Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

by Lester R. Brown

With food supplies tightening, countries are competing for the land and water resources needed to feed their people.

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. Food is the new oil,” Lester R. Brown writes.


What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Brown outlines the political implications of land acquisitions by grain-importing countries in Africa and elsewhere as well as the world’s shrinking buffers against poor harvests. With wisdom accumulated over decades of tracking agricultural issues, Brown exposes the increasingly volatile food situation the world is facing.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Science, Economics, Environment, Politics, Nature

161 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 10, 2012

About the author

Lester Russel Brown is an American environmentalist, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. BBC Radio commentator Peter Day calls him "one of the great pioneer environmentalists."

In the mid-1970s, Brown helped pioneer the concept of sustainable development, during a career that started with farming. As early as 1978, in his book The Twenty-Ninth Day, he was already warning of "the various dangers arising out of our manhandling of nature...by overfishing the oceans, stripping the forests, turning land into desert." In 1986, the Library of Congress requested his personal papers noting that his writings “have already strongly affected thinking about problems of world population and resources.”

He has been the recipient of many prizes and awards, including, the 1987 United Nations Environment Prize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize for his "contributions to solving global environmental problems."

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Mitchell · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book oversimplifies the complex interactions between nations, and leaves out historical references that would clarify the problems countries are currently facing. For example, when talking of East African countries, Brown notes the instability of their governments and uses it as a reason for why they cannot provide for their citizens. What he fails to mention though, are the reasons behind the instability, which in reality has to do with European powers taking resources and dividing the land with little regard to existing ethnic groups. He also cites large families in India and China as causes of stress on the food system and a drain of resources, when these people are using less resources per person that the US is. This book had the potential to be interesting and informing, but I found it to just push his agenda of oversimplification and decision making without taking the whole picture into consideration.

[Judy Lindow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to reread this book immediately. The book's analysis of the new geopolitics of food scarcity is superbly summarized. Many interconnections are made and he gives a clear outline of key demand side and supply side issues. He does a fairly good job of stating how dire the problems are - itemizes a to-do list - however I wish he'd put more emphasis on food choice and not eating meat as central to reversing the current environmental, climate change, resource depletion mess. I wished he'd somehow screamed a little louder. Sometimes the most concise, well stated, and cogent arguments are missed because there are so many simple minds that by-pass 'just information'. It's crazy - but human - to wait for the blood, starvation, war, and drama, before paying attention.

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought this was a good follow up read to “becoming earth”. Got pretty dull in the middle when the chapters focused on facts about grain production but otherwise a very informative read. I liked that the author included a concluding chapter on action steps.

[Eleni Dragon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was lucky to borrow this book from the author himself, my upstairs neighbor, Lester. While now outdated, very much and very little has changed since this was written in 2012, largely for the worse. I picked it up at a particularly poignant and emotional time, the week USAID is officially ‘abolished’, and it was a frustrating and galvanizing reminder of why I’m in this line of work and why we can’t afford to let defeat reign

[Alex Furst · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity by Lester Brown.
3/5 rating. 138 pages.
Book #7 of 2021. Read January 21, 2021.

This is a thoroughly depressing (though not inaccurate) look at the issues that are coming to a head in disrupting humanity's future.

Lester talks about the huge concerns of increasing population, poverty, and increased meat consumption all at the same time as climate change and water shortages clamp our ability to produce food.

I think that this is probably a good book to read right before "Two Percent Solutions for the Planet" as "Full Planet, Empty Plates" will alert you to the issues that we will see increase if we continue to go about with business as usual. After you realize the issues, then you can check out potential solutions in Two Percent Solutions.

As Lester says, "In short, avoiding a breakdown in the food system requires the mobilization of our entire society." We must address each of these concerns concurrently as unfortunately, we have run out of time while dawdling and hoping for someone else to fix things. "We all have a stake in the future of civilization."

Lester shares a few ideas, but this is mostly a book to show us where we are. We all have to make moves to reach for a brighter future. "Saving civilization is not a spectator sport."

Quotes:
"At home, corn accounts for four fifths of the U.S. grain harvest. Internationally, the U.S. corn crop exceeds China’s rice and wheat harvests combined."
"The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage—replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability—than most people realize."
"As a result of chronic hunger, 48 percent of all children in India are stunted physically and mentally. They are undersized, underweight, and likely to have IQs that are on average 10–15 points lower than those of well-nourished children."
"Interviewing individual families in Kinshasa, he noted that three years ago everyone ate at least one meal a day. But today even families with both parents working often cannot afford to eat every day."
"In 2011, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain. Of this, 127 million tons (32 percent) went to ethanol distilleries."
"The average American, in contrast, consumes roughly 1,400 pounds of grain per year, four fifths of it indirectly in the form of meat, milk, and eggs. Thus the total grain consumption per person in the United States is nearly four times that in India."
"The grain required to fill a 25-gallon fuel tank of a sport utility vehicle with ethanol just once would feed one person for a whole year. The grain turned into ethanol in the United States in 2011 could have fed, at average world consumption levels, some 400 million people."
"In terms of energy efficiency, grain-based ethanol is a clear loser. For sugarcane, the energy yield—that is, the energy embodied in the ethanol—can be up to eight times the energy invested in producing the biofuel. In contrast, the energy return on energy invested in producing corn-based ethanol is only roughly 1.5 to 1, a dismal return."
"Wang Tao, one of the world’s leading desert scholars, reports that from 1950 to 1975 an average of 600 square miles of land turned to desert each year. Between 1975 and 1987, this climbed to 810 square miles a year. From then until the century’s end, it jumped to 1,390 square miles of land going to desert annually."
"Korea’s Ministry of Environment reports that the country suffered dust storms on average for 39 days in the 1980s, 77 days in the 1990s, and 118 days from 2000 to 2011."
"Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is losing 868,000 acres of rangeland and cropland to desertification each year."
"Over the last decade, Lesotho’s grain harvest dropped by half as its soil fertility fell."
"Soil erosion and land degradation issues are local, but their effect on food security is global."
"As adults, each of us drinks nearly 4 liters of water a day in one form or another. But it takes 2,000 liters of water—500 times as much—to produce the food we consume each day."
"With wells going dry, Syria’s grain harvest has fallen by one third since peaking at roughly 7 million tons in 2001. In Iraq, the grain harvest has fallen by one sixth since peaking at 4.5 million tons in 2002."
"The state of Iowa, for instance, produces more grain than Canada and more soybeans than China."
"World fertilizer use climbed from 14 million tons in 1950 to 177 million tons in 2010, helping to boost the world grain harvest nearly fourfold."
"Impressive though the growth is over the last 60 years, the pace has slowed during the last two decades. Between 1950 and 1990, the world grain yield increased by an average of 2.2 percent a year. From 1990 to 2011, the annual rise slowed to 1.3 percent. In some agriculturally advanced countries, the dramatic climb in yields has come to an end as yields have plateaued."
"They also noted that glaciers are now melting at least twice as fast as a decade ago."
"Since 1970, the forested area in the Brazilian Amazon Basin has shrunk some 19 percent from its 400 million hectares. For the cerrado, it is estimated that roughly half of its original 200 million hectares has been lost. In both cases, soybean expansion has played a significant role."
"In short, avoiding a breakdown in the food system requires the mobilization of our entire society."
"On the demand side of the food equation, there are four pressing needs—to stabilize world population, eradicate poverty, reduce excessive meat consumption, and reverse biofuels policies that encourage the use of food, land, or water that could otherwise be used to feed people."
"The world needs to focus on filling the gap in reproductive health care and family planning while working to eradicate poverty. Progress on one will reinforce progress on the other. Two cornerstones of eradicating poverty are making sure that all children—both boys and girls—get at least an elementary school education and rudimentary health care. And the poorest countries need a school lunch program, one that will encourage families to send children to school and that will enable them to learn once they get there."
"The goal of restructuring taxes is to lower income taxes and raise carbon taxes so that the cost of climate change and other indirect costs of fossil fuel use are incorporated in market prices. If we can get the market to tell the truth, the transition from coal and oil to wind, solar, and geothermal energy will move very fast. If we remove the massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, we will move even faster."
"Beyond this, diverting a big chunk of the largely obsolete military budget into incentives to invest in rooftop solar panels, wind farms, geothermal power plants, and more energy-efficient lighting and household appliances would accelerate the energy transition."
"We all have a stake in the future of civilization."

[Wim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed by the book, that is on an important and very interesting topic, but poorly written. Brown bombards the reader with statistics that are not always presented in a way that facilitates interpretation. I strongly disagree with his ideas on human population and think he misses the points that have been repeatedly made by demographers.

The book is very mechanic, as seems the view of the author on where the world goes. Chapters are unrelated and the whole book is full of dramatically bad news. The author waits until the last chapter to hastily make some proposals about how to solve world food problems and give some positive examples, but it is too little and too late.

In spite of all this, I must say I learned a lot on grain markets (and the link between food, energy, water and land), and also on wind erosion and dust storms (very common here in the Sahel).

[Yngve Skogstad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contains loads of very useful statistics regarding resource use/depletion and food production, but in terms of an analysis of power/politics it leaves much in the way. I must admit I wasn’t familiar with the author beforehand, so I sort of expected this to be more of an IR study of the quest for food security in a time of ecological collapse. It certainly wasn’t.

I appreciate how Brown doesn’t merely talk about the problem of climate change, like so many “environmentalists” tend to do today, instead addressing a series of ecological crises (still leaving some undealt with). I do however think he displays a major historical illiteracy throughout, presenting the global south almost as innately backward, corrupt and unable to fend for itself, while avoiding the historical context of its “underdevelopment”.

[Iván · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantástico libro. Relaciona de forma sencilla y brillante las realidades globales de productos agrícolas claves como son el maíz, el trigo, la soja y el arroz. Los relaciona con la demografía, el acaparamiento de tierras de cultivo por países, fondos de inversión o multinacionales. También nos habla de los recursos hídricos para la agricultura. Me ha encantado.

[Mark Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had not reviewed this immediately after finishing it as I had moved onto "Life on the Brink", however, I went back and found the passage that struck me the most.

"For Americans, the melting of the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau would appear to be China's problem... In the 1970s when tight world food supplies were generating unacceptable food price inflation in the United States, the government restricted grain exports. This is probably not an option today where China is concerned. Each month when the U.S. Treasury Department auctions off securities to cover the U.S. fiscal deficit, China is one of the big buyers. Now holding close to $1 trillion of U.S. debt, China has become the banker for the United States. Like it not, Americans will be sharing their grain harvest with Chinese consumers."

[Luke LeBar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an old book that is a bit out of date these days although the thrust of the argument is correct. Hunger is rising globally for the first time since the 1960’s. Over 800,000,000 people go to bed hungry every night. Climate change is putting serious pressure on agroecosystems that are already stressed. This threatens the poor and vulnerable most. Brown ambiguously gestures at population control which is so uncreative and inhuman to be laughable. Hunger is totally solvable. We have enough food on plant earth to feed 11,000,000,000 people. We need more just economic systems. We need more access for smallholders to good seed and small scale mechanization. We need non-corporate models for development. Lester Brown is right about the problem but deeply misguided on the solution.

[Amos Tai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fact-wise there isn’t much that I don’t know, but it’s good (for teaching and writing) to see how a master puts things in perspectives and makes it convincing. In short, food shortage and rising food prices (as a result of the rising population, shifts toward meat-heavy diets, soil and water degradation, plateauing yields, and climate change) be the weakest link facing our civilization in the decades to come, leading to more inequality, international land grabs, and a new geopolitics that destabilizes the world.

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In short, avoiding a breakdown in the food system requires the mobilisation of our entire society...Saving civilisation is not a spectator sport.”

Really enjoyed reading Lester R. Brown’s “Full Planet, Empty Plates” and feeling inspired by his solutions...

• stabilise world population
• eradicate poverty
• reduce meat consumption 🌱
• reverse biofuel policies
• stabilise climate
• raise water productivity
• conserve soil
• redefine security to include this century’s biggest threats: climate change, food security, population growth etc

[Beto Avila Nuñez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous point of view from the numbers of the impact of food and the whole industry behind it, we are moving up too quick for the planet boundaries and with the data of the book you can't be the same mind as before the reading of it. Lester Brown put a lot of concrete information to argue that we are running out of time, and the things we need to do for survive are based on sustainable-way of life

[Hallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really good book on an expansive topic. I didn't realize this issue was so complex, and now realizing it I'm surprised the author was able to distill its core to the extent he has. It's a relatively short book written entirely for the layman, and yet surprisingly it manages to cover so many aspects relating to the emerging food crisis in ways that go beyond just skimming the surface of each. Oh, and it scared the crap out of me. Effective.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book is quite brief, there were some intriguing points made regarding food security and water security (which I knew little about). This book gives some great case studies/examples (backed by data) of historical events which highlight food insecurity across the globe. It would have been great to see this book go more in-depth on some of the explored issues. Lester clearly knows his stuff.

[Melissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

This read like a series of background memos that Brown put together for the Earth Policy Institute. He seems to have approached this in the wrong way--he's completely fixated on food scarcity as the end-all, be-all to our problems that he doesn't even acknowledge the complexities of situations facing other countries. Reading this book you'd think that water scarcity was the only problem facing Yemen, Iran, and other countries in the Middle East, not systemic political problems the countries have been struggling with for decades or longer. Not to mention his dismissal of "failed countries," and dwelling on the "overpopulation crisis" facing countries only made up of people of color. The veiled racism was really unpleasant to read.

Maybe this book was more compelling when it came out in 2012? But at this point, this book offer a one-dimensional view of the world and the problem at hand and isn't worth reading.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Malthusian little book succinctly lays out many of the problems facing today's global food supply. It's fairly interesting but nothing you wouldn't find in a report by the FAO. The 'call to action' at the end was pretty weak. I had hoped that the president of the Earth Policy Institute would be able to offer more meaningful policy prescriptions than "raise carbon taxes" and "end poverty."

[Gabby · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the amount of facts to be overwhelming while also leaving out intricacies that I think would have been helpful to understand the situation from a global perspective.


http://www.earth-policy.org/mobile/bo...

[Bill Pye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think he neglected parts of the world
No mention of Canada anywhere I
Suspect his research is designed to only support his premise
Lot of facts lots to learn raises a lot of questions not enough answers

[Michelle Smart · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only got a few pages in. I wanted to like this book, as the topic is interesting to me, but apparently I was subconsciously hoping for a not-as-scholarly approach to the topic. I found this too dry to handle.

[Charissa Palank · Rating 5 out of 5]

To the point. A quick, helpful read. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a place to begin, and every single citizen of the planet interested in eating.

[Natasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Changed my view on food

[Ritattoo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting much more... first and most, important, easy-to-remember facts. Not many came across...

[Brenda Spears · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book that delves into the core of food politics. Some parts were eye opening, some parts repeated, overall very worth your attention and time spent.

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wasn't for me.

[Ellenkiley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wake up call!

[Saahil · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a great book if one wants to get a global picture of how our food productions systems have transformed over the years following the rapid increase in the use of fertilisers in farming.

[Jonna · Rating 2 out of 5]

at this point outdated and too american-centric

[via.s · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basic facts and common sense. Not that intriguing...

[Betsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brown puts forth a lot of great points about why food scarcity will be our greatest national threat in the future. I would have appreciated more suggestions on what to do about it, but that could probably be an entirely different book. There was a little hope at the end telling you to fight for what you believe in, but it was a little late after the whole book made me feel like the world is ending.