Floods in Pakistan, droughts in Russia, rising grain prices. According to award-winning Australian science writer Julian Cribb, these are warning signs of an impending disaster that will dwarf the financial crisis.
In his new book The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do To Avoid It, he warns that looming scarcities of water, land, nutrients, oil and fish will leave us unable to feed ourselves within 50 years.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Mr. Cribb addresses the implications of the Western diet, the threat to cities and what impact famine could have on immigration.
Q: You must be a charming dinner companion.
A: I am a bit depressing. It's one of those issues people don't like to talk about much. But I'm a science journalist, so I've got a lot of other things to talk about besides food.
You outline a pretty scary scenario, but the idea of a looming global famine doesn't really seem to be on anyone's radar. Why is that?
Because we've been so very successful in food production over the last 30 years, that we've basically fallen asleep at the wheel. Countries like Canada, America, Australia, are awash with food. We throw half of it away. But what we really haven't noticed is the rate at which the basic resources for producing it are running out.
You say we've got less than 50 years until global crisis.
We're probably heading into, in 30 or 40 years, fairly savage disasters on a much larger scale than the Pakistan flood and the Russian droughts, which will displace large numbers of people. And the cost of that will fall on everybody.
Is that what it's going to take for people to notice there's a problem?
I hate to say it, but we're very slow on the uptake. Politicians don't like to move, unless they're really shoved out of their comfort zone. They haven't seen this big picture: the shortages of land, water, energy, fertilizer, fish, technology. I don't know what it's like in Canada, but in Australia, we haven't been investing anything in agricultural research in the last 20 years.
Are world leaders aware of the threat?
I think they're diverted by what they would regard as more immediate considerations. The financial crisis has got them all running around like ants, climate change has also been projected to them as a critical issue, and indeed it is, but it's a slower burning issue than the one that I'm flagging.
You need Al Gore to make a movie of your book.
I really do. I tried to get the publisher to send a copy to him. There has been a bit of a backlash with climate change though, and I'm hoping that won't happen with food. We live in an incredibly wasteful society and this is going to take hard work and co-operation, not just by governments and farmers and scientists, but also by individuals, in terms of the way they eat.
Is there any precedent for the world reacting en masse to a food issue?
In a sense, yes, the Green Revolution was that. In the 1960s, the Club of Rome pointed out that a lot of people in the world were starving and that was a disgrace. And the world invested a lot of money in agricultural science and shared the knowledge generously. We got super wheats and super rice. Places like India and China, which were starving, were self-sufficient in less than a decade.
But how do you convince Western countries that this will affect them? I think there's a perception that our borders will protect us.
