"The New Geopolitics of Food," Lester Brown

Those who have been paying attention saw this coming thirty or forty years ago, but if you haven't, well, this article on how food scarcity underlies the current unrest in the Middle East, and promises only to get worse in the future, shows that we're teetering on the brink of some extremely unpleasant times.

This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites.

Between purchases by richer nations of land in poorer nations for growing crops, which takes us right back to the good old days of nineteenth century imperialism, and protective restrictions on exports from grain-rich countries, we're looking at the global economy trying to solve an acute crisis -- hunger -- with Adam Smith's invisible hand. What no one wants to say is that a lot of people in poorer countries will starve if that hand is allowed to sweep through unimpeded.

Not that the land purchases, in particular, have gone unimpeded. Unfortunately, that just means more people in the richer country are at risk of malnutrition or poverty or both. That's better than large numbers of people in the poorer country dying, but not tremendously better.

Or, of course, the countries could go to war. I'm not venturing an opinion as to how that stacks up against mass starvation.

Like it or not, the human race is way overdue for a reality check on its lack of population controls.

Last June I wrote about how overpopulation warnings have had a history of not coming true, making a lot of people sanguine that human ingenuity would always fend it off. But do you know what the price of gleefully outrunning the natural limits on population is? You have no margin for error. If, while outrunning those limits, you stumble, you will fall -- hard. And that means a lot of people will suffer and die.

If we don't learn to restrain ourselves as a species, Nature will take care of overpopulation in its own brutal and unforgiving way.

(I found the article courtesy of LongReads. I'd offer my thanks, but I have to admit I don't feel particularly happy now that I've read it.)