Will a lack of food collapse humanity?

The greatest danger to world stability is the possibility that a food crisis in poor countries, caused by deteriorating environmental conditions, will lead to the fall of governments

By Lester R. Brown

One of the things that people have the most difficulty with is predicting sudden changes and preparing for them. We usually predict the next based on past trends. Many times this approach works well. But sometimes it fails miserably, and people suffer unexpected blows, such as the current economic crisis.

To most of us, the idea that human culture will crumble must seem ridiculous. Who among us would not find it difficult to seriously imagine such a complete and absolute deviation from the seemingly expected conduct of our normal lives? What evidence could lead us to such a dire warning, and how should we respond to it? We have already become accustomed to a long list of disasters whose chances are so low that we are as if programmed to cancel all warnings with a wave of our hands: certainly, humanity could degenerate into chaos, and it is also possible that the Earth collides with an asteroid!

For many years I have researched global trends in agriculture, population, environment and economy, and the interrelationships between them. The combined effect of these trends and the political tensions they produce lead to the collapse of governments and social systems. And here I was also opposed to the idea that a food shortage would bring down not only individual governments but the civilization of the entire world.

But I can no longer ignore this risk. Due to the environmental hazards that threaten the global food economy, especially the drop in groundwater levels, soil erosion and rising temperatures, and our inability to deal with them, I am forced to conclude that such a collapse is possible.

The problem of the failed states

But unfortunately, a cursory look at the indicators of the vitality of the world order today is enough to confirm my claim. And we, in the field of environmental sciences, who have been following the trends of environmental degradation for more than twenty years, have not seen any real effort to reverse any of them.

In 6 of the last 9 years, global grain production was less than consumption, and this forced a constant reduction in stocks. At the beginning of the 2008 harvest season, the global stockpile (the amount stored in warehouses at the start of the harvest) was enough to provide only 62 days of consumption, almost a negative record. Because of this, grain prices in the spring and summer of last year rose to the highest rates ever recorded.

Since the demand for food is growing faster than the supply, the resulting inflation in food prices puts heavy pressure on the governments of countries that are already teetering on the brink of anarchy. The hungry, who cannot buy grain nor grow it themselves, take to the streets. Indeed, even before the sharp increase in grain prices in 2008, the number of failed countries increased [see left column]. Many of their difficulties stem from their inability to slow down population growth. But if the food balance continues to deplete, entire nations will collapse at an increasing rate. We are in a new geopolitical era. In the 20th century, the main danger to international security was conflicts between great powers. Today these are failed countries. It is not the concentration of power but the lack of it that endangers us.

A country fails when its government cannot provide personal security and ensure nutrition and basic welfare services such as education and health. Many of them lose control over part or all of their territory. When a government loses its monopoly on the use of force, law and order begins to crumble. There is a point in time after which the stay in the country becomes so dangerous that humanitarian aid providers are no longer protected there and aid programs are stopped. In Somalia and Afghanistan, the worsening situation is already threatening such plans.

Failed states are an international concern because they are a source of terrorism, drugs, weapons and refugees and threaten political stability everywhere. Somalia, the first on the list of failed countries in 2008, became a base for pirates. Iraq, fifth on the list, is a hotbed for terrorist training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world's largest supplier of heroin. After the great genocide in 1994, refugees from Rwanda, including thousands of armed soldiers, played a part in destabilizing the neighboring country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (sixth on the list).

World culture relies on the functioning of a network of politically healthy nation-states, to curb the spread of infectious diseases, to manage the international financial system, to suppress international terrorism and to achieve many other common goals. If the system in charge of infectious diseases, such as polio, severe viral pneumonia (SARS) and influenza, collapses, humanity will be in trouble. Once a country fails, no one takes on the responsibility of repaying its debts to outside lenders. If too many countries break up, their fall will threaten the stability of human civilization as a whole.

Food shortage of a new species

The rise in grain prices in the world in 2007 and 2008 and the danger posed by it to the ability to ensure enough food has a different, more worrying characteristic that did not characterize the previous price increases. In the second half of the 20th century, grain prices rose steeply several times. In 1972, for example, the Soviets insisted on the poor harvest in their country ahead of time, and secretly purchased a considerable part of the wheat in the world. As a result, the prices of wheat in the rest of the world doubled and even more than that, and this also led to an increase in the prices of rice and corn. But this shock and other price increases were caused by certain events: a drought in the Soviet Union, a lack of monsoon rains in India, a heat wave that reduced crops in the United States' "corn belt." And the increases were for a short time: usually the prices returned to their normal rate in the next harvest season.

On the other hand, the recent increase in grain prices in the world is due to global changing trends, so there is little chance that prices will fall if the trends themselves are not reversed. On the demand side, the trends are the constant addition of 70 million people per year, an increase in the number of people who want to move up the food chain and consume products from the animal kingdom, the production of which requires a lot of grain [see "Hamburger Greenhouse" by Natan Piala, Scientific American Israel, June-July 2009]; and converting a considerable part of the grain in the United States to the production of ethanol as a fuel.

The additional demand for grains due to an increase in the standard of living varies greatly from country to country. Residents of low-income countries, where grains provide 60% of the calorie intake, such as India for example, directly consume about 500 grams of grain per day. In rich countries, such as the United States and Canada, the consumption of grains per capita is almost four times greater, but about 90% percent of them are consumed indirectly, by consuming meat, milk and eggs derived from farm animals that eat grains.

The potential for increasing consumption among low-income earners is huge. But this potential is dwarfed by the insatiable demand for grain-based car fuel. A quarter of the grain crop in the United States this year, an amount sufficient to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians at current consumption rates, will be used to produce fuel for cars. However, even if all grain crops in the United States were diverted to ethanol production, they would provide at most 18% of the transportation fuel needs in the United States. The amount of grain needed to fill a 95 liter tank of a dual purpose vehicle, SUV, with ethanol is enough to feed a person for a year.

Because of the merger made in recent years between the food economy and the energy economy, if grain for food is worth less than grain for energy, the market will direct it to the energy economy. This double demand leads to severe competition for the supply of grain between people and between cars, and a political and moral problem as serious as no other. The United States, in a misguided attempt to reduce dependence on oil from other countries by replacing it with fuels made from grains, is causing the world's food security to be undermined on an unprecedented scale.

Lack of water means lack of food

And what about the supply? The three environmental trends I mentioned earlier - the lack of fresh water, the loss of topsoil and the rise in temperatures due to global warming (and its other products) - make it even more difficult to increase the global grain supply at a speed sufficient to keep up with demand. Of the three, the spread of water scarcity is the most immediately threatening trend. The big challenge here is irrigation, which consumes 70% of the fresh water consumed in the world. Millions of wells in many countries are now drawing water from underground reservoirs faster than rainwater is replenishing it. The result is a drop in the groundwater level in the countries where half the world's population lives, and where the three largest grain producers are: China, India and the United States.

Generally, most aquifers can be refilled, but some of the most important ones actually cannot: "fossilized" aquifers, so called because water is stored in them from ancient times and they are not refilled by rainwater. In these aquifers, including the great Ogallala Aquifer that lies beneath the Great Plains of the United States, the Saudi Aquifer and the deep aquifer beneath the North China Plain, depletion means no more pumping. In arid regions, such a loss could shut down agriculture altogether.

In China, the groundwater level under the North China Plain, where more than half of China's wheat and a third of its corn are grown, is dropping rapidly. Over-pumping has consumed most of the water in a shallow aquifer there, forcing well drillers to turn to the deep, non-renewable aquifer. A report by the World Bank predicts "disastrous results for future generations" if they do not hurry to restore the balance between water supply and consumption.

As groundwater levels have dropped and irrigation wells have dried up, China's wheat crop, the world's largest, has declined by 8% since a peak of 123 million tons in 1997. Since then, rice production in China has also decreased by 4%. The world's largest nation may soon begin importing large quantities of grain.

But India's water woes are even more worrying. There the gap between food consumption and survival is narrower. Millions of irrigation wells have caused groundwater levels to drop in almost all Indian states, as Fred Pearce reported in New Scientist magazine:

Half of India's traditional hand-dug wells and millions of relatively shallow tube wells have already dried up, leading to a wave of suicides among those who rely on them. Power outages are approaching the level of a coup in countries where half of the electrical energy is used to pump water from a depth of up to one kilometer.

A study by the World Bank found that 15% of India's food supply relies on groundwater. That is, 175 million Indians consume grains watered from wells whose water will soon run out. If the water supply continues to decrease, this could lead to an insurmountable food shortage and social conflicts.

Less land more hunger

The extent of the second alarming trend, the loss of prime land, is also alarming. Top soil is being washed away faster than new soil is being created in about a third of the world's agricultural land. This thin layer containing essential nutrients for plants, the foundation of civilization itself, was formed over a long time on a geological scale, but it is usually only about 15 centimeters deep. Its erosion by wind and water destroyed ancient cultures.

In 2002, a UN team assessed the food situation in Lesotho, a small landlocked country located inside South Africa, with about two million inhabitants. The team's conclusions were clear: "Agriculture in Lesotho is facing disaster; Crops are decreasing and may disappear completely from large parts of the country if measures are not taken to prevent erosion, loss of soil and a decrease in its fertility."

In the Western Hemisphere, Haiti, one of the first countries to be declared failed, supplied almost all of its own grain consumption 40 years ago. But in the years that have passed since then, it has lost almost all of its forests and much of its top soil, and it is forced to import more than half of the grains it consumes.

The third threat to food security, and perhaps the most influential of them, is the increase in the temperature of the ground surface. This could affect crops everywhere. In many countries, grain is grown in optimal or near-optimal temperatures, so even a small increase in temperatures during the growing season can detract from the crop. A study published by the American Academy of Sciences confirms a rule of thumb known to crop ecologists: for every one degree Celsius rise above normal, wheat, rice and corn crops decrease by 10%.

In the past, the response to growing demand for food was the successful application of scientific agriculture: the technological panacea. The most famous example of this is the innovations in the use of fertilizer, irrigation and high-yield varieties of wheat and rice, which were part of the "green revolution" of the 60s and 70s. This time, unfortunately, many of the most effective technological innovations in the field of agriculture have already been implemented, so the prolonged increase in soil productivity is gradually moderating. From 1950 to 1990, the world's farmers increased the grain yield per square kilometer by more than 2% per year, faster than the rate of population growth. But since then, productivity growth has slowed to little more than 1% per year. There are countries where the productivity seems to be close to its maximum rate from a practical point of view, including the rice crops in Japan and China.

Some commentators claim that genetically modified varieties are the solution to the problem. However, unfortunately no such growth has yet resulted in a large increase in productivity, compared to the doubling and even tripling of rice and wheat production during the "Green Revolution". And it doesn't seem like this will happen, simply because plant breeding methods have already used up most of the potential to improve productivity.

Competing for food

When food security in the world is undermined, a dangerous food security policy enters the picture: countries acting alone out of concern only for their own affairs while, in practice, worsening the plight of the many. This trend began in 2007, when major wheat exporters such as Russia and Argentina limited exports or banned them in an attempt to increase the local food supply and lower their food prices. Vietnam, the world's second largest rice exporter after Thailand, banned exports for several months for the same reason. It is possible that such measures reassure the residents of the exporting countries, but they create panic among the importing countries, which then have to rely on the rest of the grain available for export in the world.

In response to these restrictions, the grain importers are trying to conclude long-term bilateral trade agreements, which will reserve them a supply of grain. The Philippine government, which can no longer rely on the supply of rice from the world market, recently discussed with the Vietnamese government a deal that would guarantee the Philippines 1.5 million tons of rice per year. The concern regarding food imports causes food importers to even take steps of a completely new type - buying or leasing agricultural land in other countries.

Despite these temporary countermeasures, skyrocketing food prices and widespread world hunger are beginning to disintegrate the social order in many other countries. In several provinces in Thailand, raids by "rice raiders" force the villagers to guard their rice fields at night with loaded guns. In Pakistan, an armed soldier accompanies every truck carrying grain. In the first half of 2008, 83 trucks loaded with grain were hijacked in Sudan, on their way to aid camps in Darfur.

No country is immune to the effects of shrinking food supplies, not even the United States, the world's grain powerhouse. If China requests large quantities of grain on the world market, as it recently requested to buy soybeans, it will have to buy from the United States. Then the American consumers will have to compete for the grain crop in their country against 1.3 billion Chinese consumers whose income is increasing rapidly, a real nightmare scenario. In such circumstances, the United States will be tempted to limit exports, as it limited, for example, the export of grain and soybeans in the 70s when their prices soared. But it will not be able to do this when the demand is from China. Chinese investors now hold more than a trillion US dollars, and have often been the largest international buyers of US government securities issued to finance the budget deficit. Like it or not, American consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers, however high food prices may be.

Plan B: The only choice

Since today's global food shortage is the result of environmental trends, there is no choice but to reverse them. To this end, exceptionally demanding measures are required, a major transition from conducting "business as usual", which we at the "Earth Policy Institute" call plan A, to a plan to save humanity or plan B.

Plan B, which is similar in scope and urgency to the United States enlisting in World War II, includes four components: a major effort to reduce carbon emissions by 80% of its rate in 2006, by the year 2020; stabilizing the world population at eight billion by 2040; eradicating poverty; and the restoration of the forests, lands and aquifers.

The total carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by systematic optimization of energy consumption and massive investment in the development of renewable energy sources. We must also ban deforestation in the entire world, as some countries have already banned, and plant billions of trees to capture carbon. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources can be spurred by carbon taxes, which will be offset by a reduction in income taxes.

Stabilizing the size of the population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. And after all, the key to reducing families is eliminating poverty, and vice versa. One of the measures is guaranteeing primary education, at least, for all children, including girls. Another means is the provision of basic health services, in the villages, so that the parents can be confident that their children will reach adulthood. Women everywhere should have access to fertility clinics and birth planning services.

The fourth component, the restoration of the Earth's natural systems and resources, incorporates a world-wide initiative to stop the drop in the groundwater level by optimizing the utilization of water, that is, optimizing the beneficial actions that can be squeezed from every drop. This requires a transition to more efficient irrigation systems and crops that require less water. In some countries they will have to grow (and consume) more wheat and less rice, which needs a lot of water. And the industry and the cities will have to do what some of them are already doing: constant water recycling.

At the same time, we must start a global effort to conserve land, similar to the United States' response to the "Dust Basin" of the 30s. Building ground steps (terraces), planting trees that will serve as protective strips against the soil being swept away by the wind, and switching to agriculture using a minimal tillage method, in which there are no tillers and the remains of the grain remain in the field; All of these are among the most important means of soil conservation.

Our four interrelated goals are not new. They have been discussed separately for years. Indeed, we have established many institutions in pursuit of some of them, such as the World Bank, which is designed to reduce poverty. And we have made quite a bit of progress in several places in the world, at least in one of those goals - the distribution of birth planning services and the resulting reduction in families, which leads to the stabilization of the population.

Many developing countries viewed the four goals of Plan B favorably because they encourage development as long as the cost is not too great. Others saw these goals as humanitarian goals: political correctness and moral propriety. Now a third and much more important argument emerges: their achievement may be necessary to prevent a general collapse of human culture. And yet, the estimated cost of saving humanity amounts to less than 200 billion dollars a year, one sixth of the annual cost of the world's armies. In practice, plan B is the new defense budget.

Time: the scarcest resource

The challenge before us is not only in the implementation of plan B, but also in its rapid implementation. The world is in a race between political and natural decision points. Can we shut down coal-burning power plants ahead of time so that the Greenland ice sheet doesn't slide into the sea and flood our shores? Can we reduce carbon emissions fast enough to save the glaciers in the mountains of Asia whose waters feed the great rivers of India and China in the dry season and thus sustain hundreds of millions of people? Will we be able to stabilize the size of the population before countries like India, Pakistan and Yemen are defeated due to a lack of irrigation water for their agricultural crops?

It is difficult to exaggerate the urgency of the tribulation upon us. Every day is important. Unfortunately, we don't know how long we can light our cities with coal, for example, before it's too late to save the Greenland ice sheet. Nature dictates the dates, he is in charge of the times. But we humans do not see the clock.

We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new perception. The way of thinking that got us into this mess will not be able to get us out of it. When New Yorker writer Elizabeth Colbert asked energy guru Emory Levins about thinking outside the box, he replied: "There is no box."

There is no frame. This is the concept that humanity needs to survive.

failed states

Every year, the "Peace Fund" and the "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" together analyze the national situation of countries, and rank them according to 12 social, economic, political and military indicators.

Here is the list of the 20 countries closest to collapse, from the worst to the best, according to the rating made by the funds in 2007:

1. Somalia
2. Sudan
3. Zimbabwe
4. Chad
5. Iraq
6. The Democratic Republic of Kongo
7. Afghanistan
8. Ivory Coast
9. Pakistan
10. Central African Republic
11. Guinea
12. Bangladesh
13. Burma (Myanmar)
14. האיטי
15. North Korea
16. Ethiopia
17. Uganda
18. Lebanon
19. Nigeria
20. Sri lanca

Source: "The Failed States Index 2008" on behalf of the "Peace Fund" and "Carnegie Grant for International Peace" from Foreign Policy magazine, July-August 2008 issue.

Main causes of food shortages

It turns out today that the food shortage, which is becoming more and more common, is the main reason for the failure of states. Food shortages are caused by a tangled web of causes, effects and feedbacks. The interrelationships between the components of the fabric many times amplify these factors and result in their effect being greater than the effect of each of them separately. Some of the most common factors are shown in the chart below. In the author's opinion, today's food shortage in the world is not the result of a one-time crop shortage, due to bad weather, but of four long-term and decisive trends: rapid population growth, loss of prime land, increasing water shortages and rising temperatures.

Irrigation can cause a severe water shortage
The biggest drainer of the fresh water supply is irrigation, which uses 70% of it. Irrigation is necessary for most high-yielding crops, but many of the aquifers that supply water to irrigated crops are pumped and emptied faster than the rain can fill them. Moreover, when farmers connect to "fossilized" aquifers, where ancient water is stored under layers of rock that rainwater does not seep through, they are using a non-renewable resource. Pumping from deeper and deeper wells is also problematic from another point of view: it requires a lot of energy. In some states in India, half of the available electrical energy is used to pump water.

The arable land is disappearing

The topsoil, which is one of the essential factors for supplying the world's food supply, is also, in fact, a non-renewable resource: even in a healthy ecosystem that receives enough moisture and organic and inorganic substances, the formation of a layer of topsoil that is 2.5 centimeters thick can take hundreds of years. When soil-stabilizing vegetation disappears, when forests are cut down or when grasslands become desert due to overgrazing, the wind and rain sweep away the topsoil and it is lost. They also threaten the lands suitable for cultivating roads, buildings and other non-agricultural uses.

How do the failed states endanger us all?
When the government of a country can no longer take care of the security of its citizens or basic services for them, the resulting social unrest can cause severe damage even outside the borders of that country:

• spread of disease
• A haven for terrorists and pirates
• Proliferation of drug and weapons trafficking
• A hotbed for political extremism
• Accumulation of violence and refugees who may infiltrate neighboring countries

Gambling games in the politics of food

Out of concern and a desire to ensure grain supply in the future, some countries are secretly making deals with grain exporters regarding rights to grow agricultural crops with them. These arrangements restrict the available supply to other countries that import grains and raise prices. Here are some examples:
China: seeks to lease land in Australia, Brazil, Burma (Myanmar), Russia and Uganda.
Saudi Arabia: Requests agricultural land in Egypt, Pakistan, South Africa, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey and Ukraine.
India: Agribusiness companies seek agricultural land in Paraguay and Uruguay.
Libya: leases a thousand square kilometers in Ukraine in exchange for access to its oil fields.
South Korea: seeks land deals in Madagascar, Russia and Sudan.

Climate warming will reduce productivity

Agriculture, as it is today, was shaped for 11,000 years by a climate system that hardly changed in that time period. Since most crops were developed in pursuit of maximum productivity under the same stable conditions, the relatively high temperatures expected due to global warming will reduce productivity, measured in liters per square kilometer after harvest. Agricultural crop ecologists estimate that for every increase of one degree above normal, the productivity of wheat, rice and corn will decrease by 10%.

What should we do?

Plan B, the road map outlined by the author to deal with the factors that threaten our culture, is based on four main points: a major effort to cut carbon emissions by 80% from their rate in 2006, by 2020; stabilizing the world population so that it does not exceed eight billion, until 2040; eradicating poverty; Restoring the forests, lands and aquifers on our planet. This box highlights some of the main actions necessary to achieve these goals.

key concepts

• The lack of food and the resulting increase in its price are pushing poor countries into chaos.
• Those "failed states" may export disease, terrorism, illegal drugs, weapons, and refugees.
• Water scarcity, land loss and rising temperatures due to global warming severely limit food production.
• The author of the article claims that without rapid and massive intervention to address these three environmental factors, a chain of government falls could endanger the world order.

More on:

Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures. Lester R. Brown. WW Norton, Earth Policy Institute, 2004. Available at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Out/Contents.htm

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Jared Diamond. Penguin, 2005.

Climate Change 2007. Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Available at www.ipcc.ch

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Lester R. Brown. WW Norton, Earth Policy Institute, 2008. Available at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3

About the authorThe Washington Post wrote that Lester R. Brown (Brown) is "one of the most influential thinkers in the world." The daily "Telegraph", published in Calcutta, called him "the guru of the environmental movement." Brown founded in 1974 the Worldwatch Institute and in 2001 the "Earth Policy Institute", which he heads today. He wrote and co-authored 50 books; The last one is "Plan B 3.0: Mobilization to save humanity". Brown has won many awards and honors, including 24 academic honorary degrees and membership in the "MacArthur Fellows" program.

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