If you were organizing dinner parties for the world, you would need to put out 219,000 more place settings every night than you had the night before.1 That is how fast the Earth’s population is growing. But global agricultural production is currently failing to keep pace. A June 2012 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) sees trouble looming ahead, warning that “land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer.”2
Many global analysts predict that the biggest security threats in the twenty-first century may center on disputes over water and the food that Earth’s dwindling water supply is able to produce. The greatest threat to our common future, writes Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, “is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this would lead to…”3
