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

by Peter Zeihan

Corn is, in a word, screwed. That corn on the cob you buy for grilling or steaming is not the stuff that blankets the never-ending fields of Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. The stuff you eat is called sweet corn; it makes up less than 1 percent of the corn grown in the United States.

The biggest volume of those products by far is the biofuel colloquially known as ethanol. A mix of subsidies and mandates requires American gasoline to contain 10–15 percent of the corn-based product, which doesn’t sound like too much until you realize that at ethanol’s peak, some half of the American corn harvest was being turned into a gasoline additive. The mandate absorbed so much corn it drove up not just corn prices, but the prices of pretty much all crops by displacing farm acres to corn: wheat, soy, cotton, and hay got decidedly perky from the competition, as did pork and beef due to the higher costs for feed.

For the rest of the world, serving as animal feed is corn’s primary purpose.

problem is Brazil, the largest soy exporter of the late globalized period. Brazil holds that mantle due to five factors:

Pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides that must be reformulated every decade or so in the American Midwest require overhauls every two to three years in Brazil. Consequently, Brazilian row-crop agriculture has the world’s highest input costs in fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides per unit of output. In the globalized period of easy input supply and easier product sales, this is but a footnote.

consistently gotten bigger and richer, and that means it wants more and better foods. The biggest single component of this bigger-and-richer is price-insensitive China. The preferred luxury food of the Chinese is pork, the Chinese hog herd is larger than the rest of the world’s combined, China’s own farmland is woefully inadequate to the task of feeding it, and the fastest way to fatten up a pig is to feed it soy. Unsurprisingly, Brazilian soy has been on a tear since 2000.

Rice farming is a near-full-time job. When a wheat power goes to war, so long as the farmers are back for harvest, all is good. When a rice power goes to war, a year of starvation is baked into the decision making.

rice cultivation requires very specific conditions that must be created, an ultra-low-cost labor force that does very little else, and lots of water, typically for more than one season. Regardless of what the Order did to everything and everywhere else, it did not result in a mass upheaval in the hows and especially the wheres of rice cultivation: RiceWorld has long been a fairly contained crescent of lands from South Asia through Southeast Asia into East Asia. This arc comprises roughly 90 percent of total rice production, nearly all of which is paddy-style.

Rice’s finicky, water-intensive nature means that, unlike with wheat, there is no growing of rice on marginal land. This finickiness makes rice incredibly vulnerable to climatic shifts. Change a region’s hydrology, even a little, and rice output tanks.

The water issues facing China specifically are really just a microcosm of the broader issues of climate change, and that is a far bigger topic.

Let’s start this section with a few squirmworthy facts. First, peace is exceedingly bad for the planet. When the Americans crafted their Order, they didn’t simply create an alliance to fight the Soviets. That strategic decision also enabled the vast mass of humanity to start down the road toward industrialization, generating an explosion in greenhouse gas emissions as most of humanity started using coal, oil, and natural gas en masse.

Second, the post–Cold War expansion of the Order to, well, everyone, accelerated emissions increases. It was bad enough when the world’s major industrialized systems included France and Germany and Japan and Korea and Taiwan. It was quite another when Indonesia and India and Nigeria and China joined the club. Countries that couldn’t even consider beginning the industrialization process before World War II are now responsible for more than half of current emissions, with total emissions seven times what they were in 1945.

Third, now that most of humanity has experienced things like electricity, it bears consideration that people will not consciously choose to go back to a preindustrial lifestyle, even if globalization collapses. Something the modern environmental movement often misses is that oil and natural gas are not only the world’s low-carbon fossil fuels, they are also the fuels that are internationally traded. In a post-globalized world, the primary fuel most countries can source locally is coal. And not just any coal, but low-caloric, low-temperature burning, high-contaminant soft or brown coal that generates far more carbon emissions than burning . . ...

Fourth, our capacity to forecast climate impacts tends to be embarrassingly off. The best recent example is the United States in mid-2021. A high-pressure system locked some warm air over the Pacific Northwest. Some of that air then descended from the Cascades, triggering compression effects. The result? Normally cloudy, rainy, grungy locales mutated into open ovens for weeks. Portland, Oregon, repeatedly clocked temperatures above 120 degrees. I’ve seen many climate models that suggest the inevitability of hotter deserts or a hotter American South, but none have projected that Portland—freakin’ Portland—would end up being hotter than Las Vegas has ever been.

I don’t like guessing. Whenever possible, I don’t. So I don’t look at many climate forecasts, but instead turn to weather data. Not current or future weather data—past data. The weather record is based on hundreds of thousands of reporting locations the world over, taken dozens of times a day, stretching back well over a century. The data isn’t controversial. It isn’t political. It isn’t a projection. And if there is a trend line of change, you know that the needle has moved already, and you just need to follow it forward a bit.

The Aussies, in that wonderful way they have with words, call these phases the Big Wet and the Big Dry. Such patterns were well documented long before the accelerating carbon builds in Earth’s atmosphere of the post-1990 world, or even before the Aussies began industrializing. This isn’t climate change. This is Australia.

It stretches the mind to come up with a positive aspect of the Australian evolutions, and it equally stretches the mind to come up with a negative aspect of the evolution in Illinois. That disconnect is precisely the point.

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I’m also worried about the Indian subcontinent, a region with boatloads of people and whose near-equatorial location will generate a different sort of wind condition. Rising temperatures in the Indian Ocean mean the temperature differential between sea and land is shrinking. Less temperature variation means less intense winds, which means that the century-old and very well documented weakening of the monsoonal winds will continue. This weakening has already reduced rainfall on the subcontinent by 10–20 percent over the last century.

one-third of India’s population already lives in semiarid regions, while India’s population has quadrupled during the past century, making it already the world’s most water-poor country in per capita terms. Weaker monsoons mean less rainfall in the Hindu Belt as well as less snowpack in the southern Himalayas. That last bit is particularly bad news for Pakistan, which relies upon Himalayan snowmelt to irrigate everything.

From eastern France all the way to western Ukraine, Northern Europe has been drying out bit by bit for six decades. Under the Order this hasn’t been a problem. Europe simply shifted to producing specialty products that it then sells at top dollar to a wealthy, interconnected world. It is unclear whether the Continent can shift back, and even if it succeeds, doing so would remove a lot of food products from the market as the Europeans preference local needs.*

The hands-down winner of these shifts in wind patterns is the American Midwest. It is this equatorial-polar phenomenon that is at least in part responsible for why Illinois is having such a good time at climate change to date. That’s wonderful if you’re in Iowa or Indiana, less so if you’re on the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes are a very real, annual threat.

But what is likely to be . . . sad in the American Great Plains will be crushing in India or Brazil or Australia or Southeast Asia, which are all primarily monsoonal, or the former Soviet Union or sub-Saharan Africa, which are primarily jet stream driven. In fact, aside from the American Midwest, only three places in the world benefit from both jet stream and monsoonal moisture systems: France, Argentina, and New Zealand—agricultural powerhouses all. None are likely to experience too awful a time sourcing inputs, whether in the form of equipment or oil. Better yet, none are likely to experience any meaningful security threats that might compromise life in general or agricultural production in specific. All are likely to see significant output increases due to a mix of shifting geopolitical and climatic norms.

Such marginal lands face a double blow. It took industrial technologies to turn these marginal lands green, and it took the Order to enable the industrial technologies to reach many of these marginal lands in the first place. Any of these locales that lack the river or aquifer access required for mass irrigation—and that is most of them—face stark reductions in productive acres as well as catastrophic reductions in agricultural output per acre of what’s left. This, unfortunately, represents a ginormous proportion of the Earth’s surface, including agricultural powerhouses ranging from Bolivia to Brazil to Paraguay to Italy to Spain to Portugal to Algeria to Nigeria to Congo to Pakistan to India to Thailand to China to Vietnam to Indonesia to Australia to Mexico to South Africa. Conservatively, that adds climatic challenges to the agricultural production zones feeding some 4 billion people.

The domestication of critters is the original human invention, predating even the farming of wheat and rice. And the same technological tree that brought us man’s best friend and whiskered watching of grain stores is responsible for everything from hamburgers to chicken wings to bacon to foie gras.

The sole exception was sheep, the critter that makes the best metabolic use of grass and so can be fattened up on the graze. But even here, the sheep (and shepherd) would have to walk to town. Railways and steamships and trucks sped things up, but the real shift didn’t occur until the twentieth century, with the rise of inexpensive refrigerated shipping. Animals could now be butchered and chilled before being shipped, and carcasses don’t have to be fed.

None of this, of course, is sustainable in a post-globalized world. Production of the crops used for fodder—most notably corn—will dip. Transport that brings corn and soy to the feedlots and meat to the world will falter. Global income will crater, returning animal protein to the realm of luxury for the bulk of the human population. The key word there is “bulk.” The New World writ large will still enjoy massive grain and soy surpluses, enabling it to continue following the industrial agricultural model as regards animal husbandry.

My world cannot function without coffee (7th by value) and I am . . . concerned. Coffee is a lot like cocaine . . . in terms of where it can be grown. It demands a very specific mix of elevation, temperature, and moisture conditions. Too dry and the crop shrivels. Too wet and it rots. Too hot and it is bitter. Too cold and it won’t flower. Roughly 7,500 feet is the ideal elevation, putting it well above most lines of human habitation and making servicing and transport tricky. Mass coffee culture is only possible in a globalized system in which the inputs can access such often-near-inaccessible areas. The Arabica coffee you get at everything from McDonald’s to your favorite espresso bar faces the greatest challenges, while the robusta coffee that goes into instant is far more heat and drought tolerant. The combination of deglobalization and climate change suggests that most of the world is about to get a coffee downgrade.

Many may think of universal access to processed food as a root cause of obesity, and they are not wrong. But such access is also one of the glories of the Order. Most of the developing world has zero experience in maintaining large populations without shelf-stable food. Remove palm oil from areas that cannot produce their own cooking oil and seasonal famines are absolutely guaranteed.

we’ve seen this delayed and staged upgrading time and time again in the United States, whether it be for roads or rail lines or power lines or telephones or cell phones or broadband. Such staged development might seem to make the United States somewhat less advanced than countries like Germany or Japan or the Netherlands or Korea, where such processes occur at a breakneck pace, but it also means the American modernization process is (far) cheaper and less of a strain on the country’s financial capacity. It isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

sheer speed of the German industrialization process combined with the German geography contributed to the traumatic horrors of the world wars. Germans lacked an overseas empire to absorb their surplus populations. Even at its pre–World War I peak, Germany just wasn’t that big—a bit smaller than Montana plus Idaho—and half the territory is too rugged to be easily developed. Once industrial techs enabled the German population to expand, Germans quickly discovered they had nowhere to expand into, part and parcel of why Hitler was so obsessed with munching on the horizon.