The new geopolitics of food.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.

THE NEW GEOPOLITICS OF FOOD

By Lester R. Brown, President, Earth Policy Institute http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food?page=0,0

Lester Brown has been warning about imminent world food scarcity for more than forty years. Ronald Baily, writing in Reason, noted that in 1965, Brown opined that the food problem in less-developed regions was insoluble. Nine years later, he predicted chronic worldwide food scarcities. In the late 1980s, he wrote that population growth was "exceeding the farmer's ability to keep up," and that "hunger" was again "at the door." In the 1990s, Brown worried that mankind might not make it to the next harvest and that "food scarcity" was a "defining issue" for the world.

Despite being wrong for more than forty years, Brown persists in his doom saying, this time in the pages of Foreign Policy. Food scarcity, he writes, "is the new norm." The agricultural producing countries are running wells dry and mismanaging our soils. "Food nationalism," population growth, and climate change are leading to "world food security" problems.

Brown's predictable solution: an internationally-directed organized...