Here’s a new entry in the running-out-of-food genre.

I’ve embedded a Fresh Air interview about this book at the bottom of the post. You can find a transcript here. And here’s an excerpt:

And so suddenly, you had an instance where the world began consuming fairly consistently more of these major grains than it was producing, whittling down stockpiles to levels we haven’t seen since the 1970s. So, for example, in the 1970s, we consumed or utilized more grain than we ate only about four years out of the decade. In the drier ’80s, it was about five years. Since 2000, we’ve consumed or utilized more of these feed grains in eight of the first 12 years of the decade. So really, we’re starting to see the demand pressures outstrip our ability to produce food. All this while our yield gains, that have been spectacular since Norman Borlaug introduced the Green Revolution agriculture in the ’50s and ’60s, started to plateau.

So it – just as our demands are starting to rise, we’re starting to plateau in the amount of grain we’re getting per hectare, while things like climate change are really starting to hammer us. So we’re looking at, you know, these major disruptions of our food supply. Now, there was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed, like, 73,000 people in Europe. And yet what – that one made headlines all over the world, but what people didn’t realize was that a third of the wheat and grain and fruit crops were decimated that year.

You know, Russia has had these enormous droughts events where they’ve lost up to a third to half of their crop. Here in the United States, we’ve had 2012-2013, you know, we had the worst drought since the Dust Bowl days – cost us $30 billion. So – and what we’re dealing with is sort of the new normal. You know, the researchers say that now we’re going to have to, because of the increased demand from population growth, increased meat consumption in developing parts of the world, that we’re going to have to double our grain production, our food production, by 2050 to make sure everyone’s reasonably fed. And yet, climate change is just starting to really hammer it down, so we’re in a bit of a pinch.