The Age of Scarcity
Why rising temperatures mean the end of cheap food—and what the world should do about it
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This has been a brutal summer. Record drought across the Midwest has forced the U.S. Department of Agriculture to slash its forecast for 2012 corn production by 12 percent. Corn prices are already 90 percent higher than in July 2010. They’ve gone above 2007-08 levels, when soaring food prices sparked riots in more than 30 countries. On July 25 the U.S. government reported that corn prices may push the cost of meat 4 percent to 5 percent higher next year. And there’s good reason to believe that the upward trend is a taste of worse things to come—in particular, for the world’s poorest people, who spend 60 percent to 80 percent of their limited incomes on food.