WAKEUP CALL ON THE FOOD FRONT
15 December 2003 | Lester R. Brown

(This piece first appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday, December 15, 2003, entitled "Dry, With a Chance of a Grain Shortage.")

While Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Bush discussed Taiwan, currency rates and North Korea on December 9, a more important and far-reaching development in U.S.-China relations was going on far from the White House.

Under the North China Plain, which produces half of China's wheat and a third of its corn, water tables are falling by 3 to 10 feet per year. Along with rising temperatures and the loss of cropland to non-farm uses, this trend is shrinking the Chinese grain harvest, which has fallen in four of the past five years. To get an idea of the magnitude, the harvest dropped by 66 million tons during that period, an amount that exceeds the total annual grain harvest of Canada, one of the world's leading grain exporters. [Keep Reading]

WORLD CREATING FOOD BUBBLE ECONOMY BASED ON UNSUSTAINABLE USE OF WATER
13 March 2203 | Lester R. Brown

On March 16, 2003, some 10,000 participants will meet in Japan for the third World Water Forum to discuss the world water prospect. Although they will be officially focusing on water scarcity, they will indirectly be focusing on food scarcity because 70 percent of the water we divert from rivers or pump from underground is used for irrigation.

As world water demand has tripled over the last half-century, it has exceeded the sustainable yield of aquifers in scores of countries, leading to falling water tables. In effect, governments are satisfying the growing demand for food by overpumping groundwater, a measure that virtually assures a drop in food production when the aquifer is depleted. Knowingly or not, governments are creating a "food bubble" economy.

As water use climbs, the world is incurring a vast water deficit... [Keep Reading]