Full Planet

Empty Plates

By: Lester R. Brown

Narrated by: Alpha Trivette

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.

©2012 Earth Policy Institute (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Informative

When I first started reading the book, I was a bit frustrated with the emphasis on managing population growth. I didn’t feel that it was taking into consideration the other factors in play that contribute to overpopulation in some areas of the world. However, by the end of it it did address everything that was coming up for me.

But by the end of the book I feel like this author had a lot of great information to share about global food insecurity and different methods to address climate change as well as other systemic issues at play exacerbating each other.

I did have to read this book at a 1.5x the speed because it was too slow for me.