Who Will Feed China?

Who Will Feed China? PDF

Author: Lester Russell Brown

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780393038972

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

To feed its 1.2 billion people, China may soon have to import so much grain that this action could trigger unprecedented rises in world food prices. In Who Will Feed China: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet, Lester Brown shows that even as water becomes more scarce in a land where 80 percent of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of cropland to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. When Japan, a nation of just 125 million, began to import food, world grain markets rejoiced. But when China, a market ten times bigger, starts importing, there may not be enough grain in the world to meet that need - and food prices will rise steeply for everyone. Analysts foresaw that the recent four-year doubling of income for China's 1.2 billion consumers would increase food demand, especially for meat, eggs, and beer. But these analysts assumed that food production would rise to meet those demands. Brown shows that cropland losses are heavy in countries that are densely populated before industrialization, and that these countries quickly become net grain importers. We can see that process now in newspaper accounts from China as the government struggles with this problem.

Will Africa Feed China?

Will Africa Feed China? PDF

Author: Deborah Brautigam

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 019939685X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"In Will Africa Feed China?, Deborah Brautigam, one of the world's leading experts on China and Africa, challenges the conventional wisdom that the Chinese are leading the great African land grab. Her eye-opening analysis sheds new light on the myths and realities of China's evolving global quest for food security"--

Who Will Feed China?

Who Will Feed China? PDF

Author: Lester Brown

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-18

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13: 1000968499

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Originally published in 1995, but with enduring relevance in a time of global population growth and food insecurity, when it was first published, this book attracted much global attention, and criticism from Beijing. It argued that even as water becomes scarcer in a land where 80% of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of agricultural land to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. This book predicts that in an integrated world economy, China’s rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will come everyone’s land scarcity and water scarcity in China will affect the entire world. China’s dependence on massive imports, like the collapse of the world’s fisheries, will be a wake-up call that we are colliding with the earth’s capacity to feed us. Over time, Janet Larsen argued, China’s leaders came to ‘acknowledge how Who Will Feed China? changed their thinking..’ As China’s wealth increases, so do the dietary demands of its population. The increasing middle classes demand more grain-intensive meat and farmed fish. The issue of who will feed China has not gone away.

The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition

The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition PDF

Author: T. Colin Campbell

Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.

Published: 2016-12-27

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1942952902

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The revised and expanded edition of the bestseller that changed millions of lives The science is clear. The results are unmistakable. You can dramatically reduce your risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes just by changing your diet. More than 30 years ago, nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell and his team at Cornell, in partnership with teams in China and England, embarked upon the China Study, the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease. What they found when combined with findings in Colin's laboratory, opened their eyes to the dangers of a diet high in animal protein and the unparalleled health benefits of a whole foods, plant-based diet. In 2005, Colin and his son Tom, now a physician, shared those findings with the world in The China Study, hailed as one of the most important books about diet and health ever written. Featuring brand new content, this heavily expanded edition of Colin and Tom's groundbreaking book includes the latest undeniable evidence of the power of a plant-based diet, plus updated information about the changing medical system and how patients stand to benefit from a surging interest in plant-based nutrition. The China Study—Revised and Expanded Edition presents a clear and concise message of hope as it dispels a multitude of health myths and misinformation. The basic message is clear. The key to a long, healthy life lies in three things: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Feeding the World

Feeding the World PDF

Author: Vaclav Smil

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001-08-24

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780262692717

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A realistic yet encouraging look at how society can change in ways that will allow us to feed an expanding global population. This book addresses the question of how we can best feed the ten billion or so people who will likely inhabit the Earth by the middle of the twenty-first century. He asks whether human ingenuity can produce enough food to support healthy and vigorous lives for all these people without irreparably damaging the integrity of the biosphere. What makes this book different from other books on the world food situation is its consideration of the complete food cycle, from agriculture to post-harvest losses and processing to eating and discarding. Taking a scientific approach, Smil espouses neither the catastrophic view that widespread starvation is imminent nor the cornucopian view that welcomes large population increases as the source of endless human inventiveness. He shows how we can make more effective use of current resources and suggests that if we increase farming efficiency, reduce waste, and transform our diets, future needs may not be as great as we anticipate. Smil's message is that the prospects may not be as bright as we would like, but the outlook is hardly disheartening. Although inaction, late action, or misplaced emphasis may bring future troubles, we have the tools to steer a more efficient course. There are no insurmountable biophysical reasons we cannot feed humanity in the decades to come while easing the burden that modern agriculture puts on the biosphere.

Where Am I Eating? An Adventure Through the Global Food Economy

Where Am I Eating? An Adventure Through the Global Food Economy PDF

Author: Kelsey Timmerman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-08

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1118639863

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Bridges the gap between global farmers and fishermen and American consumers America now imports twice as much food as it did a decade ago. What does this increased reliance on imported food mean for the people around the globe who produce our food? Kelsey Timmerman set out on a global quest to meet the farmers and fisherman who grow and catch our food, and also worked alongside them: loading lobster boats in Nicaragua, splitting cocoa beans with a machete in Ivory Coast, and hauling tomatoes in Ohio. Where Am I Eating? tells fascinating stories of the farmers and fishermen around the world who produce the food we eat, explaining what their lives are like and how our habits affect them. This book shows how what we eat affects the lives of the people who produce our food. Through compelling stories, explores the global food economy including workers rights, the global food crisis, fair trade, and immigration. Author Kelsey Timmerman has spoken at close to 100 schools around the globe about his first book, Where Am I Wearing: A Global Tour of the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes He has been featured in the Financial Times and has discussed social issues on NPR's Talk of the Nation and Fox News Radio Where Am I Eating? does not argue for or against the globalization of food, but personalizes it by observing the hope and opportunity, and sometimes the lack thereof, which the global food economy gives to the world's poorest producers.

Blockchain Chicken Farm

Blockchain Chicken Farm PDF

Author: Xiaowei Wang

Publisher: FSG Originals

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0374721254

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

The Party's Over

The Party's Over PDF

Author: Richard Heinberg

Publisher: New Society Publishers

Published: 2005-08-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 155092334X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The world is about to run out of cheap oil and change dramatically. Within the next few years, global production will peak. Thereafter, even if industrial societies begin to switch to alternative energy sources, they will have less net energy each year to do all the work essential to the survival of complex societies. We are entering a new era, as different from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times. In The Party's Over , Richard Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the 20th century, and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the 21st century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South America. He describes the likely impacts of oil depletion, and all of the energy alternatives. Predicting chaos unless the U.S. -- the world's foremost oil consumer -- is willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a "managed collapse" that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society in the future. More readable than other accounts of this issue, with fuller discussion of the context, social implications, and recommendations for personal, community, national, and global action, Heinberg's updated book is a riveting wake-up call for humankind as the oil era winds down, and a critical tool for understanding and influencing current U.S. foreign policy. Listen to an interview with Richard Heinberg from WRPI.

Communities of Complicity

Communities of Complicity PDF

Author: Hans Steinm

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-03-30

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0857458914

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.

The Coming Collapse of China

The Coming Collapse of China PDF

Author: Gordon G. Chang

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2001-09-15

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1588360210

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society. Beijing's cautious reforms have left the country stuck midway between communism and capitalism, Chang writes. With its impending World Trade Organization membership, for the first time China will be forced to open itself to foreign competition, which will shake the country to its foundations. Economic failure will be followed by government collapse. Covering subjects from party politics to the Falun Gong to the government's insupportable position on Taiwan, Chang presents a thorough and very chilling overview of China's present and not-so-distant future.