COFFEE BREAK 411

+ updated at 1:54pm EST on Wednesday, February 26, 2014

+ Earth Policy Institute offers "Can the World Feed China" by Lester R. Brown. Lester Brown continues to promote a plan to sustain civilization.  We can be hopeful if we begin to implement this plan and we need to be quite alarmed if we don't.  Here are 2 excerpts: 

“It wasn’t until 20 years ago, after I wrote an article entitled “Who Will Feed China?”, that I began to fully appreciate what a sensitive political issue food security was to the Chinese. The country’s leaders were all survivors of the Great Famine of 1959–61, when some 36 million people starved to death. Yet while the Chinese government was publicly critical of my questioning the country’s ability to feed itself, it began quietly reforming its agriculture. Among other things, Beijing adopted a policy of grain self-sufficiency, an initiative that is now faltering.”

Concluding Paragraph: “The world is transitioning from an era of abundance to one dominated by scarcity. China’s turn to the outside world for massive quantities of grain is forcing us to recognize that we are in trouble on the food front. Can we reverse the trends that are tightening food supplies, or is the world moving toward a future of rising food prices and political unrest?” | Read the whole article | Consider buying the PLAN B video