The Century of Hunger

Unlike the past century, which witnessed a Green Revolution, the 21st Century is likely to see a Green Reversal that will amount to the worst kind of economic crisis imaginable: one so bad that starvation will be its most visible manifestation.

This Green Reversal will arise from a number of issues, including rising temperatures, rising sea levels and oil and water scarcity.

Temperature Rise

Rising temperatures will impact agricultural productivity everywhere. In the United States, for example, warmer and drier conditions in California, which produces half of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables, will result in less productive agriculture for the state, impacting the agricultural market of the whole country, and the world.

Journalist Stephan Faris has written about how climate change is already affecting wine production, demonstrating that warmer temperatures have actually produced better wine in France due to the favorable interplay of temperature and moisture of a warmer France. But improvements in flavor are eventually lost when the air becomes too warm.

Returning to California, for that state’s wine region, global warming means that as the climate warms during this century, the best wine lands will shift north and to higher altitudes. This will ultimately lead to costs to the wine industry, which will have to move its vineyards every few decades. In addition, a warmer world will mean bearing other costs as well, such as the costs of fighting local water wars, lobbying new political constituencies and other associated costs. In the end, all of this will mean higher costs for wine.

Unfortunately, such market dynamics will not be exclusive to luxuries like wine. Temperature rises will affect crops across the planet, from California rice to Iowa corn, from Australian wheat to Brazilian sugarcane.

But the costs caused by warming air will not be the only issue facing world agriculture.

Sea Level Rise

Later in the century, as the oceans begin to swell, even more productive farmland will be lost. In a worst case scenario, sea level could rise by as much as six feet, which would devastate the dozens of deltas around the world where food is grown. But even if half this much increase in sea level were realized, the world’s number two rice exporter, Vietnam, could see 50% of it’s rice paddies disappear (Lester Brown, 2008). Similarly, under this moderate forecast, Bangladesh would also see half its rice productivity lost along with that in most other Asian deltas.

In other words, the world is slated to lose crucial swaths of productive land that it has depended on to feed its growing population. And as the land shrinks, the cost pressure on those populations will grow.

Peak Oil

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, food costs are also linked to oil and the oil is running out. The machinery used to produce food relies on oil as does the transport used to bring it to where people live. Additionally, food production is also reliant on fertilizers which are made from natural gas, another limited resource which cannot be so easily imported when domestic supplies are depleted.

Everything But the Kitchen Sink

Another set of cost pressures on crops will be three intertwined factors: overpopulation, water scarcity and rising competition for food from emerging markets. And taken together, these three forces will perhaps have the most dramatic affect on the global agricultural market.

As mentioned in Part 2, in Asia alone, glaciers supply the water required for over 1 billion people. Furthermore, additional numbers of people rely on unsustainable pumping of water from the ground. In China and India, 300 million people rely on over-pumping of ground water, the equivalent of the entire population of the United States, another country that over-pumps its water for food (Lester Brown, 2008). As the glaciers shrink and the aquifers run dry, the impact on food will be enormous.

To emphasize this point, take the example of the world’s three largest wheat producers: China, India and the United States. China is the world’s biggest producer of wheat, with India being number two (Lester Brown, 2008). Moreover, China and India dominate the world’s rice harvest. But when water pressures begin to undermine the harvests of China and India, their enormous populations will do what they have already done with soy beans: they will buy on the international market. And when they do that, prices will skyrocket.

An interesting competition will then begin in earnest over America’s grain supply. Certainly, this will lead to protectionist reactions in US politics. But what really will the American government be able to do? After all, China will continue to be America’s biggest creditor for decades to come and will therefore have enormous leverage over Washington. There is no way of knowing the precise outcome, but when the water begins to dry up and the competition for grain heats up, it may be the moment where the world finds out just who the true 21st Century super power really is.

And this is just the story among the three biggest grain producers. This kind of competition for food will be global, with populations in the oil rich Middle East and nuclear-armed Pakistan also expected to be at risk.

What is being forecast, then, is a catastrophe in the making that will affect every person in every country. No longer will hunger and food scarcity afflict only the poor nations. This will be the topic of conversation at every dinner table from New York to New Delhi, from London to Lombok. And that conversation will be both pressing, frightened…and too late.

Some hope that advances in genetic science will allow us to engineer crops that can produce grains and vegetables in the harsh environments forecast for the future, allowing humanity to adjust effectively to the shifting climate. Undoubtedly, there is some hope in this, but so far their impact has not kept up with the demands of world population.

Indeed, the trend lines are not pointing in the right direction. In the 1990s, world hunger bottomed out at 825 million people but by 2008, it was back up to 925 million. Last year, it went over a billion, with forecasts pointing to ever higher numbers ahead.

It seems, frankly, that a second green revolution may not materialize in a timely manner or with sufficient scope to meet the multiple challenges of rising temperatures, shrinking cultivatable land, oil and water scarcity and simple population growth. Instead, the likely scenario is looking much more like the Mother of All Economic Crises.