The Crimson Thread

For thousands of years, famine and conflict have united in the human mind and destiny. And they will rule its future, also.

In Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (opposite), drawn from the Biblical book of Revelation, Famine is the central figure, astride a black horse and with empty food scales in hand, riding down the hapless multitudes of citizens, along with his grim allies: False Ideologies (or Saviours); War; and Pestilence and Death.¹

Most people who die in wars perish from hunger, as their food stocks are plundered and devoured by marauding armies, farming is disrupted by military recruitment, food requisitions and scorched earth policies, and the food and trading systems that sustain their society collapse. Contrary to the popular imagery of war, hunger is a far greater killer than military action or disease, though it interacts with both.

The earliest-known battle painting of all, a vivid piece of Australian Aboriginal rock art (Figure 1.1) dating from perhaps 17,000 years ago depicts two battlelines of combatants exchanging volleys of multi-barbed harpoons and boomerangs – which are primarily hunting implements rather than weapons. The leader of one side has charged his enemies and fallen before their missiles. The painting is from an enigmatic phase of art in the Kimberley (northwestern Australia) known as Gwion Gwion, which was strangely different to other, later, Aboriginal art forms and was contemporary with the peak of the last Ice Age.² The fact that the combatants are using hunting tools, rather than purpose-made man-killing weapons, hints that the origins of their dispute lie in access to food in the form of hunting rights, territory or water (which amount to the same thing, as animals were often hunted when they came to drink at water holes in the parched Australian landscape).

Figure 1.1. The 17,000 year old Gwion Gwion rock art from Australia depicting a battle between two groups of warriors, hurling multi-barbed harpoons and boomerangs.

Credit: Bradshaw Foundation & G. L. Walsh.

The figures depicted in the Australian battle scene are from the later ‘clothes peg’ period of Gwion Gwion, which is thought to coincide with a time when sea levels were rising rapidly, by an astonishing 53 metres (174 feet), as the great ice sheets covering the continents melted and collapsed. The flood they unleashed inundated a quarter of the Australian landmass (over 2.12 million square kilometres) drowning beneath the sea an area larger than France, Spain, Germany, Britain and Italy combined. Prehistorians have calculated this flooding would have halved the area of good coastal land available to support each inhabitant of the continent at the time, thrusting overwhelming stresses onto populations which had expanded over the previous 20,000 years with the largesse of a far greater area. On the fertile, well-watered coastal plains where most of these hunter-gatherer people subsisted, the pressure on resources would have become intense as the existing population was compressed into a rapidly dwindling area, or else driven into the harsh interior Australian deserts.³ At the end of this period the Gwion Gwion art ceases abruptly and is replaced by the Wandjina tradition. It may be no coincidence that this was also about the same time that Australia’s Ice Age megafauna – giant kangaroos, emus and wombats – also vanished entirely and forever. Thus, it is also probably no mere coincidence that the world’s first battle painting appears at this time of stress, extinction and possible genocide. Those ancient warriors were in all likelihood fighting over food and the shrinking territory that supplied it – as a direct consequence of a rapidly warming world.

Conflict over scarce resources of food, land and water is a crimson thread that runs through the entirety of human history. In every inhabited continent periods of scarcity have ignited conflict, insurrection and war – and wars have been followed in turn by prolonged hunger and hardship, sometimes giving rise to new wars in a horrible, almost interminable cycle.

Food Empires

Food has played a dynamic role in the genesis of human conflict since the dawn of civilisation – and not merely its lack. Also its abundance. The world’s great civilisations almost all arose in fertile river valleys such as the Nile, the Tigris–Euphrates, the Indus, the Ganges, the Yangtse and Yellow, the Mekong, the Rhine, the Danube, the Tiber and lake systems such as those of Switzerland, Scandinavia and Mexico for a good reason: to build and maintain an army you need two things – a surplus of young males to use as warriors and a surplus of food to breed and feed them. With the advent and spread of agriculture, 5000–7000 years ago, in the fertile bottomlands of the great rivers and lakes, a comparatively stable food surplus became possible for the first time in the human experience. With pottery and basketry came the ability to store and preserve nutrients through the lean times of the year, leading to declines in infant and maternal mortality. This in turn bred steady expansion in human populations – which soon began to exceed, or even to exhaust, the resources within their traditional boundaries. Since farming makes it possible for one person to support many, there were soon plenty of spare, fit young males to go a-roving – and this coincided with the advent of the age of metals. These raids, like those of the later Vikings and Mongolian tribes, soon developed into organised warfare. Time and again, the fertile regions of the world have spewed out great armies, bent on conquest, plunder and, often, on the acquisition of fresh lands in which their people can flourish. But first they must displace or absorb the conquered.

It is likely that the Tiber Valley, in Italy, provided sufficient reliable sustenance to support a primitive Roman army, originally organised into legions on family clan lines, that was able to subdue many of its neighbouring tribes, like the Sabines, Latins, Volscians and Etruscans, who inhabited hillier, less-fertile regions. However, this amateur force was nowhere near powerful enough to resist the military might of the Gauls, who had crossed the Alps and subjugated the fertile Po Valley in northern Italy, flourishing as a consequence. In 390 BC, a well-fed Gallic warband under King Brennus broke out of the Po Valley, smashed the early Roman army at the battle of the Allia and then went on to sack and occupy the little city of Rome – though legend insists the citadel on the Capitoline Hill held out, thanks to the geese who warned the sleeping guards of an attempt by the invaders to storm their hilltop fortress. The Romans fled in all directions, taking shelter with their frightened neighbours. Eventually these scattered Romans managed to raise enough cash to ransom their city and induce the Gauls to depart, and the invaders made their way into southern Italy.⁴ Their departure left a power vacuum which the Romans, having rebuilt their city and army more strongly, gradually filled over the next two centuries, asserting hegemony over the whole of Italy.

During this period, Rome faced another invasion, led by the Carthaginian general Hannibal who, in 216 BC, after the prodigious feat of crossing the Alps from southern France with his army, its horses and elephants, inflicted several crushing military defeats on the Roman army – but failed to capture the city, which was, by then, ringed with a formidable stone wall. The Romans and the Carthaginians had been scrapping with one another on and off for almost half a century, as their growing spheres of trade, colonial and political interest collided. To begin with, Carthage, chief city of the Phoenicians in North Africa, had the upper hand because theirs was a ‘thalassocracy’ – an empire founded on the wealth garnered from its sea-borne trade and its maritime strike power. However, this perspective overlooks one of the chief dynamics in its rise: the ability to grow crops and supply its largely mercenary armies through access to the great grain bowl of the Mediterranean, the North African coastline, stretching from Egypt to Morocco, including its own Libyan hinterland. Access to reliable food supplies thus fed the growth of both the Roman and Carthaginian empires and their war machines, bringing forward the inevitable head-clash over colliding spheres of interest in the form of the three devastating Punic Wars. These ended only when the Romans, spurred by the vitriolic cries of the Elder Cato that ‘Cartago delenda est ’ (‘Carthage must be destroyed’) provoked the third war by demanding the Carthaginians surrender all their children, then used their refusal as a pretext to besiege, starve and eventually take the city and enslave its inhabitants. To make sure that Carthage never arose to trouble them again they razed the city and its defences utterly, cursed the rubble and sowed the surrounding fields with salt, so they could not grow crops. This ancient Roman ‘Agent Orange’ tactic is nowadays questioned by some scholars, but the Cambridge Ancient History asserts ‘Buildings and walls were razed to the ground; the plough passed over the site, and salt was sown in the furrow made… A solemn curse was pronounced that neither house, nor crops, should ever rise again’. ⁵ Logically, if you curse a place, you might wish to make sure the curse will stick – and salt, which is freely available from desert lakebeds in North Africa, was an effective way to discourage wheat production, for a time at least.

If they indeed salted the Carthaginian farmland, then the Romans clearly understood the importance of a sustainable local food supply as the springboard for the growth of both a city and a military power (although it was not a permanent solution, as the salt would eventually leach out of the soil after a few years of rain). The Romans’ most important gains from the conquest of Carthage and their consequent acquisition of its overseas territories in Spain and Africa were a navy, which they used to suppress piracy and encourage peaceful trade across the entire Mediterranean, and access to the priceless grain belt of Egypt and North Africa. This both fed and enriched the subsequent expansion of Rome and its imperial dominions, supplying the vital bread that accompanied the circuses that various Emperors used to placate the mob and manage local urban politics. More importantly, the grain trade generated a large part of the mercantile wealth that was taxed to pay the 55 legions that guarded the Empire’s frontiers, from Britain and Spain to the Black Sea and Persia. The importance of this industrial-scale grain trade to Rome’s life and economy can still be seen in the vast ruins of the harbour at Ostia.

Besides being competent warriors, the Romans were excellent farmers themselves and their agricultural system, from the huge latifundia (large slave-worked estates) to the diversity of smallholder agriculture supplied most of their needs for grains, olives, vegetables, meat and grapes. Indeed, our global food supply today is still essentially patterned on the Roman system of broadacre single-crop agriculture in favoured regions, exporting grain and other produce to distant cities – except that today, industrial technology has substituted machinery and chemicals for agricultural slavery and draft animals. This point needs to be borne in mind as we explore the frailties of the modern food system in later chapters (Chapters 3 and 4). Ominously, when its food system failed in the early centuries of the Christian Era, the Roman Empire collapsed.

There are numerous popular theories as to why Rome fell, starting with the obvious proximate cause – the invasion of Goths, Huns and other barbarian tribes – imperial overreach (the favoured view of the historian Gibbon) and the economic mismanagement of the Empire itself. However, history is seldom quite so simple.

In 165 AD, Roman legionaries returning from the Middle East brought with them a horrible plague, whose symptoms were fever, diarrhoea and boils. Known as the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD) it was probably smallpox. It slew an estimated seven million people throughout the Roman Empire before subsiding. Plagues, classically, are thought of as largely urban contagions stemming from overcrowding and bad public hygiene – but their effects among country dwellers and farmers, whose immune systems have never been ‘vaccinated’ by previous exposure to city diseases, can be even more devastating (as the Black Death subsequently demonstrated in the fourteenth century). The Antonine Plague was followed in 251–266 AD by the Cyprian Plague, possibly also smallpox or maybe a virulent form of measles – which was then a killer, not a ‘childhood disease’. These two events made a massive hole in the Roman agricultural workforce, as well as in the cities and trading fleets of the Empire and its economy. Between 482 AD and 535 AD, a third pandemic, the Plague of Justinian, cut another swathe through the population.

Simultaneously, the climate changed. Between about 150 AD and 400 AD weather conditions cooled and deteriorated with temperatures reaching unprecedented lows in what became known as the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’. This climatic switch, combined with short-term weather events such as the failure in 244 AD of the Nile River to rise and flood the grain farms along its banks, created a time of hunger which interacted with the incoming plagues to make them even more lethal, according to epidemiologist and historian Tony McMichael.⁶ This had a compounding effect on the Roman food supply and economy, and especially on the ability of Rome to pay and feed its legions. Many of these legions were made up largely of local recruits who then mutinied, becoming independent war bands, some of which even joined forces with the raiding Goths who devoured the Western Empire.⁷ Scholars have also found that periods of drought correlate strongly with the assassinations of 25 Roman Emperors and unrest among Germanic tribes between 27 BC and 476 AD.⁸

If the pathway to war, government failure or the collapse of a civilisation can be thought of as a series of dominoes, collapsing one upon another, the fall of the food domino and the climate domino lie very early in the sequence and have irresistible impact and consequences. Despite our technological mastery, these dominoes are no less deadly in a twentyfirst century world which, typically, has only about 10–12 weeks’ surplus of grain in store at any time – a surplus that depends for its renewal on the succession of harvests round the planet. A major crop failure in any of the great grain bowls would reduce this to zero and send world bread prices rocketing through the roof for everybody, thanks to the globalised trading system and world grain prices that now exist. Since our population is now straining at the very limits of the Earth itself (Chapters 3 and 4), this risk is more pronounced than ever. Indeed, food insecurity represents as direct an existential threat to our civilisation in the event of major disruption – such as a worldwide conflict, a nuclear war or a climate catastrophe – as it did to the ancient Romans. We ignore the lesson of their experience at our peril.

Here Come the Long Ships

In 789 AD, a sheriff called Beaduheard who worked for the King of Wessex in southern England went to greet three Norwegian ships that had been observed pulling into Portland Bay. Naively assuming they were merchants, he invited the Viking crews to meet with the King in Dorchester to discuss trade, which they, having other ideas, refused to do. In the ensuing dispute and scuffle they cut him down, and Beaduheard became the first named victim in three centuries of violence, plunder and exploitation that was visited on the countries of Western Europe from the North.⁹ But who were the Vikings? And why did they come?

The Vikings were not, as they are sometimes considered, a separate race of people. They were a violent and rapacious minority of an otherwise largely peaceful and prosperous community of farming settlements extending across Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Jutland. Outcasts, adventurers, terrorists and religious fanatics, Vikings were a product of a long, slow improvement in farming methods from the Iron Age onward that had brought about a steady expansion in Nordic populations. This pastoral progress was then rudely disrupted by the same climatic blow that brought down the Roman Empire – a sudden cold spell when crop yields, especially in Northern climes where growing seasons are short and cool, fell below subsistence and communities that had hitherto had ample sustenance found their wooden trenchers empty. The situation was especially dire in countries such as Norway, where level farmland was in scant supply along the towering walls of the fjords. Over the next few centuries this period is marked archaeologically by a proliferation in fortified homesteads, villages and towns across Scandinavia, whose sturdy defences testify to the unsettled nature of the times.

What began as petty raids among local Scandinavian tribes, probably with food, slaves and farmland as the chief aims, steadily grew with experience into a more formalised kind of warfare, especially with the development of the Viking long ship, which could cover thousands of miles of open sea or major European river systems as far afield as Russia and Turkey in one direction and Greenland and America in the other. Armed initially with the weaponry of the failing Roman Empire and lured on by its riches – silver, gold, iron, food and slaves – from weakly defended Roman centres which presented easy targets to a ruthless, unexpected adversary – the Viking raiding tradition was born. In countries such as Iceland, Ireland, Normandy and northeast England the raiders soon settled down and began to farm again, once they had taken suitable lands. This farming had two aims – to sustain those who wished to settle permanently, a form of eighth-century agrarian colonialism or Lebensraum¹⁰, and to feed up the Viking raiding forces for the next season’s depredation. Particular targets were the rich monasteries, fortified towns and cities which the post-Roman Europeans could no longer protect, places such as London, York, Paris, Rouen, Cologne, Aachen and Bonn. Eventually the Vikings, raiding, trading and settling along the Dneipr/Volga river system – where they founded Kiev – teamed up with the local Rus to assault Constantinople (Istanbul) in 907 AD.

Then as now, most Scandinavians were peaceable people with a strong social ethos and an attachment to their land. But when ample food increased their populations and climate-induced famine followed, the young, the strong and the ruthless among them of necessity became wolves – homo homini lupus¹¹ as the chroniclers put it. Like the Gauls who had raided Italy in the fourth century BC, the source of their manpower was a reliable food supply, the trigger for their outward movement was lack of it – and the aim of further settlement was to feed their military might.

Thanks to vivid accounts left by quaking mediaeval chroniclers, especially in the monasteries, the Vikings are usually remembered as merciless, bloodthirsty pirates roving and butchering at will. However, historian John Hayward argues they were also civilised traders, farmers, craftsmen, artists and sailors – the settlement of Iceland, which boasted the world’s first Parliament, the founding of the first towns in Ireland and the establishment of the Danelaw in England being cases in point. Over time these settlements mostly assimilated with the local culture.

Thus, the Vikings were probably no more piratical than many folk during this turbulent period of world history. Such a view is supported by evidence that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the introduction of modern farming methods caused the Nordic population once again to expand rapidly, outgrowing the local capacity to support it, there was a second huge wave of Scandinavian out-migration, this time mostly to North America, and entirely peaceful.

The interaction of food surpluses and shortages with Scandinavian population, emigration and warfare is another vivid instance of how food, in subtle ways, interweaves with the greater weft and warp of human history, occasionally surfacing as a crimson, bloody thread.

Food and the Rise of China

Food has played a pivotal role in the rise of the greatest nation to emerge in the modern era: the story of China is intimately interwoven with food and its development. The Yangtse River marks the climatic boundary between Chinese wheat culture, to the north, and rice culture to the south. When China was unified under powerful dynastic rulers from 200 BC onwards, these together furnished a year-round food supply and the basis for sustained population growth, punctuated by occasional climatic disasters. Wheat is not native to China but is thought to have arrived from the Middle East along the Silk Road around 4500 years before the present.¹² Rice culture has been traced by modern science to a single domestication event in the Pearl River basin some 8500 years ago,¹³ but may have originated as long ago as 12,000 or even 15,000 years (in Korea), according to some sources. Together, the rice and wheat cultures built and sustained early China to a population approaching 100 million (Figure 1.2).¹⁴

Figure 1.2. China's population, 0 AD to 2050 AD.

Source: IIASA, 1999.

However, with agriculture also comes crop failure. Chroniclers recount that famine stamped its brutal footprints on Chinese history – coupled with ensuing revolts, conflicts and refugee tides – for over 3600 years. Northern China, in particular, is susceptible to drought when the seasonal rains which are the tail end of the Indian monsoon sometimes fail to penetrate to wheat-growing regions. More than seventeen major droughts have been recorded in the past two millennia, including: the famine of 1630–31, which led to a revolt culminating in the collapse of the Ming Dynasty; the drought and Taiping rebellion, which claimed around 20–30 million lives in the mid nineteenth century; and the famine and Boxer rebellion of the 1890s. The Japanese invasion in the 1930s unleashed war and famine that killed 35 million. Between 1958 and 1962, Mao Zedong’s ill-conceived Great Leap Forward combined with drought to create the ‘Three Years of Difficulty’, which took 15 million lives – some scholars say as many as 50 million. When local community leaders protested there was no food, they were told ‘That’s right-deviationist thinking. You’re viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter’.¹⁵

As far back as 500 BC, China’s arch codifier of military platitudes, Sun-Tzu, saw a red-hot connection between food and war, advocating the use of sustenance as a military weapon: ‘Steal food from the enemy so that you have enough food to eat as well’ and ‘Maintaining an army is difficult as the common people will suffer due to lack of resources and higher prices… Forage on the enemy’s resources’, he counselled. And generations of military commanders have taken his advice.

Despite such occasional setbacks, food was nevertheless the mainspring of the vast population surge which has taken place in China since the 1950s. For most of the previous 3000 years, the teetering balance between abundance and famine held the Chinese population at between 60–140 million people – less than a tenth of its present level.

The Green Revolution, which rapidly doubled and redoubled farming yields through the introduction of superior crop varieties, fertilisers, pest control and machinery leading to better diets, in combination with vaccine prevention of infectious disease and improved public health – lit the fuse for an unanticipated explosion in numbers from the 1950s onward, potentially peopling the Chinese landmass way beyond its natural capacity to sustain in the longer term.

The Chinese population explosion was chiefly the result of the zeal of the Agriculture and Health Ministries of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which had ensured that the new knowledge about how to increase food production and how to reduce infectious disease was widely and efficiently disseminated among hundreds of millions of people with the resulting broad-scale industrialisation of food production and decline in infant death rates. India underwent a similar explosion, and for much the same reasons – whereas in Africa, where the Green Revolution was slower to take hold, owing to less effective farm extension services and poorer healthcare, the main population surge did not begin until the 1990s.

Agriculture played a second key role in the rise of modern China – it helped ignite the economic miracle. After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping began the huge task of transitioning China from a state retarded by ideology-driven central planning to a more liberal ‘socialist market economy’. One of the first places he began was on the farm, dismantling the inefficient state-run enterprises in favour of individual farms and allowing China’s peasant farmers to sell their produce on the open market instead of to the government because, as he is said to have put it, ‘wealth is glorious’. The Chinese economic miracle thus began, ingloriously but highly effectively, with cabbages and carrots and with erstwhile peasants getting rich. This food revolution laid a stable foundation for the industrial, mercantile, financial and IT revolutions to follow. Also, with the population already exceeding a billion, it came in the nick of time.

In the mid 1980s, when China was first opening up, I interviewed a number of eminent professors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who were experts in farming, soil, water, food and population. Their considered and scientific view – contrary to then Communist Party doctrine – was that the long-term ‘carrying capacity’ of China, based on its soils, water and contemporary technology, was a maximum of about 645 million people. This is less than half the present-day population of 1.4+ billion, and barely a third of the UN’s high-growth scenario, where it peaks at 1.7 billion or above.

Throughout recent Chinese history periodic famine has been one of the principle drivers of emigration, first into South East Asia but subsequently all around the world. To begin with, the communist PRC Government frowned on emigration and discouraged it – but from the 1980s onward it rapidly began to relax restrictions and issue passports for study, business and tourism. This led to a sharp rise in emigration culminating in the modern-day Chinese diaspora in which, it is estimated, some 50–60 million ethnic Chinese now reside outside of China.¹⁶

Whether this is the result of a deliberate policy of the Chinese Government to relieve population pressures, expand its sphere of influence globally or the natural outward impulses of businesses, individuals and families – or all three combined – is debatable. Foreign policy expert Howard French, for example, argues that more than a million Chinese ‘are building a second Empire in Africa’ (although Chinese migration to the USA is thought to be double that to Africa).¹⁷ The claim that China as a whole has colonial ambitions in Africa, however, is rejected by scholars such as Deborah Brautigam, of John Hopkins University. ‘There is no evidence to support the notion that Chinese firms in rural Africa are the beachhead of a rising imperial power…’ nor of ‘a state-sponsored quest to lock up vast tracts of African land’, she states.¹⁸ No evidence does not, however, equate with no intention.

The Chinese Government is plainly alert to the risks of famine, based on the nation’s historical experience and particularly on the growing scarcity of water in the bread basket of the north as the great aquifers that supply agriculture on the North China Plain run dry in the face of gargantuan demand from China’s northern megacities. In 2014, the PRC Ministry of Agriculture, excited by the success of Chinese investment in global oil resources, blurted out that it had a similar plan to acquire farmland in other countries around the world. Oil is one thing – but foreign acquisition of land often provokes howls of anger from local farmers and the subsequent international media debacle resulted in a red-faced backdown by the Ministry, which then declared it never had any such intent. Subsequent history suggests otherwise: Chinese agricultural and food acquisitions now span the globe, embracing millions of hectares in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the Russian Far East, Central Asia and Europe – wherever, in fact, farm land or agribusiness enterprises are up for easy sale to foreign buyers.

There appear to be five main approaches to the contemporary risk of famine faced by China:

• to buy up large tracts of farm land and food processing companies overseas and feed itself from other countries;

• to improve domestic water supplies, conserve soil and recycle more water and nutrients;

• to invest heavily in new technologies such as biotechnology and biocultures and improve the efficiency of agricultural markets;

• to develop high-intensity urban farms to help feed the swollen megacities; and

• to ease domestic population pressures by encouraging its own people, especially surplus males, to re-settle overseas.

Population control, as once practised in the PRC under the one-child policy, has gone out the window. Owing to urbanisation, rising household incomes and education levels, birth rates have fallen well below replacement. While measures to further limit population growth could be reintroduced, it is now far too late for them to have any but a marginal effect on the trajectory of Chinese population growth, at least in the coming 50 years.

However, it appears China is implementing all five of the above measures. These are probably thought of as its insurance policy against future food shortages. Whether they will succeed in a time of acute and growing water scarcity and increasingly severe climatic impacts is discussed in Chapter 5.

At the same time, thanks to the combination of its former one-child policy and pregnancy ultrasound tests – which enabled parents to selectively abort female foetuses – China has a growing disparity of males over females, roughly 118 males being born for every 100 females. By 2020 males are expected to outnumber females by some 35 million.¹⁹ The implications of this bachelor army – or ‘bare branches’ as they are known within China – for Chinese military aspirations are not yet clear. However, throughout human history, male surpluses have frequently led to a heightened risk of conflict, both internal and external.

If China cannot feed itself through the twentyfirst century, it follows that others, whether willingly or unwillingly, will have to do so – or else face the prospect of a tsunami of Chinese out-migration potentially totalling hundreds of millions. The Chinese Government has been anxious to represent its agricultural investments as benign, as business partnerships, or as aid to help African and other countries (such as the Philippines) to develop their own agricultural resources along the highly successful (until now) Chinese model. However, at some point, the issue will inevitably arise whether the food so produced will be used to feed local people or Chinese people in China. Who will take priority? Almost certainly this will occur as a result of water- or climate-induced food scarcity in both regions, or globally. Almost certainly, too, it will lead to tensions and to conflict. Whatever happens in the twentyfirst century, food will rule the fate of China – and hence, the whole world.

Food and India

Like China, India is blessed with mighty rivers. These are filled with water from the snowmelt in the girdling northern mountain chains of the Pamirs, Hindu Kush, Karakorum and Himalaya. These form vast, fertile floodplains where agriculture has thriven for more than 7000 years and, until recent times, furnished an inexhaustible supply of fresh water for the growing of food. Like China too, an abundance of food bred steady Indian population growth in historic times (Figure 1.3), the rise of great cities and an almost endless succession of wars between the various Indian states and principalities, as well as attracting the attention of land-hungry invaders like the Mughals. With an agricultural system highly dependent on the monsoon rains, India has faced famine time and again and these events are recorded as far back as 2000 years. During the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when its population averaged 200 million, it is estimated that more than 60 million Indians died of hunger. Today, with a population exceeding 1.3 billion, for all of its high technology-fuelled advancement and economic miracles, Indian poverty and malnutrition remain among the gravest on the planet, giving rise to the phenomenon known as ‘hunger in a time of plenty’.²⁰

Figure 1.3. Indian and other population growth, 1500–2000.

Source: Angus Maddison, 2003 (http://www.wrsc.org/attach_image/population-growth-over-last-500-years).

The remarkable feature of all this is that India, from being in a condition of repeated famine and constant food deficits, managed through a prodigious effort by its farmers, the Indian Agriculture Department and the scientists of the Green Revolution to become self-sufficient in cereal production from the 1980s on. This miracle was accomplished in barely six years, through the introduction of high-yielding varieties of rice, wheat and pulses and modern agricultural techniques under the inspiration of scientists like M S Swaminathan, especially in northern India. However, today, though living in one of the world’s largest and most efficient grain-producing nations, an estimated one quarter of India’s population still goes to bed hungry, and 800 million receive government-subsidised food – a condition variously attributed to inefficient food distribution and waste, endemic corruption, poverty and lack of land tenure.

Climate change, the spread of irrigation and the burgeoning of its megacities are devouring India’s water resources – surface and groundwater – at an alarming rate, while soil erosion remains widespread. Together these raise the spectre of future food insecurity. The consequences of this for India and the world are discussed in Chapter 5.

Food and War

Of the 200+ million people who have perished in wars between nation states since the 1850s, it is estimated that over half – 105 million – have died of hunger. This makes food by far the deadliest of all the weapons deployed by governments, against their own people or others (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4. World famine deaths by region, 1870–2010.

Source: World Peace Foundation, 2017.

The World Peace Foundation ‘has compiled a catalogue of every case of famine or forced mass starvation since 1870 that killed at least 100,000 people. There are 61 entries on the list, responsible for the deaths of at least 105 million people’, writes WPF executive director Alex de Waal.²¹ He continues:

In his book Mass Starvation²², de Waal states that the worldwide death toll from famine had declined markedly since 1980 – although this may be an exception since, from the 2010s, it showed signs of increasing again. De Waal argues that famines in recent times have tended to be the result of deliberate political crimes rather than climatic factors alone, as was the case in earlier centuries.

The American philosopher George Santayana is famed for his aphorism ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. (This is often misquoted as ‘Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it’.) Strictly speaking, history – or the past – does not actually repeat itself, at least in detail, but its patterns, which are defined by certain basic elements of human nature, certainly do. In the case of food and conflict, the past offers very clear guidance to the likely future. Humans are competitive beings, and one of the things they compete most fiercely over is food and the means to produce it, including especially the land and water required to grow it. One of the things they fear most is hunger – and this is often taken as a justification for the mass killing of others. It follows that, in the twentyfirst century, a significant disruption to either global, regional or even national food supplies will generate the kind of tensions that can lead to conflict on a scale ranging from riots and government failure to nuclear exchange (Table 1.1).

Humanity as a whole is now in a position parallel to that of China, with a total population whose demands – including food – far exceed the long-term ability of the Earth to sustain them, at least under present systems of production. It is not merely a matter of population: today each human consumes around ten times more material goods (water, soil, timber, metals, energy, food, etc.) than did their great grandparents a century ago, while those living in the richest countries consume six to ten times more resources than those in the poorest. Factoring in a quadrupling in our numbers over the same period of time, this means humans presently devour 40 times more stuff than we did in the early twentieth century. The combined volume of this consumption is now so vast, and so great is our general ignorance of the long industrial chains that produce these goods, that many people have difficulty in envisioning them.

We do not perceive the unavoidable nexus between food and conflict now bearing down on us at a shocking pace.

Fear of Famine

Hunger is among the most feared of human afflictions – and not without reason. Death by starvation is one of the most lingering, painful and psychologically traumatic ways to die. It gives rise to a great sense of helplessness and impotence – and this in turn can fuel the rage and aggression that lead to conflict when food resources become scarce.

Starvation has two components – a lack of the energy needed by the body to perform its normal tasks and a lack of key nutrients, essential in a balanced diet, which maintain certain vital bodily systems and keep particular diseases at bay. Thus, it is possible to eat food containing ample energy – and still starve, because of the lack of vitamins, minerals and other important nutrients.

A starving person undergoes a whole range of body system breakdowns. To begin with they lack energy, may experience chronic diarrhoea and become anaemic. The legs often swell as the blood loses its protein content and fluids build up beneath the skin. Their sex drive dissipates. Wounds may not heal. It becomes harder to digest normal food because the stomach is not producing enough digestive acid. The victim may become irritable, have difficulty in concentrating and experience periods of great lassitude. The body’s fat deposits shrink away and, when these are depleted, the muscles begin to waste as the body consumes itself: the victim becomes increasingly weak. Vital organs such as the heart, lungs, ovaries or testes, begin to shrink and their functions to fail. The immune system breaks down, exposing the sufferer to a range of opportunistic infections by microbes, many of which are harmless to a healthy person. Riboflavin (vitamin B2) deficiency makes the mouth and throat sore, producing skin rashes and anaemia and may cause the heart to fail and the brain to swell. Niacin (vitamin B3) deficiency produces diarrhoea, skin rashes, brain dysfunction, tongue, mouth and vaginal irritation and trouble swallowing. Lack of vitamin C causes hair to fall out, bleeding under the skin, in muscles and joints, gum disease and poor wound healing. In severe cases it causes convulsions, fever, loss of blood pressure and death. Lack of vitamin A may lead to blindness. Lack of vitamin D may cause rickets and bone weakening. Lack of vitamin K prevents blood from clotting, leading to increased risk of bleeding.²³

In adults, total starvation brings death within eight to twelve weeks. In its final stages, the victim may suffer hallucinations and convulsions, along with severe muscle pain and fluctuations in heart rhythm. In children, prolonged starvation retards growth and mental development in ways from which they may never recover, even if sound nutrition is restored.

In short, starvation is one of the most excruciating ways to die, both physically and mentally – far worse, indeed, than most tortures invented by cruel people, because it takes so long and involves the destruction of virtually every system in the human body. In turn, the body becomes focussed on trying to obtain the nutrients indispensable to life – and it is this subconscious awareness in all people of the risks of hunger that drives our desire to contest food resources so fiercely, to challenge, displace and even kill those who compete for them. It is one of the fundamental motives for the mass flight of refugees from famine and war-torn regions – and for genocide, when one group seeks to eliminate others whom it regards as rivals for scarce local food resources. Fear of hunger is the deep motive in establishing tribal territories, feudal fiefdoms, kingdoms, national borders, even maritime boundaries – to secure their food production assets against outsiders.

Fear of hunger exists in all societies – not just those on the brink of starvation. Of the 68.5 million refugees worldwide in 2018,²⁴ the vast majority were fleeing hunger. Of the 258 million economic migrants in 2017,²⁵ most were educated, thoughtful people trying to escape what they regarded as the probable disintegration of their home society and build a better future for themselves and their families, primarily in countries which were more food-secure.

These deeper motivations will define the nature of, and set the scene for, conflict in the overcrowded world of the twentyfirst century as much, or more, than in any previous human epoch. They confront humanity at large, and each of us as individuals, with a stark choice: food… or war.