Book Review: The Coming Famine: The Globel Food Crisis and What We Can Do To Avoid It

paints a stark portrait of our 21st century reality that bears a striking resemblance to the 'banquet of consequences' for which Robert Louis Stevenson famously pronounced everyone is eventually destined. According to Cribb, our banquet of consequences might be truly catastrophic if we don't make many crucial changes.

This book describes the fate humanity faces by 2050 (if not earlier) if we don't address issues inextricably linked to the problems of food: peak oil, population increases, water scarcity, land degradation and climate change.

Cribb quoted a progressive farmer as saying: 'Global warming gets all the publicity but the real imminent threat to the human race is starvation on a massive scale. Taking a 10-30 year view, I believe that food shortages, famine and huge social unrest are probably the greatest threat that the human race has ever faced.'

The world had a wakeup call in 2008 when global food prices coupled with problems of availability showed that global food security is a myth. Though few Americans may know it, some Third World countries have been hit by food riots. '...The well-off part of humanity has largely forgotten what it is to go hungry and is awakening to an unpleasant shock: starvation and the wars, refugee crises and collapse nationstates that often accompany hunger have not been permanently banished after all.'

Noting that food scarcities catalyzed both the French and Russian Revolutions, Cribb writes,'An increasingly credible scenario for World War III is not so much a confrontation of superpowers and their allies as a festering, selfperpetuating chain of resource conflicts driven by the widening conflict between food and energy supplies and peoples' need to secure them.'

But Cribb is no mere doomsayer. He offers a large list of recommendations: lowering our collective meat consumption; curbing the massive amounts of food waste; sharing knowledge and even making sure classes on food are offered for children; having agribusiness help pay the cost of R&D for agriculture; lowering our fossil-fuel consumption and looking for alternatives; cooperating with other countries and peoples by ending various subsidies in order to cut food prices; reducing human fertility; and paying farmers more, apparently through various kinds of taxes. Biotechnology and fish farms can help: Cribb thinks the situation is so dire that we have to get rid of any preconceived notions and ideology and act as if our survival is at stake.