MUCH has been said about how BHP Billiton's bid for Potash Corporation and Canadian fertiliser company Agrium's play for AWB fit in with the growing issue of food security and food shortages.

These are just new chapters in developments that resulted in China's Bright Food Group trying to acquire Australia's CSR sugar this year and Sinochem's move to buy Australian agrichemicals operator Nufarm. Then there's Qatar-based Hassad Food, backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, buying up rural land in Australia to feed Qatar and other Middle East countries worried about food security. Hassad has bought more than $40 million worth of sheep stations in northern New South Wales and South Australia in the past six months.

The corporate activity is a storm warning of how food shortages and famine will reshape the world and corporate strategies.

The Economist notes that by 2050 world grain output will have to rise by half and meat production will need to double to meet demand at a time when growth in grain yields is flattening out, there is little extra farmland and renewable water is running short.

Similarly, rising food prices are a poke in the eye that the world needs to remind us of how fragile the food production chain has become. The drought and bushfires in Russia, combined with limits on grain exports, have resulted in a 70 per cent price spike in wheat futures, which has caused prices for soy and barley to go up by 10 per cent.

Global warming is getting the press, but some are now warning that the threat to the human race is a looming food shortage. This seems unimaginable in a world where there has been almost half a century of abundance.

But in his chilling book The Coming Famine, journalist and science writer Julian Cribb warns we are headed towards global food shortages in the next 40 years because of scarcities of water, good land, energy, nutrients, technology, fish and, significantly, stable climates. You can add to that population growth, consumer demand and protectionist trade policies. Read more at www.smh.com.au