Lester Brown is worried by the drought in Moscow this past summer. The drought, which lasted two months, resulted in a loss of about 40,000,000 tons of grain. Brown worries as to what would happen if a similar drought hit our fertile Midwest or China. If the drought hit us, prices of grain would spike. If the drought hit the area around Beijing, China, which had a famine less than 50 years ago (1959 - 1961), would have a problem and in our 20th century interconnected world the world would have a major problem.
Brown is especially worried about China beyond the question of a drought. Its rise as an economic power with the attendant better standard of living has meant the removal of a fairly significant amount of land from agriculture to such items as highways and an increase in the consumption of grain-dependent products.
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