This should not surprise us: people have fought over the means of survival for most of history. But in the abbreviated reports on the nightly media, and even in the rarefied realms of government policy, the focus is almost invariably on the players— the warring national, ethnic, or religious factions— rather than on the play, the deeper subplots building the tensions that ignite conflict. Caught up in these are groups of ordinary, desperate people fearful that there is no longer sufficient food, land, and water to feed their children— and believing that they must fight “the others” to secure them. At the same time, the number of refugees in the world doubled, many of them escaping from conflicts and famines precipitated by food and resource shortages. Governments in troubled regions tottered and fell.
The coming famine is planetary because it involves both the immediate effects of hunger on directly affected populations in heavily populated regions of the world in the next forty years— and also the impacts of war, government failure, refugee crises, shortages, and food price spikes that will affect all human beings, no matter who they are or where they live. It is an emergency because unless it is solved, billions will experience great hardship, and not only in the poorer regions. Mike Murphy, one of the world’s most progressive dairy farmers, with operations in Ireland, New Zealand, and North and South America, succinctly summed it all up: “Global warming gets all the publicity but the real imminent threat to the human race is starvation on a massive scale. Taking a 10–30 year view, I believe that food shortages, famine and huge social unrest are probably the greatest threat the human race has ever faced. I believe future food shortages are a far bigger world threat than global warming.”
The coming famine is also complex, because it is driven not by one or two, or even a half dozen, factors but rather by the confluence of many large and profoundly intractable causes that tend to amplify one another. This means that it cannot easily be remedied by “silver bullets” in the form of technology, subsidies, or single- country policy changes, because of the synergetic character of the things that power it.
The collapse in world economic conditions in late 2008 and 2009 has changed the prices of many things, including land, food, fuel, and fertilizer— but has not altered the fact that demand for food continues to grow while limits on its production multiply. Indeed, the economic crash exacerbated hunger among the world’s poor, and has not altered the fundamentals of climate change, water scarcity, population growth, land degradation, or nutrient or oil depletion.
In early 2009 a report by Chatham House, a think tank focused on international affairs, observed that a lower food price “does not mean that policy- makers around the world can start to breathe a sigh of relief. . . . [E]ven at their somewhat diminished levels current prices remain acutely problematic for low- income import- dependent countries and for poor people all over the world. The World Bank estimates that higher food prices have increased the number of undernourished people by as much as 100 million from its pre- price- spike level of 850 million.”
Asian Chicken Thighs
