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.
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. 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 neighbouring Democratic
Republic of the Congo (number six).
Our
global civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy
nation-states to control the spread of infectious disease, to manage the
international monetary system, to control international terrorism and to reach
scores of other common goals. If the system for controlling infectious diseases—such
as polio, SARS or avian flu—breaks down, humanity will be in trouble. Once
states fail, no one assumes responsibility for their debt to outside lenders.
If enough states disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global
civilization itself.
The
surge in world grain prices in 2007 and 2008—and the threat they pose to food
security—has a different, more troubling quality than the increases of the
past. During the second half of the 20th century, grain prices rose
dramatically several times. In 1972, for instance, the Soviets, recognizing
their poor harvest early, quietly cornered the world wheat market. As a result,
wheat prices elsewhere more than doubled, pulling rice and corn prices up with
them. But this and other price shocks were event-driven—drought in the Soviet
Union, a monsoon failure in India, crop-shrinking heat in the US Corn Belt. And
the rises were short-lived: prices typically returned to normal with the next
harvest.
In
contrast, the recent surge in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it
unlikely to reverse without a reversal in the trends themselves. On the demand
side, those trends include the ongoing addition of more than 70 million people
a year; a growing number of people wanting to move up the food chain to consume
highly grain-intensive livestock products; and the massive diversion of US
grain to ethanol-fuel distilleries.
The
extra demand for grain associated with rising affluence varies widely among
countries. People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60 percent of
calories, such as India, directly consume a bit more than a pound of grain a
day. In affluent countries such as the US and Canada, grain consumption per
person is nearly four times that much, though perhaps 90 percent of it is
consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals.
The
potential for further grain consumption as incomes rise among low-income
consumers is huge. But that potential pales beside the insatiable demand for
crop-based automotive fuels. A fourth of this year’s US grain harvest—enough to
feed the entire population of Thailand for two years - or half a billion
Indians at current consumption levels - will go to fuel cars. Yet even if the
entire US grain harvest were diverted into making ethanol, it would meet at
most 18 percent of US automotive fuel needs. The grain required to fill a
25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.
The
recent merging of the food and energy economies implies that if the food value
of grain is less than its fuel value, the market will move the grain into the
energy economy. That double demand is leading to an epic competition between
cars and people for the grain supply and to a political and moral issue of
unprecedented dimensions. The US, in a misguided effort to reduce its
dependence on foreign oil by substituting grain-based fuels, is generating
global food insecurity on a scale not seen before.
What
about supply? The three environmental trends I mentioned earlier—the shortage
of freshwater, the loss of topsoil and the rising temperatures (and other
effects) of global warming—are making it increasingly hard to expand the world’s
grain supply fast enough to keep up with demand. Of all those trends, however,
the spread of water shortages poses the most immediate threat. The biggest
challenge here is irrigation, which consumes 70 percent of the world’s
freshwater. Millions of irrigation wells in many countries are now pumping
water out of underground sources faster than rainfall can recharge them. The
result is falling water tables in countries populated by half the world’s
people, including the three big grain producers—China, India and the US.
Usually
aquifers are replenishable, but some of the most important ones are not: the “fossil”
aquifers, so called because they store ancient water and are not recharged by
precipitation. For these—including the vast Ogallala Aquifer that underlies the
US Great Plains, the Saudi aquifer and the deep aquifer under the North China
Plain—depletion would spell the end of pumping. In arid regions such a loss
could also bring an end to agriculture altogether.
In China the water table under the North China Plain, an area that
produces more than half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is
falling fast. Over pumping has used up most of the water in a shallow aquifer
there, forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep aquifer, which is not
replenishable. A report by the World Bank foresees “catastrophic consequences
for future generations” unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back
into balance.
As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry,
China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8 percent since it
peaked at 123 million tons in 1997. In that same period China’s rice production
dropped 4 percent. The world’s most populous nation may soon be importing
massive quantities of grain.
But water shortages are even more worrying in India. There the
margin between food consumption and survival is more precarious. Millions of
irrigation wells have dropped water tables in almost every state. As Fred
Pearce reported in New Scientist: “Half of India’s traditional hand-dug wells
and millions of shallower tube wells have already dried up, bringing a spate of
suicides among those who rely on them. Electricity blackouts are reaching
epidemic proportions in states where half of the electricity is used to pump
water from depths of up to a kilometer”.
A World Bank study reports that 15 percent of India’s food supply
is produced by mining groundwater. Stated otherwise, 175 million Indians
consume grain produced with water from irrigation wells that will soon be
exhausted. The continued shrinking of water supplies could lead to unmanageable
food shortages and social conflict.
The scope of the second worrisome trend—the loss of topsoil—is
also startling. Topsoil is eroding faster than new soil forms on perhaps a
third of the world’s croplands. This thin layer of essential plant nutrients,
the very foundation of civilization, took long stretches of geologic time to
build up, yet it is typically only about six inches deep. Its loss from wind
and water erosion doomed earlier civilizations.
In 2002 a UN team assessed the food situation in Lesotho, the
small, landlocked home of two million people embedded within South Africa. The
team’s finding was straightforward: “Agriculture in Lesotho faces a
catastrophic future; crop production is declining and could cease altogether
over large tracts of the country if steps are not taken to reverse soil
erosion, degradation and the decline in soil fertility.”
In the Western Hemisphere, Haiti—one of the first states to be
recognized as failing—was largely self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago. In the
years since, though, it has lost nearly all its forests and much of its
topsoil, forcing the country to import more than half of its grain.
The third and perhaps most pervasive environmental threat to food
security—rising surface temperature—can affect crop yields everywhere. In many
countries crops are grown at or near their thermal optimum, so even a minor
temperature rise during the growing season can shrink the harvest. A study
published by the US National Academy of Sciences has confirmed a rule of thumb
among crop ecologists: for every rise of one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit) above the norm, wheat, rice and corn yields fall by 10 percent.
In the past, most famously when the innovations in the use of
fertilizer, irrigation and high-yield varieties of wheat and rice created the “green
revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, the response to the growing demand for food
was the successful application of scientific agriculture: the technological
fix. This time, regrettably, many of the most productive advances in
agricultural technology have already been put into practice, and so the
long-term rise in land productivity is slowing down. Between 1950 and 1990 the
world’s farmers increased the grain yield per acre by more than 2 percent a
year, exceeding the growth of population. But since then, the annual growth in
yield has slowed to slightly more than 1 percent. In some countries the yields
appear to be near their practical limits, including rice yields in Japan and
China.
Some commentators point to genetically modified crop strains as a
way out of our predicament. Unfortunately, however, no genetically modified
crops have led to dramatically higher yields, comparable to the doubling or
tripling of wheat and rice yields that took place during the green revolution.
Nor do they seem likely to do so, simply because conventional plant-breeding
techniques have already tapped most of the potential for raising crop yields.
As the world’s food security unravels, a dangerous politics of
food scarcity is coming into play: individual countries acting in their narrowly
defined self-interest are actually worsening the plight of the many. The trend
began in 2007, when leading wheat-exporting countries such as Russia and
Argentina limited or banned their exports, in hopes of increasing locally
available food supplies and thereby bringing down food prices domestically.
Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest rice exporter after Thailand, banned its
exports for several months for the same reason. Such moves may reassure those
living in the exporting countries, but they are creating panic in importing
countries that must rely on what is then left of the world’s exportable grain.
In response to those restrictions, grain importers are trying to
nail down long-term bilateral trade agreements that would lock up future grain
supplies. The Philippines, no longer able to count on getting rice from the
world market, recently negotiated a three-year deal with Vietnam for a
guaranteed 1.5 million tons of rice each year. Food-import anxiety is even
spawning entirely new efforts by food-importing countries to buy or lease
farmland in other countries.
In spite of such stopgap measures, soaring food prices and
spreading hunger in many other countries are beginning to break down the social
order. In several provinces of Thailand the predations of “rice rustlers” have
forced villagers to guard their rice fields at night with loaded shotguns. In
Pakistan an armed soldier escorts each grain truck. During the first half of
2008, 83 trucks carrying grain in Sudan were hijacked before reaching the Darfur
relief camps.
No country is immune to the effects of tightening food supplies,
not even the US, the world’s breadbasket. If China turns to the world market
for massive quantities of grain, as it has recently done for soybeans, it will
have to buy from the U.S. For US consumers, that would mean competing for the
US grain harvest with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with fast-rising incomes—a
nightmare scenario. In such circumstances, it would be tempting for the US to
restrict exports, as it did, for instance, with grain and soybeans in the 1970s
when domestic prices soared. But that is not an option with China. Chinese
investors now hold well over a trillion US dollars, and they have often been
the leading international buyers of US. Treasury securities issued to finance
the fiscal deficit. Like it or not, US consumers will share their grain with
Chinese consumers, no matter how high food prices rise.
Since the current world food shortage is trend-driven, the
environmental trends that cause it must be reversed. To do so requires
extraordinarily demanding measures, a monumental shift away from business as
usual—what we at the Earth Policy Institute call Plan A—to a
civilization-saving Plan B.
Similar in scale and urgency to the US mobilization for World War
II, Plan B has four components: a massive effort to cut carbon emissions by 80
percent from their 2006 levels by 2020; the stabilization of the world’s
population at eight billion by 2040; the eradication of poverty; and the
restoration of forests, soils and aquifers.
Net carbon dioxide emissions can be cut by systematically raising
energy efficiency and investing massively in the development of renewable
sources of energy. We must also ban deforestation worldwide, as several
countries already have done, and plant billions of trees to sequester carbon.
The transition from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy can be driven by
imposing a tax on carbon, while offsetting it with a reduction in income taxes.
Stabilizing population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. In
fact, the key to accelerating the shift to smaller families is eradicating
poverty—and vice versa. One way is to ensure at least a primary school
education for all children, girls as well as boys. Another is to provide
rudimentary, village-level health care, so that people can be confident that
their children will survive to adulthood. Women everywhere need access to
reproductive health care and family-planning services.
The fourth component, restoring the earth’s natural systems and
resources, incorporates a worldwide initiative to arrest the fall in water
tables by raising water productivity: the useful activity that can be wrung
from each drop. That implies shifting to more efficient irrigation systems and
to more water-efficient crops. In some countries, it implies growing (and
eating) more wheat and less rice, a water-intensive crop. And for industries
and cities, it implies doing what some are doing already, namely, continuously
recycling water.
At the same time, we must launch a worldwide effort to conserve
soil, similar to the US response to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Terracing the
ground, planting trees as shelterbelts against windblown soil erosion, and
practicing minimum tillage—in which the soil is not ploughed and crop residues
are left on the field—are among the most important soil-conservation measures.
There is nothing new about our four interrelated objectives. They
have been discussed individually for years. Indeed, we have created entire
institutions intended to tackle some of them, such as the World Bank to
alleviate poverty. And we have made substantial progress in some parts of the
world on at least one of them—the distribution of family-planning services and
the associated shift to smaller families that brings population stability.
For many in the development community, the four objectives of Plan
B were seen as positive, promoting development as long as they did not cost too
much. Others saw them as humanitarian goals—politically correct and morally
appropriate. Now a third and far more momentous rationale presents itself:
meeting these goals may be necessary to prevent the collapse of our
civilization. Yet the cost we project for saving civilization would amount to
less than $200 billion a year, a sixth of current global military spending. In
effect, Plan B is the new security budget.
Our challenge is not only to implement Plan B but also to do it
quickly. The world is in a race between political tipping points and natural
ones. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to prevent the Greenland
ice sheet from slipping into the sea and inundating our coastlines? Can we cut
carbon emissions fast enough to save the mountain glaciers of Asia? During the
dry season their melt-waters sustain the major rivers of India and China—and by
extension, hundreds of millions of people. Can we stabilize population before
countries such as India, Pakistan and Yemen are overwhelmed by shortages of the
water they need to irrigate their crops?
It is hard to overstate the urgency of our predicament. Every day
counts. Unfortunately, we do not know how long we can light our cities with
coal, for instance, before Greenland’s ice sheet can no longer be saved. Nature
sets the deadlines; nature is the timekeeper. But we human beings cannot see
the clock. We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mind-set. The
thinking that got us into this bind will not get us out. When Elizabeth
Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, asked energy guru Amory Lovins about
thinking outside the box, Lovins responded: “There is no box.”
There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is
to survive.
This article, which first appeared in the May
2009 issue of Scientific American was written by Lester Brown, President of
Earth Policy Institute.
