Who Will Feed China?: Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780393314090)

To feed its 1.2 billion people, China may soon have to import so much grain that this action could trigger unprecedented rises in world food prices. In Who Will Feed China: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet, Lester Brown shows that even as water becomes more scarce in a land where 80 percent of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of cropland to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. When Japan, a nation of just 125 million, began to import food, world grain markets rejoiced. But when China, a market ten times bigger, starts importing, there may not be enough grain in the world to meet that need - and food prices will rise steeply for everyone. Analysts foresaw that the recent four-year doubling of income for China's 1.2 billion consumers would increase food demand, especially for meat, eggs, and beer. But these analysts assumed that food production would rise to meet those demands. Brown shows that cropland losses are heavy in countries that are densely populated before industrialization, and that these countries quickly become net grain importers. We can see that process now in newspaper accounts from China as the government struggles with this problem.

Author: Lester Russell Brown
ISBN-10: 039331409X
ISBN-13: 9780393314090
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 09/01/1995
Pages: 168
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.47lbs
Size: 8.01h x 5.40w x 0.53d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/1995 pg. 101