropping, something needs to be done now. The alternative is the world's food production and distribution system completely falling apart, with disastrous consequences. This book is short, a very easy read, and it says a lot. It is highly recommended.