- If food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an increasing rate
- Main threat to national security is failing states.
- States fail when national governments can't provide personal security, food security and social services.
- When governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order disintegrate
- At that point, countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no longer safe.
- Failing states are of international concern, because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability.
- Somalia #1, piracy
- Iraq #5, terrorist training
- Afghanistan #7, leading heroin supplier
- Surge of world grain prices in 2007 and 2008- and the pose they threat to food security- has a different, more troubling quality than the increases of the past.
- Grain prices rose dramatically several times. As a result, wheat prices more than doubled, pulling rice and corn prices up with them
- Surge in world grain prices are trend-driven. As populations grow, more demand for the grain grows.
- Potential for further grain consumption rise among low-income consumers is huge.
- Shortage of freshwater, loss of topsoil and rising temperatures are making it hard to expand world's grain supply fast enough to keep up with demand.
- Spread of water shortages poses the most immediate threat
- Irrigation is biggest challenge, which consumes 70% of world's freshwater.
- Topsoil is eroding faster than new soil forms on a third of the world's cropland.
- Thin layer of essential plant nutrients took long stretches of geologic time to build up, yet it is typically only about six inches deep. Loss from wind and water erosion doomed earlier civilization
- Third and most pervasive environmental threat is rising surface temp
- It can affect crop yields everywhere
- Even a minor temperature change can shrink harvest
- For every rise of one degree Celsius, yields fall 10%
- People looked towards GMOs to solve the problem. No GM crops have led to dramatically higher yields.
- Soaring food prices and spreading hunger in other countries are beginning to break down the social order.
- Since current world food shortage is trend-driven, the environmental trends that cause it must be reversed.