Can food shortages bring down civilization?

Third World countries are often described as “developing” while the First World, industrialized nations are often “developed”. What does it mean to describe a nation as “developing”? A lack of material wealth does not necessarily mean that one is deprived. A strong economy in a developed nation doesn’t mean much when a significant percentage (even a majority) of the population is struggling to survive.

Successful development can imply many things, such as (though not limited to):

• An improvement in living standards and access to all basic needs such that a person has enough food, water, shelter, clothing, health, education, etc;
• A stable political, social and economic environment, with associated political, social and economic freedoms, such as (though not limited to) equitable ownership of land and property;
• The ability to make free and informed choices that are not coerced;
• Be able to participate in a democratic environment with the ability to have a say in one’s own future;
• To have the full potential for what the United Nations calls Human Development:

  Human development is about much more than the rise or fall of national incomes. It is about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations. Development is thus about expanding the choices people have to lead lives that they value. And it is thus about much more than economic growth, which is only a means—if a very important one—of enlarging people’s choices. — What is Human Development?, Human Development Reports, United Nations Development Program

In the May issue of  Scientific American,  Lester Brown discusses how food shortages could be the weak link that brings down civilization.  Brown reveals that the biggest threat to global political stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. Those crises are brought on by rising demand and ever worsening environmental degradation.

“In the twentieth century, dramatic rises in grain prices resulted from poor harvests. They were event driven and short-lived. In contrast, the recent escalation in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it unlikely to reverse the rise in food prices without a reversal in the trends themselves.” — Lester Brown

Demand side trends include the addition of more than 70 million people to the global population each year, 4 billion people moving up the food chain–consuming more grain-intensive meat, milk, and eggs–and the massive diversion of U.S. grain to fuel ethanol distilleries.

On the supply side, the trends include falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures. Higher temperatures lower grain yields. They also melt the glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau whose ice melt sustains the major rivers and irrigation systems of China and India during the dry seasons. Without a massive intervention to reverse these three environmental trends, Brown argues, more and more states will fail, ultimately threatening civilization itself.

In the article, Brown discusses measures to reverse the trends.  He says:

“Among other steps, it will take a massive restructuring of the world energy economy similar in scale and urgency to the wartime restructuring of the U.S. industrial economy in 1942.”

Lester R. Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available  for free downloading.