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75 Foreign Aff. 127 (1996)
Rice Bowls and Dust Bowls: Africa, Not China, Faces a Food Crisis

handle is hein.journals/fora75 and id is 513 raw text is: Review Essay Rice Bowls and Dust Bowls Africa, Not China, Faces a Food Crisis Robert L. Paarlberg Who Mill Feed China? Wake- Up Callfor a SmallPlanet. BY LESTER R. BROWN. New York: W. W. Norton/ World- watch Institute, 1995, 16o pp. $19.95 (paper, $8.95). World grain markets tightened sharply in 1995, bringing Malthusian worries back into fashion. A weather-related drop in corn production in the United States combined with strong worldwide demand to push U.S. corn export prices up 45 per- cent in a single season. Corn and wheat prices on the Chicago Board of Trade jumped to a 15-year high. Both the United States and the European Union stopped subsidizing wheat exports, and the EU even imposed export taxes to guard against shortages at home. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAo) projected that world grain stocks would fall, before a new harvest came in, to between 14 percent and 15 percent of annual consumption, the lowest level in two decades, and much less than the 17 percent to 18 percent level the organiza- tion considers safe. Lester R. Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute, believes these short-term changes may be the leading edge of a disturbing scenario: world grain shortages caused by the growing imports of China. In Who Will Feed China? Wake-Up Callfor a Small Planet, Brown calculates that by the year 2030 Chinas need for grain imports will far outstrip the spare production capacity of export- ing nations. International prices will then skyrocket, imperiling consumers in poor importing countries. This scenario seemed to be unfolding ahead of schedule last year, when China, already the world's largest importer of wheat, switched from being an exporter to an importer of corn. [127] ROBERT L. PAARLBERG is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley Col- lege and Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs.

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