- The global agricultural system as it exists today is a manifestation of 100 years of geopolitical competition.
- The world produces enough food to feed everyone, but hunger is rising, people are getting fatter, and we waste 40% of the food we produce.
- The future of the world will be determined by changes happening in global fertilizer markets and grain markets.
The Importance of Food
Food is the essence of geopolitics. There is no more basic human need than securing access to food and water, and, as a result, there is no more important geopolitical imperative for national governments than to ensure their people do not starve. A government that fails to provide food security will not stand long.
This idea is more deeply embedded in your consciousness than you probably realize. Let’s get biblical for a second. Yeah, I said biblical - where else do you get content on the geopolitics of the Bible other than at Lykeion?
In Genesis 41, Joseph is twiddling his thumbs in a jail cell until he is summoned by Pharoah to interpret a vexing dream. Joseph explains to Pharoah that the dream means Egypt will experience 7 years of plenty – followed by 7 years of famine. Pharoah listens – and appoints Joseph to oversee an export ban on Egyptian grain so that 1/5th of the food gathered during the 7 years of plenty is saved for the 7 years of famine. Joseph ends up being right – and manages Egypt’s agricultural sector so well that the Israelite population of Egypt explodes. Eventually, a new Pharoah rises over Egypt and becomes afraid of the Israelite numbers and decides to enslave them and drown their first-born boys. Ok, we won’t digress much more…
There are two extremely important insights to glean from the story of Joseph and his amazing technicolor wheat tariffs:
· The first is that for most of human civilization, access to food was not assured. Even after the Neolithic Revolution (when agriculture became a thing) and the emergence of large-scale human societies in the crescent of civilization of the Middle East – based largely around rivers as they are more predictable than rain – leaders lost sleep at night over what they would do if a famine occurred.
· We are all used to going to the grocery store and getting non-GMO organic free-range elk meat whenever we fancy it. Most humans that have ever lived have not enjoyed the predictable and stable access to food we treat as commonplace in the Western world.
· The second is that when agricultural yields increase, so does population. That can mean all sorts of good things – economic growth, artistic expression, technological innovation – but it can also mean more conflict. Human brains have been conditioned for millennia to worry about scarcity – so that even when we are rich in resources, we tend to compete for them anyway.
· Remember all that dumb toilet paper hoarding when the pandemic lockdowns first started? The same impulse is behind the depressing fact that the world produces more than enough food to feed almost 1.5 times the global population – and yet global hunger has been on the risefor years.
A Broken System
The global food system today is broken. For decades, a combination of rising incomes, record harvests, liberalized trade, and lower food prices helped decrease global hunger rates significantly. Global progress was so good that in 2015, the United Nations set a goal of eliminating world hunger by 2030. But then things changed.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN was off to a rough start. In 2015, almost 630 million people were chronically undernourished according to the UN, which defines undernourished people as individuals whose food intake falls below the minimum level of dietary energy requirements. "630 million people" sounds like a lot, but it actually reflectedreal progress, as it was equivalent to a 23% decline from undernourishment levels in 1990-1992. That number, however, increased to 690 million in 2019.
· COVID-19 badly exacerbated the situation, as an additional 161 million fell back into hunger. As a result, roughly 1 in 10 people in the world are undernourished today, and that figure is going to rise sharply due to the Russia-Ukraine war. But hold that thought – we’ll come back it in a few.
“So what?” the callous among you might be thinking. Hunger has been a global problem since humans were walking on two feet – that’s not a sign the global food system is broken. It’s just a sign that hunger has been a problem that we’re gradually solving, with ups and downs along the way.
Let’s add in two more mind-blowing statistics:
· Even as hunger is increasing, people are getting fatter. Worldwide obesity rates have tripled since 1975. More than 1.9 billion adults are overweight. Almost 40% of people in the world over the age of 18 years old are overweight. I live in Louisiana, where according to the Centers for Disease Control, the self-reported obesity rate is 38%. Sheesh!
· And perhaps the most depressing of all: an estimated one third of the world’s food is lost or wasted each year. The USDA estimates that food waste in the US is equivalent to 30 to 40% of food supply, corresponding to roughly 133 billion pounds of food, or $161 billion. According to an EPA estimate from 2010, the average American wastes 219 pounds of food every year.
To recap: The world produces enough food to feed everyone, but hunger is rising, people are getting fatter, and we waste 40% of the food we produce. Can you think of another industry in which that kind of waste and these kinds of irrationalities could continue indefinitely, especially given the importance of it to our survival?
The FAO estimates that, to satisfy the growing demand driven by population growth and dietary changes, global food production has to increase by 60% by 2050. You could get most of the way there by just eliminating waste, building better infrastructure, and increasing yields with modern technology in developing markets.
Hopefully, you are now convinced that the global food system is broken. The question then becomes – why is it broken… and what does this have to do with geopolitics? The answers to those questions are one and the same. The way global agriculture works today is an expression of a unipolar geopolitical world.
Our global food system – which has been wildly successful at increasing production and decreasing human suffering – is a manifestation of the rise of the United States as a dominant global power, one whose interests were best served by liberalizing global trade and exporting its agricultural products abroad to developing countries.
It is not a coincidence that geopolitics – the discipline of understanding how nation-states will behave based on their imperatives and constraints (read the primer if you haven’t!) – emerged around the same time that a revolution was taking place in global agriculture.
So, let’s review a little bit of history to understand precisely how we got here – and then look ahead with clear eyes, full bellies, CAN’T LOSE.
Revolutions, Demographics, and Calories
The Industrial Revolution, sparked by the advent of steam power in late-18th century Britain, was a tremendously important period in history. Fromroughly 1760-1840, mechanical production led to massive increases in capacity and productivity. The political fallout was transformative. The politics of identity broadened from one’s village to one’s nation. The American and French Revolutions birthed new republics. New nations emerged in Italy and Germany. Europe’s hunger for markets led to the Opium Wars – and the eventual collapse of the Qing Dynasty. The United Kingdom, after winning the Napoleonic wars, gave the Mughal Empire the coup de grâce and created the basis for modern India. Vast multiethnic empires fell one by one, replaced by more homogeneous nation-states. It is difficult to overstate just how much the Industrial Revolution changed the world.
The Industrial Revolution, however, would not have been possible if it were not for its less mentioned precursor: the Agricultural Revolution of the 16th and 17thcenturies .....
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