By Frosty Wooldridge

Somalia’s current famine portends greater starvation around the world.  There is no way that humans can escape their “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” fate if they keep adding 1 billion of their numbers every 13 years.  As humans gallop toward 10.2 billion world population by mid century, the Four Horsemen gallop even faster as a commensurate response.

Just as we face water shortages, Peak Oil and resource shortages, we face food shortages.  It’s already happening in India, Africa, Bangladesh and Indochina.  Millions of children suffer from malnutrition.  As the human race adds another 80 million of its kind annually, net gain, it races toward its unfortunate fate.

London based writer Gwynne Dyer said, “Back in 2008, the OECD published a report on world food supply predicting that the price surge of that year would quickly revert to normal: “Barring any underlying climate change or water constraints that could lead to permanent reductions in yield, normal higher output can be expected in the very short term.”

“Between April 2010 and April 2011, the average world price of grain soared by 71 per cent: not a very big deal for people in rich countries who spend less than 10 per cent of their incomes on food, but a catastrophe for poor people who already spend more than half their money just to keep their families fed. And that is before “climate change and water constraints” get really serious.”

The green revolution was instigated as a result of the efforts of Norman Borlaug, who, while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.”

“The first great food price crisis was in the early 1970s, when consumption was outrunning production due to rapid population growth: the world’s population doubled between 1945 and 1975,” said Dyer. “Grain prices were even higher in real terms than they are now, and there was near-starvation in some areas. But the problem was quickly solved by the famous “Green Revolution,” which hugely increased yields of rice, wheat and corn.

“The only drawback was that the Green Revolution wasn’t really all that green. Higher-yielding strains of familiar crops played a part in the solution, certainly, but so did a vastly increased use of fertilizer: Global fertilizer use tripled between 1960 and 1975. And above all, there was an enormous expansion of the world’s irrigated area. It has more than tripled since 1950.

“Only 10 per cent of the world’s cropland is irrigated even now, but that irrigated land provides about 40 per cent of the world’s food, so it is absolutely vital. Yet they didn’t discover any new rivers after 1950. Almost all of the new irrigated land — two-thirds of the total — uses water that is pumped up from deep underground aquifers.

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“The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Thomas Malthus 1798

“The irrigated area in the United States has probably passed its peak already,” said Dyer. “In key agricultural states, it is already long past: 1978 in Texas, 1997 in California. In China and India irrigation may be at its peak right now. A World Bank study reported in 2005 that the grain supply for 175 million Indians is produced by overpumping water, and some 130 million Chinese similarly depend in a dwindling supply of underground water for their grain.

“It gets worse. In the Middle East, Israel banned all irrigation of wheat in 2000 in order to conserve the remaining underground water for people. It now imports 98 per cent of its grain. More recently Saudi Arabia, which was self-sufficient in wheat production only five years ago, decided to shut grain-growing down completely before the major aquifer under the country runs dry. Next year, it will import 100 per cent of its grain.

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“If present growth trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth will be reached sometime in the next 100 years.”  The Club of Rome 1972

“Saudi Arabia will be able to go on importing grain even when the price is twice what it is now, and so will Israel,” said Dyer. “But there are a great many countries that will lose their ability to feed their own people once the irrigation bubble bursts — and will not be able to afford to import food at the vastly inflated prices that ensue.

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The growing reality facing humanity: too many people too little water, arable land and food. It’s not going to be pretty for millions if not billions of humans.

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