Even if not directly existential---that spurs system collapse AND pandemics, which are

Humanity is facing its greatest test in the million-year ascent of our kind. This isn’t a single challenge. It’s a constellation of huge man-made threats, now coming together to overshadow our civilisation’s stability and even, maybe, its future survival. These ten intersecting risks are: ecological collapse, resource depletion, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, global poisoning, food insecurity, population and urban failure, pandemic disease and uncontrolled new technologies (like killer robots, artificial intelligence and universal surveillance) – reinforced by a prodigious capacity for human self-delusion. But sticking our heads in the sand and trying to ignore them will not remove the danger.

These threats are known as ‘existential risks’ because they imperil our future existence, both as individuals, as a civilisation and maybe even as a species.

Their most important feature is the fact that they are not isolated from one another. They are deeply interwoven. They play into and feed one another. They cannot be addressed separately or singly, because to do so creates a situation where curbing one risk only makes other risks worse. Together they constitute a single existential emergency facing all of humanity.

An example of why they cannot be addressed piecemeal is trying to solve the global food problem by intensifying agriculture worldwide using fossil fuels, fertilisers and petrochemicals: this will only destroy the very climate, resources and ecosystem services on which agriculture, itself, depends – and is not, consequently, a viable or enduring solution. Other answers must be sought. Another example is that trying to end the Sixth Extinction of wildlife on our planet by turning half of it back to forest and grassland will not work on its own, because it would involve the sacrifice of half the current human food supply: consequently, we need a solution that achieves both aims – sustainable food for all and a sufficient haven for the Earth’s other species. So, the problem of extinction needs to be solved, in part, by solving the problem of food – and that, in turn, entails solving the problems of climate, global poisoning, resource depletion and other mega-risks. It is absolutely clear from this that the solutions we adopt must be cross-cutting. They must comprehensively address all the perils we face, not just one or a handful of them.

Take these ten great risks together and what you have is the focal issue of our time – the greatest and most profound challenge ever to confront human civilisation. The risks are all selfinflicted, a direct result of the overgrowth in human numbers and our unbridled demands on the planet – for food, resources, space and a healthy environment. By solving them together, we ensure our future. By denying them or failing to solve them all in time, we knowingly create untold misery and suffering for most of humanity and generations to come through the centuries ahead. We are gambling with the very survival of our civilisation and species. The risks are described below, along with observations about how they play into the Food or War scenario. The detail, the scientific sources and the solutions, collective and individual, to each risk are described in more detail in Surviving the 21st Century.

Extinction and Ecological Collapse

More than half of the large animals that once inhabited the Earth have been wiped from it by human action since 1970, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Index.3 So, too, have half the fish in the sea on which humans rely for food.4 Humans are, in the words of the great biologist E. O. Wilson, ‘tearing down the biosphere’, demolishing the very home that keeps us alive.5

Extinction, it should be noted, is a part of life: 99.9 per cent of all species ever to evolve on this planet have disappeared, and new ones like ourselves have arisen to replace them. But extinction rates like today’s – a hundred to a thousand times faster than normal – are a freak occurrence that usually takes tens of millions of years, not mere decades. Animal, plant and marine species are presently vanishing so fast that scientists have dubbed our time “the Sixth Extinction” – the sixth such megadeath in the geological history of the Earth.6 By the end of the present century, Wilson says, it is possible that up to half of the eight million species thought to exist here will be gone. Furthermore, in all previous extinctions, natural events like asteroid strikes and vast volcanic outbursts have been to blame. This will be the only time in the Earth’s history when the wipe-out was caused by a single species. Us.7

The probability of humans becoming extinct during the twentyfirst century is not high – but there are scenarios, such as an all-out nuclear war, runaway climate change (+5–10 C or more), or a compound collapse in the Earth’s main life support systems, in which it must be regarded as a possibility – and the fact that it is unpleasant to contemplate is no excuse for doing nothing to stop it.

However, there are also a number of credible scenarios in which large-scale ecosystem collapse could endanger civilisation and cause very high mortality among the world’s population. These revolve around the notion of ‘environmental security’ which is, in turn, very closely tied to human security – i.e. peace or war. An ecosystem is a biological community of mutually dependent species – and the removal of one species after another can undermine it and render it dysfunctional, in the same way that pulling one brick at a time out of your home will eventually cause it to fall down. Ecosystems support all life on the planet, and maintain the quality of air, water and soil on which it depends. For humans, they provide food and clean water (provisioning services), disease and climate regulation (regulatory services), spiritual and aesthetic fulfilment (cultural services), useful chemical energy (from plants) and soil formation (support services). As ecosystems decay, the decline and loss of these services often causes significant harm to human wellbeing and can inflame the tensions that lead to conflict.

The most destructive object on the planet, as we noted in Chapter 3, is the human jawbone. The need to keep it fed is responsible, every year, for the loss of up to 75 billion tonnes of topsoil, the wasting of six trillion tonnes of water, the release of five million tonnes of pesticides, and 30 per cent of the world’s climate-wrecking carbon emissions. In addition, the contemporary food system is the chief driver of deforestation, desertification, wildlife extinctions and impaired ecosystems. Among the most striking examples of food’s impact on the wild world are the 400+ ‘dead zones’ spreading through the world’s oceans from the Arabian Sea, to the Baltic and the Mississippi delta. These are oxygenless layers in the sea, where fish cannot survive. They are caused by topsoil dislodged by land clearing, over-farming and over-grazing, the use of huge quantities of artificial fertilisers, toxic chemicals and human sewage. Along with overfishing they contribute to an ongoing collapse in world wild fisheries and are a clear example of how the activity of one part of the food system can impair another. Similarly, most inland rivers and lakes in populated regions are eutrophic and polluted – and no longer capable of producing as much food as in the past. The loss of wild fisheries increases tensions between nations and fishers over what remains and can lead to ‘fish wars’. 8

The existing global food production system is therefore a major contributor to the decline and failure of ecosystem services needed to support the human population. This in turn rebounds on the food system itself. Furthermore, the extinction of wild animals and plants deprives the food industry of many edible species that may be needed as part of a healthy, diverse global diet in future.

The solution to the extinction crisis is to cease farming and grazing on about half the currently farmed area of the planet (25 million square kilometres), transfer food production to the cities where it can take advantage of all the nutrients and water currently being wasted, and employ many of the world’s farmers and indigenous people as Stewards of the Earth to manage the rewilding and regeneration of former farmlands. Food production can continue on the remaining 24 million square kilometres using eco-agriculture. This process is further described in Surviving the 21st Century and in Chapter 9 of this book.

How the existing food system plays into the risk of war can also be viewed through the lens of environmental security: war damages environments, making it harder for humans to sustain and feed themselves – and ruined environments themselves become cauldrons of war. This is plainly to be seen in the cases of Syria, South Sudan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. What we most need are food systems that do not cause knock-on damage to either the environment and wildlife, the climate, the oceans or to consumer health – and which ease tensions, so promoting peace, not conflict. These are described in Chapters 8 and 9.

Resource Scarcity

The average citizen of planet Earth today uses at least ten times the volume of resources used by their grandparents a century ago. Since the human population has also quadrupled over the same time, this means humanity’s gargantuan appetite for minerals, metals, timber, water, food and energy has grown fortyfold in barely a hundred years. As the Global Footprint Network explains, we are presently using enough ‘stuff’ for 1.6 Earths, not just the one we have. We now outrun the Earth’s natural ability to supply our needs in August each year.9 As with the mining of groundwater, the decline and collapse of global resources like soil, water and phosphorus, is often imperceptible to the individual: people have simply no idea they are living on borrowed time and, with that, comes enormous risk.

To make the issue of resource consumption a little more personal: you (as an average individual citizen of the planet) will in your lifetime

– use 99,720 tonnes (i.e. 40 Olympic pools) of fresh water

– displace 750 tonnes of topsoil

– consume 720 tonnes of metals and materials

– use 80 billion joules of energy

– release 288 tonnes of CO2

– release 320 kilograms of toxic chemicals

– waste 13.4 tonnes of food

– destroy 800 square metres of forest.

Because of the long, cryptic, industrial and international trade chains which hide it, most of us are unaware of the vast damage we do to the planet through our simple habit of shopping.

Yes, some of us have a notion that some of our purchases may be bad for gorillas in the Congo, orangutans in Borneo or flamingos in the Atacama – but we mostly have no true appreciation of the wider havoc we inflict on the Earth and its natural systems by the ‘innocent’ act of consumption, which business and governments try constantly to convince us is essential to ‘growth and jobs’.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the world finds itself increasingly short of key resources like fresh water, soil, phosphorus, timber and certain minerals – and that these shortages are giving rise to tensions and even to conflicts. Indeed, resource scarcity has for some time been considered by strategic experts to be one of the most likely causes of war in the twentyfirst century.10

However, people are not equally responsible for the devastation of Planet Earth. The diagram below (Figure 6.1), from [[FIGURE 6.1 OMITTED]] Oxfam, illustrates how just one tenth of humanity consumes five times as much in the way of material resources (expressed here in the form of their carbon footprint) as the poorest half of the world population. The affluent are chiefly responsible for the destruction taking place on a global scale as they seek to sustain lifestyles that the planet can no longer afford or support.

The significance of this blind spot around consumption for global food security is very great. As described in earlier chapters, the world food system depends critically on soil, water, nutrients and a stable climate, to supply humanity’s daily need for nutriment – and all of these essential resources are in increasingly short supply, chiefly because of our own mismanagement of them and our collective failure to appreciate that they are finite. On current trends, the existing food system will tend to break down, first regionally and then globally, owing to resource scarcity from the 2020s onward, and especially towards the mid century – unless there is radical change in the world diet and the means by which we feed ourselves. This will lead to increasing outbreaks of violence and war. Nobody, neither rich nor poor, will escape the consequences.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Detonating just 50–100 out of the global arsenal of nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons would suffice to end civilisation in a nuclear winter, causing worldwide famine and economic collapse affecting even distant nations, as we saw in the previous chapter in the section dealing with South Asia. Eight nations now have the power to terminate civilisation should they desire to do so – and two have the power to extinguish the human species. According to the nuclear monitoring group Ploughshares, this arsenal is distributed as follows:

– Russia, 6600 warheads (2500 classified as ‘retired’)

– America, 6450 warheads (2550 classified as ‘retired’)

– France, 300 warheads

– China, 270 warheads

– UK, 215 warheads

– Pakistan, 130 warheads

– India, 120 warheads

– Israel, 80 warheads

– North Korea, 15–20 warheads.11

Although actual numbers of warheads have continued to fall from its peak of 70,000 weapons in the mid 1980s, scientists argue the danger of nuclear conflict in fact increased in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This was due to the modernisation of existing stockpiles, the adoption of dangerous new technologies such as robot delivery systems, hypersonic missiles, artificial intelligence and electronic warfare, and the continuing leakage of nuclear materials and knowhow to nonnuclear nations and potential terrorist organisations.

In early 2018 the hands of the ‘Doomsday Clock’, maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, were re-set at two minutes to midnight, the highest risk to humanity that it has ever shown since the clock was introduced in 1953. This was due not only to the state of the world’s nuclear arsenal, but also to irresponsible language by world leaders, the growing use of social media to destabilise rival regimes, and to the rising threat of uncontrolled climate change (see below).12

In an historic moment on 17 July 2017, 122 nations voted in the UN for the first time ever in favour of a treaty banning all nuclear weapons. This called for comprehensive prohibition of “a full range of nuclear-weapon-related activities, such as undertaking to develop, test, produce, manufacture, acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, as well as the use or threat of use of these weapons.”13 However, 71 other countries – including all the nuclear states – either opposed the ban, abstained or declined to vote. The Treaty vote was nonetheless interpreted by some as a promising first step towards abolishing the nuclear nightmare that hangs over the entire human species.

In contrast, 192 countries had signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention to ban the use of chemical weapons, and 180 to the Biological Weapons Convention. As of 2018, 96 per cent of previous world stocks of chemical weapons had been destroyed – but their continued use in the Syrian conflict and in alleged assassination attempts by Russia indicated the world remains at risk.14

As things stand, the only entities that can afford to own nuclear weapons are nations – and if humanity is to be wiped out, it will most likely be as a result of an atomic conflict between nations. It follows from this that, if the world is to be made safe from such a fate it will need to get rid of nations as a structure of human self-organisation and replace them with wiser, less aggressive forms of self-governance. After all, the nation state really only began in the early nineteenth century and is by no means a permanent feature of self-governance, any more than monarchies, feudal systems or priest states. Although many people still tend to assume it is. Between them, nations have butchered more than 200 million people in the past 150 years and it is increasingly clear the world would be a far safer, more peaceable place without either nations or nationalism. The question is what to replace them with.

Although there may at first glance appear to be no close linkage between weapons of mass destruction and food, in the twentyfirst century with world resources of food, land and water under growing stress, nothing can be ruled out. Indeed, chemical weapons have frequently been deployed in the Syrian civil war, which had drought, agricultural failure and hunger among its early drivers. And nuclear conflict remains a distinct possibility in South Asia and the Middle East, especially, as these regions are already stressed in terms of food, land and water, and their nuclear firepower or access to nuclear materials is multiplying.

It remains an open question whether panicking regimes in Russia, the USA or even France would be ruthless enough to deploy atomic weapons in an attempt to quell invasion by tens of millions of desperate refugees, fleeing famine and climate chaos in their own homelands – but the possibility ought not to be ignored.

That nuclear war is at least a possible outcome of food and climate crises was first flagged in the report The Age of Consequences by Kurt Campbell and the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, which stated ‘it is clear that even nuclear war cannot be excluded as a political consequence of global warming’. 15 Food insecurity is therefore a driver in the preconditions for the use of nuclear weapons, whether limited or unlimited.

A global famine is a likely outcome of limited use of nuclear weapons by any country or countries – and would be unavoidable in the event of an unlimited nuclear war between America and Russia, making it unwinnable for either. And that, as the mute hands of the ‘Doomsday Clock’ so eloquently admonish, is also the most likely scenario for the premature termination of the human species.

Such a grim scenario can be alleviated by two measures: the voluntary banning by the whole of humanity of nuclear weapons, their technology, materials and stocks – and by a global effort to secure food against future insecurity by diverting the funds now wasted on nuclear armaments into building the sustainable food and water systems of the future (see Chapters 8 and 9).

Climate Change

The effects of food and war on climate change as it is presently predicted to occur were described in Chapter 3: in brief, the stable climate in which agriculture arose over the past 6000 years is now becoming increasingly unstable as a result of the billions of tonnes of carbon that humans are injecting into the atmosphere and oceans, forming a colossal heat engine to drive more frequent, violent weather. This in turn impairs food production in regions of the world already facing severe stresses from population growth and resource depletion. Military analysts describe climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’, augmenting the tensions, conflict and instability which already exist. In reality it is a feedback loop, in which worsening climate conditions cause greater food insecurity, which is met by measures (like increased land clearing and use of fossil fuels and chemicals), which in turn worsen climate conditions, which worsen food security, which cause wars, which inflict more eco-damage...

Two degrees (2 C) of global warming – described as the danger point for humanity – are predicted to occur well before 2050 because of our collective failure to curb our carbon emissions.16 Those 2 C of warming portend bad things for any food system that depends on the weather – but just how bad cannot easily be forecast as both the climate state and the response of the global food system are governed by human behaviour, which is fairly unpredictable. Current estimates suggest crop losses of the order of 20–50 per cent at the very time we are trying to raise food output by 50–70 per cent. What can be confidently predicted, however, is that there will be an increase in both the frequency and scale of harvest failures and agricultural disease outbreaks around the world as we approach the mid century – and that beyond 2 C of warming it will become very hard indeed to maintain a stable outdoors, agriculture-based system to meet an anticipated doubling in world demand for food by the 2060s. The ‘worst case’ risk of this, as previously outlined, would be ten billion people having to subsist on enough food to feed only four billion.

That, however, is by no means the worst case of the climate story. There are ominous signs that humans have already unleashed planetary forces over which we have absolutely no control – and that these, should they become large enough, will take charge of the Earth’s climate engine and drive it into a superheated condition of +9–10 C or even higher.

Today, more people are aware that global warming may lead to complete melting of all glaciers and the polar ice-caps, thereby raising sea levels by 65 metres and inundating almost all of the world’s seaboard cities, fertile river deltas and coastal plains.17 This would clearly have a devastating effect on coastal food production. However, this process will probably take several centuries, allowing populations ample time to relocate inland. That sea levels previously rose by a similar quantum at the end of the last Ice Age, flooding part of Australia, severing Britain from Europe and America from Asia, is proof enough that such events occur as a regular part of the Earth’s warming and chilling cycles.

The great existential threat to humanity lies in vast stores of frozen methane gas (CH4) locked into the soils of the tundra regions of Canada and Siberia, in colossal deposits of frozen methane on the continental seabed surrounding the Arctic Ocean, and in massive stores of methane submerged in peat deposits and swamps in places such as the Amazon and the wet tropical forests of Southeast Asia and Africa. Methane is a gas with 20–70 times the climate-forcing power of carbon dioxide. These deposits are the accumulation of the slow decomposition of planet and animal matter in the Earth’s sediments over several hundred million years – they are identical in origin to the gas bubbles that surface when we stir the bed of a pond or lake.

The actual volume of these methane deposits is still being assessed by science. Recent estimates suggest:

• seabed deposits – between 500–2500 billion tonnes of frozen carbon;18

• tundra deposits – potentially emitting 180–420 million tonnes of carbon a year by 2100; and

• tropical peat swamps – could emit 480–870 million tonnes of carbon a year by 2100.19

That carbon released from peat swamps, tundra and possibly the oceans can have a catastrophic effect on the Earth’s climate is foreshadowed by an event known as the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which took place some 55 million years ago, when Earth took a sudden fever and its temperature rocketed upwards by +5–9 C. This ‘heat spike’ caused a lesser extinction event involving widespread loss of ocean life and a smaller toll of land animals.20 However, the heating occurred over a much longer period – 100–200,000 years, compared with human-driven heating (50–100 years) – and is thought to have been mainly caused by the drying out and burning of tropical peat swamps as the climate warmed. However, the volume of carbon which caused this sharp planetary heat spike in the past is estimated to be barely a tenth of that released by humanity today.21

Today, human activity in clearing rainforests, draining swamps and burning the world’s forests to open them up for farming and food production is releasing vast amounts of methane and CO2. Explosion craters have been reported across Canada and Siberia as frozen methane deposits well up and erupt with the melting of the tundra. And scientists from Sweden, Russia, Canada and America have reported methane bubbling from the seabed of the Arctic Ocean, though not yet in massive volumes. The risk in all this is that, by warming the planet by only 1–2 C, we have set in train natural processes that we are powerless to control, setting ourselves on an inescapable trajectory to a Hothouse Earth, 5–10 C or more above today’s levels.

Although it is hard to estimate, some scientists are of the view that fewer than one billion humans would survive such an event22 – in other words, nine people out of every ten may perish in the cycle of famines, wars, heatwaves and pandemic diseases which global overheating would entail. This underlies the deadly urgency of ceasing to burn all fossil fuels, locking up as much carbon as possible and re-stabilising the Earth’s climate. In that, food production can and will play a central role.

Poisoned Planet

‘Earth, and all life on it, are being saturated with man-made chemicals in an event unlike anything which has occurred in all four billion years of our planet’s story. Each moment of our lives, from conception unto death, we are exposed to thousands of substances, some deadly in even tiny doses and most of them unknown in their effects on our health and wellbeing or upon the natural world. These enter our bodies with every breath, each meal or drink, the clothes we wear, the products with which we adorn ourselves, our homes, workplaces, cars and furniture, the things we encounter every day. There is no escaping them. Ours is a poisoned planet, its whole system infused with the substances humans deliberately or inadvertently produce in the course of extracting, making, using, burning or discarding the many marvellous products on which modern life depends. This explosion in chemical use and release has all happened so rapidly that most people are blissfully unaware of its true magnitude and extent, or of the dangers it now poses to us all as well as to future generations for centuries to come.’

This is a summation of the chemical crisis facing all of humanity, as well as all life on Earth, which I wrote in Surviving the 21st Century, and which is based on the extensive scientific research reported in Poisoned Planet.23 It is a crisis with profound impact for everyone.

According to the medical journal The Lancet, nine million people – one in six – die every year from chemical pollution of their air, water, food and living environment.24 A further 40 million die from the so-called noncommunicable or ‘lifestyle’ diseases (NCDs), cancer, heart disease, diabetes and lung disease, which are mostly diet-related.25

Food production, as we have seen, is deeply implicated in the chemical deluge. However, it is also an existential threat to human health, both in terms of infectious disease and the new ‘lifestyle’ diseases. No-one to my knowledge has compiled an accurate assessment of the total chemical effusion of humanity or presented a realistic impression of its true scale. Box 6.1 represents my own best estimate, drawn from various reliable sources.

From this it can easily be seen that the scale of humanity’s chemical assault on ourselves and on the planet is many times the scale of our climate assault – yet this issue commands nowhere near the political or scientific priority that it should. It is arguably the most under-rated, under-investigated and poorly understood of all the existential threats to humanity.

The poisoning of the Earth by human activities has grave implications for the health and safety of the global food chain and its eight billion consumers. It is not only the use of chemicals in food production that is of concern, but also the contamination of water, soils and livestock by industrial pollutants from other sources, such as mining or manufacturing. It is also the disruption of vital services such as pollination by insects of a [[BOX 6.1 OMITTED]] third of the world’s food crops and 90 per cent of wild plants.26 It is the contamination of up to three quarters of the world fish catch with microscopic plastic particles and clothing microfibres made by the petrochemical industry.27

The ending of this flood of poisons is a prerequisite for a safe, healthy and sustainable global food supply in future. And, since government regulation has largely failed to stem the worldwide flood, the task now falls to consumers – to choose foods which have been produced by safe methods and shun foods produced by unsafe methods. That is the only way that the food industry can be encouraged (and penalised) into doing the right thing by humanity and the planet: by consumers rewarding it for producing clean food and punishing it for toxic food. Otherwise it will continue to pollute as profitably as it can. It follows that the urgent global education of consumers about which foods are safe and which are toxic is also a pre-requisite.

Food Security

Our demand for food is set to double by the 2060s – potentially the decade of ‘peak people’, the moment in history when the irresistible human population surge may top out at around 10 billion. However, as we have seen, many of the resources needed to supply it agriculturally could halve and the climate for the growing of food outdoors become far more hostile.

Why food insecurity is an existential threat to humanity should, by now, be abundantly clear from the earlier chapters of this book: present systems are unsustainable and, as they fail, will pose risks both to civilization and, should these spiral into nuclear conflict, to the future of the human species.

The important thing to note in this chapter is that food insecurity plays into many, if not all, of the other existential threats facing humanity. The food sector’s role in extinction, resource scarcity, global toxicity and potential nuclear war has already been explained. Its role in the suppression of conflict is discussed in the next chapter. Its role in securing the future of the megacities, and of a largely urbanised humanity, is covered in Chapter 8. And its role in sustaining humanity through the peak in population and into a sustainable world beyond is covered in Chapter 9.

Food clearly has a pivotal role in the future of human population – both as a driver of population growth when supplies are abundant and as a potential driver of population decline, should food chains collapse. It is no exaggeration to state that the fate of civilisation depends on it.

Pandemic Disease

Disease pandemics have been a well-known existential risk to humanity since the plague of Athens in 430 BC – itself linked to a war. However, a point that escapes many people nowadays is that, as humans have become so numerous – indeed the predominant lifeform on the planet – we have also become the major food source for many microbes. We are now the ‘living compost heap’ on which they must dine and in which they must reproduce, if they are themselves to survive.

As our own population grows, pandemics are thus likely to increase, as more and more viruses and bacteria are forced to take refuge in humans following the depletion or total extinction of their natural hosts, the wild animals we are exterminating. This process is greatly assisted by our creation of megacities, tourism and air travel, schools and child-minding centres, air-conditioned offices, night clubs, sex with strangers, pet and pest animals, insects which prosper from climate change or human modification of the environment (like mosquitoes), ignorance, poor public hygiene, lack of clean water, and deficient food processing and handling.

So, while humanity is confronted with an ever-expanding array of parasites, we are simultaneously doing everything in our power to distribute them worldwide in record time – and to seed new pandemics. The World Health Organisation has identified 19 major infectious diseases with potential to become pandemic: chikungunya, cholera, Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Hendra, influenza, Lassa fever, Marburg virus, meningitis, MERS-CoV, monkeypox, Nipah, plague, Rift Valley fever, SARS, smallpox, tularaemia, yellow fever and Zika virus disease.28 While none of these is likely to fulfil the Hollywood horror movie image of wiping out the human species – for the simple reason that viruses are usually smart enough to weaken to a sublethal state once comfortably ensconced in their new host – the apocalyptic horseman representing Pestilence and Death will nevertheless continue to play a synergetic role with his companions warfare, famine, climate change, global poisoning, ecological collapse, urbanisation and other existential threats.

Food insecurity affects the progression of pandemic diseases, often in ways that are not entirely obvious. First, new pandemics of infectious disease tend to originate in developing regions where nutritional levels are poor or agricultural practices favour the evolution of novel pathogens such as, for example, the new flu strains seen every year – which arise mainly from places where people, pigs and poultry live side-by-side and shuffle viruses between them – and also novel diseases like SARS and MERS. Second, because totally unknown diseases tend to arise first in places where rainforests are being cut down for farming and viruses hitherto confined to wild animals and birds make an enforced transition into humans. Examples of novel human diseases escaping from the rainforest and tropical savannah in recent times include HIV/AIDS, Hendra, Nipah, Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and Hanta, Lujo, Junin, Machupo, Rift Valley, Congo and Zika.29 And thirdly, because the loss of vital micronutrients from heavily farmed soils and from food itself predisposes many populations to various deficiency diseases – for example, a lack of selenium in the diet has been linked with increased risk from both HIV/AIDS and bowel cancer.30 A key synergy is the way hunger and malnourishment exacerbate the spread of disease, classic examples being the 1918 Global Flu Pandemic which spread rapidly among war-starved populations, or the more recent cholera outbreak in war-torn Yemen. In a fresh twist, Dr Melinda Beck of North Carolina University has demonstrated that obesity – itself a form of malnutrition – may cause increased deaths from influenza by both aiding the virus and suppressing the patient’s immune response.31