Tough Choices: Facing the Challenge of Food Scarcity (Worldwatch Environmental Alert) - Softcover

Brown, Lester R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393315738 ISBN 13: 9780393315738

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996

Synopsis

In a world where the need for seafood and grain for the 90 million people being added each year is being satisfied in part by reducing consumption among those already here, the world has little choice but to try and quickly slow population growth. Historically, farmers and fishermen bore the primary responsibility for balancing supply and demand. Now with the fish catch no longer expanding and with the growth in grain production slowing, the principal responsibility rests with the family planners.

Published for the World Food Conference to be held in Rome in November, this provocative book assesses the current food scarcity situation and proposes steps that can be taken to expand food production and buy additional time to stabilize population. Part of the Worldwatch Environmental Alert series.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Food scarcity is emerging as the defining issue of the new era now unfolding, much as ideological conflict was the defining issue of the historical era that recently ended. More fundamentally, food scarcity may be the first major economic manifestation of an environmentally unsustainable global economy. An early hint of the shift to an economy of scarcity came in late April 1996, when wheat prices on the Chicago Board of Trade soared above $7 a bushel, the highest level in history and more than double the price a year earlier. Corn prices also doubled, moving above $5 a bushel, a new record. And the price of rice, the other major grain, was climbing. In this, the seventh volume in the Worldwatch Environmental Alert series, Lester Brown observes that prices were climbing because world carryover stocks of grain had fallen to 48 days of consumption, the lowest level on record. Production was falling behind demand. Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, argues that the continually expanding demand for food is colliding with some of the earth's natural limits, including the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries, the sustainable yield of the aquifers that supply irrigation water, and the physiological limits of crop varieties to use fertilizer.

About the Author:

Lester R. Brown is the founder of the Earth Policy and Worldwatch Institutes. He has been honored with numerous prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the United Nations Environment Prize, and twenty-five honorary degrees. He lives in Washington, D.C.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0393315738
• ISBN 13: 9780393315738
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164