History proves – food wars have the potential to go nuclear. No country is immune

ANDANA SHIVA, an Indian environmental activist, once  growing one’s own food as “the most revolutionary act.” That idea is clearly echoed in  by Australian climate scholar Julian Cribb, in which he suggests that climate change threatens the very foundations of agriculture and calls for a scientific food revolution. Ignoring the profound global challenges that endanger farming systems, he argues, may lead to extensive warfare and famine in the near future.

“The most destructive object on the planet,” Cribb writes, “is the human jawbone.” Our agricultural ingenuity has enabled us to masterfully exploit our natural resources, Cribb maintains, but looming food insecurity, thanks to desertification, topsoil loss, dead zones in the ocean, and other climatic hazards, will ultimately lead to wars.

“That food wars will happen is totally predictable — on the strength of what has occurred regularly during the past 20,000 years, and what is happening right now in terms of rising food demand from a shrinking resource base,” he writes. Despite his dire prognosis, Cribb later outlines several ways to avoid such wars, mainly through innovative “food for peace” farming techniques that he hopes will “see humanity through the human population peak of the mid-21st century, and down the other side.”

Cribb, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, has made a career writing books on existential risks with alarming titles like “Poisoned Planet” or “Surviving the 21st Century.” To build his case in “Food or War,” he draws on numerous historical examples that may seem, on the surface, entirely unrelated to food scarcity, such as the 30 Years’ War, fought in 17th-century Europe. But that conflict and numerous others have been  to localized fluctuations in climate, such as “The Little Ice Age,” a  between the 16th and 19th centuries,  crop failure, starvation, and ultimately war. Similar climatic links have been proposed for the fall of the , the collapse of the  in 17th-century China, and even harsh winters that preceded major crop failures leading to the  of 1905.

War itself, of course, also results in starvation. At least  people have died from famine or forced starvation since 1870, more than half the total killed in combat. And wartime malnourishment can lead to still more conflicts, as in the case of roiling civil wars that have plagued Sudan since 1955. Like Ouroboros, the mythical snake that eats itself, war and famine are deeply interconnected.

Modern hostilities are no exception, Cribb notes, citing examples across the Middle East and Northern Africa. Hunger is now commonly , as in conflicts like the Yemen civil war, currently the  with approximately 56 percent of the population — some 17 million people — facing life-threatening food shortages. The complex  of the Yemen war traces back in part, Cribb notes, to regional food insecurity, when approximately 40 percent of people lived below the poverty line, most suffering from some form of malnutrition, according to . This instability was a stimulating component of the 2010 Arab Spring, a revolt that dissolved into the humanitarian disaster witnessed today.

Cribb underlines similar trends in Syria and South Sudan, warning that similar conflicts are likely to unfold as climate change batters humanity’s ability to grow food. Heat waves, freakishly powerful flood storms, and ecosystem collapse — events that now , according to the United Nations — make farming, and thus global food supply, extremely precarious.

Cribb writes that “there is no country, no matter how food secure it may deem itself, that is immune from this type of conflict once politics, climate, environmental collapse, and military power compound their lethal brew.” This threat is especially dire in Southeast Asia, Cribb warns, as two nuclear-armed nations, Pakistan and India, are beset by water shortages and rampant pollution. Even a relatively small nuclear engagement could lead to global crop failure.