The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

This banishing of wheat to the periphery means the bulk of the world’s wheat is grown in just a handful of places: the American Great Plains, the Canadian Prairie Provinces, Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin plus the continent’s southwestern fringes, the drylands of central Argentina, southeast England, the endless small fields of highly protectionist France, dumpling country in northern China, Pakistan and India to feed the teeming masses and limit the need for imports, and the great expanses of the Russian wheat belt, a zone that includes Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. (Of these, only France, Pakistan, and India grow wheat in areas that could grow lots of other things more efficiently, but for these three, efficiency isn’t what governments are targeting.)