From the
May 2009 Scientific American MagazineCould Food
Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential
for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse
By Lester R. Brown
Key Concepts
* Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor
countries into chaos.
* Such “failed states” can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons
and refugees.
* Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global warming
are placing severe limits on food production.
* Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three
environmental factors, the author argues, a series of government collapses
could threaten the world order.
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change.
Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past.
Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails
spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s
economic crisis.
For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate
probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously
about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What
evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about
responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely
catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a
wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth
might collide with an asteroid, too!
For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental
and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those
trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of
governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food
shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our
global civilization.
I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the
environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy—most
important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising
temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.
The Problem of Failed States
Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends
unwelcome support to my conclusion. And those of us in the environmental
field are well into our third decade of charting trends of environmental
decline without seeing any significant effort to reverse a single one.
In six of the past nine years world grain production has fallen short of
consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. When the 2008 harvest
began, world carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new
harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low. In
response, world grain prices in the spring and summer of last year climbed
to the highest level ever.
As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting
food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries
already teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their
own, hungry people take to the streets. Indeed, even before the steep climb
in grain prices in 2008, the number of failing states was expanding
[Purchase the digital edition to see related sidebar]. Many of their
problems stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations. But if
the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down
at an ever increasing rate. We have entered a new era in geopolitics. In the
20th century the main threat to international security was superpower
conflict; today it is failing states. It is not the concentration of power
but its absence that puts us at risk.
States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal
security, food security and basic social services such as education and
health care. They often lose control of part or all of their territory. When
governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to
disintegrate. After a point, countries can become so dangerous that food
relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted; in Somalia
and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in
jeopardy.
Failing states are of international concern because they are a source of
terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability
everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008 list of failing states, has
become a base for piracy. Iraq, number five, is a hotbed for terrorist
training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world’s leading supplier of
heroin. Following the massive genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, refugees from that
troubled state, thousands of armed soldiers among them, helped to
destabilize neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (number six).
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