A Chinese food 'nightmare' in the making?

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

North America's "birthright" of cheap food is coming to an end, according to Lester Brown, the founder of Worldwatch Institute in 1974 and the Earth Policy Institute in 2001.

Brown is either admired as a deep thinker or vilified as an alarmist. For decades, he repeatedly warned of a cataclysmic food shortage and widespread starvation in Third World countries that never arrived as scheduled.

Now Brown says that, last year, China became a net buyer of corn for the first time, importing 1.3 million metric tonnes, while exporting 150,000 tons. Brown figures that, by 2015, China will be importing up to 25 million tons. Yet, the chart of grain imports on the website for the Earth Policy Institute shows that last year grain imports were about 4.5 million tons, far less than the peak of more than 18 million in 1995 and just over 16 million in 1996.

Brown explains that China's attempts to be self-sufficient in grains since 1995 have led to a dust bowl in northwestern China with 1,400 square miles of former farmland turning into desert every year. Aquifers are being over-pumped to irrigate crops that feed 130 million Chinese, a short-term measure he says can't be maintained.

Brown argues that it is a nightmare for everyone. Americans would find themselves competing for food against 1.4 billion Chinese and the United States is in no position to restrict exports, as it did in the 1970s, because China holds more than $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities. "Just as China is America's banker, America could become China's farmer," the environmentalist wrote in the Washington Post on Mar. 13. BF