I first became aware and concerned about sprawl during the eight years I lived in a central Illinois farm town. Illinois, with 22 million acres of corn and soybeans under production, exports $13 billion worth of grain and beans annually, yet in recent years has annually converted 100 thousand acres to development.
It doesn’t take an agricultural specialist to realize farmland is a finite, non-renewable resource. Once you pave it over, it’s almost never returned to production. Now we see this happening in China.
The rule of thumb used in the United States is you need to pave an acre for every five cars on the road. With car sales approaching 1 million vehicles per month now in China, that’s a love of pavement. Not only that, the Chinese now consume more meat than Americans — half of the world’s pork production occurs in China, and a lot of grain is needed to fatten up those pork bellies. China is a significant grain producer, but they need to import most of their grain from the United States of America. With record drought decimating Russian grain production this year and lower yields on American crops, we’ll see higher prices at the supermarket in the next few weeks.
Higher prices are inconvenient, but how soon before climate change and unproductive land brings drought to China and Illinois? Even if we completely discount or disbelieve human causes of climate change, why don’t these patterns of development and reduced food production scare the well nourished feces out of us?
Foreign Policy Magazine interviewed Lester Brown, an expert on the issue of food security, in Grain Pains. Read it for more on the topic.
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