Julian Cribb

“I’m doing my best to alert people to this perilous situation,” says Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine. A longtime science journalist in Australia, Cribb works around the globe, reporting on the increasing shortage of food, water, land, and energy.

He says that the situation is the most dire that humanity has ever faced. “At the moment, we’re worried about things like the global financial crisis, which is a relatively small problem when compared with whether 10 billion people can be fed.” One of the biggest roadblocks to making significant progress, he says, is that “not enough attention was being paid to these issues by governments, by humanity at large.”

A key problem that Cribb points to is the difficult market for farmers, since global urbanization has disconnected the general public from how their food is produced. “It doesn’t matter which country you look at — they are not getting the reward they need to double food production.”