The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It

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The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It

4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 · rating details · 24 ratings · 5 reviews

In The Coming Famine, Julian Cribb lays out a vivid picture of impending planetary crisis--a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century--that would dwarf any in our previous experience. Cribb's comprehensive assessment describes a dangerous confluence of shortages--of water, land, energy, technology, and knowledge--combined with the increased demand created...more

Hardcover, 264 pages

Published August 10th 2010 by University of California Press (first published July 11th 2010)

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Nov 26, 2010 Keith Akers rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book which is a good general introduction to the food crisis. It is clearly written and pretty well researched, and off the top of my head I can't think of a better one. It's better than "Empires of Food," another book in this basic genre. It is the first book since "A Vegetarian Sourcebook" (which first came out in 1983) which addresses the environmental problems created by our food system.

It is really a book about the food crisis, and he does not actually talk about what a worl...more This is a good book which is a good general introduction to the food crisis. It is clearly written and pretty well researched, and off the top of my head I can't think of a better one. It's better than "Empires of Food," another book in this basic genre. It is the first book since "A Vegetarian Sourcebook" (which first came out in 1983) which addresses the environmental problems created by our food system.

It is really a book about the food crisis, and he does not actually talk about what a world-wide famine would really be like, contrary to the suggestion of the title. (The subtitle is more accurate than the title.) Rather, he goes down a laundry list of problems connected to food: water, land, fertilizer, fishing, agricultural research, oil, population, climate change, and the economics of farming. I am glad that he emphasizes at the start that a critical problem is the price of food, but he doesn't really follow up by discussing structural problems with our economy as they relate to food.

One endearing feature of the book is the way he refers to "peak land" and generally "peak this or that" without any explanation. He assumes you've heard of "peak oil," which he doesn't bother to explain right away. Thus, he assumes that you are familiar with the concept of "limits" and proceeds from there. Peak oil is first mentioned, fairly casually, on page 75, as if it were pretty obvious and needed no real explanation.

After the first two chapters, he starts putting in a section at the end of most chapters headed "what can I do about it?" Although he is (evidently) not a vegetarian and even warns against trying to "impose" vegetarianism, he continually urges us to eat more vegetables and eat less meat and fish. It is striking that all of our food problems are made worse by eating high on the food chain and it is clear that he understands there are going to be a lot more vegetarians in the future.

The main problem is that he sticks pretty closely to technical issues and avoids social or economic issues. This is most evident in his discussion of "organic" versus "conventional" agriculture, where he tries to split the difference between the two camps -- he says that we're going to need both, as kind of a "compromise" solution. It's not so much that I disagree with this assessment as that he just doesn't explain it, and generally doesn't talk about economic problems or the vast and growing inequality between and within nations.

He's aware of economic issues, because he discusses the price of food, but I get the impression that reducing the price of food is seen as a question of addressing the specific issues he talks about (water, land, population, etc.). What about our growth economy? What about cap and trade for all natural resources (not just carbon emissions)? What about the self-aggrandizing nature of industrial capitalism? What about ecological economics? What about redistributing wealth? What about land reform? That's the kind of thing I would like to have seen, but what Cribb has done is quite good.

There's another book called "A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization And How to Save It" by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, who does go into these kinds of issues, which discusses but is not limited just to food. I'm not sure I agree with Ahmed on every issue, but he's clearly headed in the right direction also. (less)

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Aug 29, 2010 Susan Albert rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: climate-change, economics, food-agriculture, energy-depletion, nature-environment, resource-depletion

“This book is a wake-up call. It deals with the most urgent issue facing humanity in the twenty-first century, perhaps in all of history: the planetary emergency over whether or not we can sustain our food supply through the midcentury peak in human numbers, demand, and needs. It reflects on the likely consequences of our failure to do so.”--Julian Cribb, Preface, The Coming Famine

This book brings us a message that we all need to hear: that resource depletions, climate change challenges, and gro...more “This book is a wake-up call. It deals with the most urgent issue facing humanity in the twenty-first century, perhaps in all of history: the planetary emergency over whether or not we can sustain our food supply through the midcentury peak in human numbers, demand, and needs. It reflects on the likely consequences of our failure to do so.”--Julian Cribb, Preface, The Coming Famine

This book brings us a message that we all need to hear: that resource depletions, climate change challenges, and growth in human numbers and appetites pose a dire threat to our food supply. An Australian journalist and Director of National Awareness for Australia's national science agency, Julian Cribb joins a growing chorus of other writers who have looked at food issues from a variety of angles. There are three major differences between this book and most of the other "end of food" books, however.

1) "The Coming Famine" deals systematically with all the major threats to the food supply: water shortages; soil depletions; nutrient loss and waste; fishery collapse; the Green Revolution and private ownership of genetic material; war and mass migrations; peak oil; climate change; uncontrolled human population growth; and unfair trade practices.

2) It focuses attention on the twin demand pressures of population growth and increased human appetites--the twin "elephants in the kitchen."

3) It offers practical suggestions in every chapter that encourage the reader to commit to positive actions. For example, in his chapter on climate change, Cribb suggests rebalancing our diets toward foods with a smaller carbon footprint; reducing consumption of meat, oils, and dairy products; selecting seasonal, locally-grown foods. (Losing hope? Plant a garden.)

Chapter by chapter, Cribb builds the argument that our habits of wasteful, irresponsible, and ignorant consumption have already created the conditions for an inevitable global famine, and that the only way to avert it is to alter our current practices. He bolsters every assertion of fact with a recital of terrifying and nearly irrefutable evidence, fully documented in the notes and delivered in a dispassionate voice that is all the more compelling because it is neither angry nor accusatory.

Cribb doesn’t claim to have all the answers, and some of his solutions are contradictory. (For example, it will be hard to develop a second, high-tech “Green Revolution” at the same time that we’re running out of fossil fuels and coping with rising sea levels.) But this important book organizes the challenges that face us in a clear and understandable way, provides convincing factual support for the problems he describes, and reminds us (with a note of hope) that humans are a highly adaptive species that can meet the challenges if they can muster enough global will to get the job done.

Cribb’s journalist style and his blizzard of facts do not make for pleasant reading, and you may be tempted to put the book down before you’ve finished it. Don’t. It deserves to be read to the end. “Today’s food is too cheap to last,” Cribb writes, in the book’s final section. “To avert the coming famine we all need to start paying its true price--not blindly transferring the cost of what we consume today to our grandchildren tomorrow.”

Put The Coming Famine at the top of your reading list. And when you’ve finished it, go out and tell your friends and colleagues about it. It’s that important.
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Nov 09, 2010 Chris Walker rated it 4 of 5 stars

The veggie farmers will like the fact that one of the solutions Julian Cribb offers to stall The Coming Famine is for all of us to eat more vegetables in our diet, since growing these is a more sustainable and productive use of scarce arable land and water, than proteins such as meat and dairy. He also advocates paying farmers what it really costs to produce food sustainably: "By paying cheap prices for food, as we all like to do, we undermine the capacity of farmers to take care of the resource...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Muhammad al-Khwarizmi rated it 4 of 5 stars

Pretty awesome book. Unlike the author, I look forward to a future of famine and war, because finally the human species will feel guilty about what it really is. But otherwise this a super book and it gives you a glimpse into our lulzy future, as well as what sort of omens you ought to be looking at (e.g. the Arctic thaw).

I didn't even know about the potential of crop diseases to decimate food supply!

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Mar 02, 2011 Laura rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a must read for every American. It is informative and helpful. It provides fantastic scientific support, but you do not need to be a scientist to understand it. It hasn't changed radically what I'm eating or how I'm eating, but it has made me more aware and empowered to more consciously consider alternative methods, ways, habits, etc. I've created a list of "Things to Consider" from it. Inspiring.

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