The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It [ハードカバー]

"This book is a wake-up call. It deals with the most urgent issue facing humanity in the twenty-first century, perhaps in all of history: the planetary emergency over whether or not we can sustain our food supply through the midcentury peak in human numbers, demand, and needs. It reflects on the likely consequences of our failure to do so."--Julian Cribb, Preface, The Coming Famine

This book brings us a message that we all need to hear: that resource depletions, climate change challenges, and growth in human numbers and appetites pose a dire threat to our food supply. An Australian journalist and Director of National Awareness for Australia's national science agency, Julian Cribb joins a growing chorus of other writers who have looked at food issues from a variety of angles. There are three major differences between this book and most of the other "end of food" books, however.

1) "The Coming Famine" deals systematically with all the major threats to the food supply: water shortages; soil depletions; nutrient loss and waste; fishery collapse; the Green Revolution and private ownership of genetic material; war and mass migrations; peak oil; climate change; uncontrolled human population growth; and unfair trade practices.

2) It focuses attention on the twin demand pressures of population growth and increased human appetites--the twin "elephants in the kitchen."

3) It offers practical suggestions in every chapter that encourage the reader to commit to positive actions. For example, in his chapter on climate change, Cribb suggests rebalancing our diets toward foods with a smaller carbon footprint; reducing consumption of meat, oils, and dairy products; selecting seasonal, locally-grown foods. (Losing hope? Plant a garden.)

Chapter by chapter, Cribb builds the argument that our habits of wasteful, irresponsible, and ignorant consumption have already created the conditions for an inevitable global famine, and that the only way to avert it is to alter our current practices. He bolsters every assertion of fact with a recital of terrifying and nearly irrefutable evidence, fully documented in the notes and delivered in a dispassionate voice that is all the more compelling because it is neither angry nor accusatory.

Cribb doesn't claim to have all the answers, and some of his solutions are contradictory. (For example, it will be hard to develop a second, high-tech "Green Revolution" at the same time that we're running out of fossil fuels and coping with rising sea levels.) But this important book organizes the challenges that face us in a clear and understandable way, provides convincing factual support for the problems he describes, and reminds us (with a note of hope) that humans are a highly adaptive species that can meet the challenges if they can muster enough global will to get the job done.

Cribb's journalist style and his blizzard of facts do not make for pleasant reading, and you may be tempted to put the book down before you've finished it. Don't. It deserves to be read to the end. "Today's food is too cheap to last," Cribb writes, in the book's final section. "To avert the coming famine we all need to start paying its true price--not blindly transferring the cost of what we consume today to our grandchildren tomorrow."

Put The Coming Famine at the top of your reading list. And when you've finished it, go out and tell your friends and colleagues about it. It's that important.

I just finished "The Coming Famine" and thought it was a smart, well written, interesting and compelling description of the challenges my children will likely face as the world's growing population and our shrinking resources collide. The author writes with authority, cites credible research, and finds a measured path between sounding a wake up bell and offering hope for the human race. There is urgency behind every word, and this is an important book. Like many people, I have had a complacent belief that science/research will find ways for us to produce superfoods that will largely (magically?) keep up with humankind's demand, and his chapters on agro R and D were sobering. Living in the northeast US with its abundant H20 has made it hard to pay close attention to the water woes of China and Africa, and i had under-appreciated the connection between famine and ethnic strife.

This book should be widely read. It will make you take a better look at the source of your larder, view your green, sprinklered lawn with an eye toward permaculture and food plants, and become thriftier with water and less wasteful generally. There are action plans here at the macro and micro level that might just save the planet.

I am skeptical of doomsayers but Cribb just isn't one. The "The era of cheap, abundant food is over." is his punching punchline. One reads this and hopes that there must be breakthroughs before supply and demand meet at this books point. The consumer staples sector just got more attractive.