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

by Peter Zeihan

Another big-ticket subsector is aerospace. As with automotive, the big three Order-era manufacturing regions each has its own system: Boeing for North America, Airbus for Europe, and Comac for China.

In the aftermath, Boeing will take over global aviation.

culture cannot be transferred. No matter how much cash is splurged on it. Just ask the Chinese, whose efforts to pirate German designs and mimic German output have consistently met with failure.

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complete reorganization on the low end is imminent as well. The two subsectors that will see the biggest shifts are textiles and wiring. Textiles is a low-skilled, labor-intensive industry while wiring is low-skilled and electricity intensive.

Anything that raises the marginal cost of transport increases friction throughout the system. Simply a 1 percent increase in the cost of a subsidiary part largely obliterates the economics of an existing supply chain. Most locations will count themselves fortunate if their transport costs increase by only one hundred percent.

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But if there isn’t enough to eat, you die. Your neighbors die. Everyone in your town dies. Your country dies. Far more governments have fallen due to food failures than war or disease or political infighting combined.

Food is fleeting, but hunger is forever.

which led to the fourth-century BCE rise of the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, who, like the Achaemenids before him, conquered the entirety of the known (fed) world. And, like the Achaemenids before him, Alexander too largely stopped once the great granaries of the First Three were under his control.*

Three broad developments broke the wheel of wheat-induced conquering. First, the industrial era introduced humanity to synthetic agricultural inputs, most importantly fertilizers, but also pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.

The second factor that broke the world of wheat was, shocker, the Order. By making the seas safe for all and banning imperial expansions, the Americans overturned the previous millennia of agriculturally driven conquering.

Better modern inputs, fewer imperial-era restrictions, more farms on more acreage, larger yields of a greater variety of products. Wins all around. That greater variety is the third and arguably the most important factor that ended the Wheat Age: people chose to simply stop growing wheat.

a carburetor is delayed three months in getting to the assembly location, the car can still be finished—just with a delay of three months. If pesticide or fertilizer or diesel fuel or raw soy or a refrigeration unit is delayed three months, much of the food product itself will be lost somewhere along the chain of planting-growth-harvesting-processing-shipment.

There is a lot more to fertilizer than simply oil or natural gas. There’s a second classification of fertilizer based on a material called phosphate. Phosphate is, in essence, fossilized bird poop, which serves as a suitable substitute to . . . human poop. I’m slightly oversimplifying here, but the mined bird poop is treated with acid, ground to a powder, and tossed on plants.

interaction between agriculture and finance. This might sound obvious, but agriculturalists tend to not get paid for their product until they . . . deliver it. This might sound even more obvious, but agriculturalists cannot work double shifts or odd hours or opposite seasons to generate more product. Stuff is planted or born when seasonal weather allows it.

They fall into three general categories. Raw stock. Seeds for planting sounds simple, but in many cases hybridized, genetically modified, or otherwise specialized seeds are far more expensive than simply holding back some of the previous year’s harvest.

Equipment. A modern combine will set a farmer back a cool half million. Growth inputs. These include fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and possibly irrigation for plant crops, and silage, grazing rights, and medical inputs for animal husbandry.

Growth inputs. These include fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and possibly irrigation for plant crops, and silage, grazing rights, and medical inputs for animal husbandry.

Equipment. A modern combine will set a farmer back a cool half million.

From 1990 through 2020, that wasn’t much of a problem. Capital flight from the former Soviet world, hyperfinancialization out of China, and heavy agricultural subsidies out of Europe and Japan, combined with the ridiculously available and cheap credit made possible by the Boomer Bulge, has deluged agriculturalists the world over with all the financing they could stomach.

The first category of food-exporting countries are those whose supply systems for everything from finance to fertilizers to fuels are sufficiently in-house that they can continue producing their current product set with only minor adjustments. France, the United States, and Canada are the only countries on the planet that check all the boxes. Russia is a near miss.

Next up are those exporting countries that have most of the pieces in place regionally. They will still require access to a sort of friends-and-family network in order to meet all their input needs, but even in a Disorderly world this should be manageable. Ranked from those facing the least to greatest challenges: New Zealand, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, Turkey, Nigeria, India, Uruguay, Paraguay, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Italy, and Spain. All have shortcomings—most notably in accessing equipment, fertilizers, and energy—but none are likely to face the sort of extreme supply or security challenges that will wreck production in more vulnerable locations.

The third category are those exporters that simply cannot maintain the input flows required to keep things going without a perfect constellation of unlikely geopolitical factors that are largely beyond their capacity to shape. They won’t face catastrophic production declines, but they’ll have to get used to agriculture becoming intermingled with geopolitical threats—and in some years that means crops simply won’t perform to snuff. This is the future for Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and South Africa.

Fourth among the exporters are those places that have carved out a place for themselves among the agricultural powers of the Order but have zero chance of playing a significant role in the Disorder. Most of their supply chains lie outside of territories they can reach, and most face security concerns that will make it impossible for them to maintain what has become their business as usual: Bulgaria, Estonia, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mali, Romania, Slovakia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The real desperation is on the importers’ side of the ledger. The first category are those who are close enough to exporters both geographically and diplomatically that they need not overworry about getting cut off: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Iceland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Japan also falls into this category not becau...

The second group of importers is where things get uncomfortable. Food will be available, but at a price—and not one that is entirely denominated purely in financial terms. These importers will need to bend to their suppliers’ ...

Hyper food-secure France is going to get all neocolonial.

Nigeria, the only African nation that can maintain its agricultural output without extensive outside assistance, will establish a sphere of influence that includes Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. In a bit of turnabout-is-fair-play, oil- and natural-gas-rich Nigeria will find itself sparring, neocolonial-style, with the French throughout West Africa, and doing reasonably well in the contest.

Turkey was already going to emerge as the master of the Eastern Mediterranean.

good rule of thumb is that it takes about nine times as many inputs to generate a calorie from animals as it does from plants,

After all, a government that cannot feed its population is a government that falls. That’s the story of the biggest losers in relative terms. In absolute terms the biggest loser by far will be China. China sits at the end of the world’s longest supply routes for nearly everything it imports, including roughly 80 percent of its oil needs. China’s navy lacks the range necessary to secure, via trade or conquest, agricultural products—or even the inputs to grow and raise its own.

The first way to prevent famine is to contribute some thing or technology that wasn’t being added previously, in order to increase yields.

if gardening is a full-time job and if it is the only method of food production and if the labor is bottomless and free, it can actually give some forms of industrialized agriculture a run for their money in output levels per acre.

China’s best bet will likely be a brutal, state-organized deurbanization campaign that somewhat resembles the Cultural Revolution, to turn a half billion people or so back into gardeners.

but mass deurbanization just might—might—generate enough food to preserve the concept of China as a political entity.

Gene editing simply speeds up the process from dozens of generations to one.

In agriculture the emerging use is for a tractor-mounted computer to individually evaluate every single plant as the tractor rolls through the field, first to identify it, and then to determine what should be done to or for it, and finally to signal an attached apparatus to take action. Is the plant a weed? Squirt of herbicide. Is the plant infested with bugs? Squirt of pesticide. Is it yellow? Squirt of fertilizer. No longer will farmers have to use broadcast sprays over their entire fields, one pass per spray type.

isn’t so much industrial farming as it is digital gardening, where every plant gets dedicated attention . . . just not from a human.

together, genetically tweaked seeds plus digital gardening promise to—at a minimum—double crop yields per acre by 2030, while simultaneously reducing chemical inputs and fuel needs by up to three-quarters.

Farm equipment is already among the most expensive gear civilians can purchase, and the new digital gardening equipment undoubtedly will cost triple to purchase and far more than triple to maintain as compared to its nondigitized industrial forebears. Such investments only make sense for row crops where the farms are huge and capital supplies ample: United States, Canada, and Australia are it for large-scale application.

The second means of mitigating famine is to grow products more in line with local, rather than global, demand.

Expect three patterns to manifest, based on climate, geography, and culture. First, large-scale, export-driven monoculture will give way to small-scale, local-driven polyculture.

Second, wheat plantings will come back in a very big way . . . after they disappear in a very big way. The same input math that was in play for all agricultural crops in the Industrial Age—better financing, better equipment, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides—applies to wheat as well.

Third, this is a recipe for gross rural poverty. Removing monoculture reduces economies of scale.

Rice is demanding of both water and labor, to the point that its cultivation profoundly shapes—and hobbles—the cultures that use it. Wheat is a once-and-done. Well, maybe twice-and-done if you consider threshing. Rice? Fat chance. It is all about water management.

The Order didn’t transform the world of rice nearly as much as it did the world of wheat. Wheat grows anywhere, so the Order banished it to places only wheat can grow. But 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.

The knock-on effects of such mass relocations for manufacturing capacity should be obvious. The labor will simply be in the wrong place, doing something unrelated to widget making. The knock-on effects for rice output are somewhat less obvious. China’s breakneck urbanization means its population has aged so quickly that there are not a lot of strong backs to relocate to the farms in the first place.

Nearly all population gains in China that occurred between 1980 and 2020—roughly 500 million people—are from health gains extending life spans, not from new births.

This means that should China need to switch away from synthetic fertilizers to something more . . . natural, the country’s life span gains—the country’s last forty years of population increases—will be lost in ...

unlike with wheat, there is no growing of rice on marginal land. This finickiness makes rice incredibly vulnerable to climatic shifts.

(True free-range chickens cost more per pound than most steaks, with boneless/skinless chicken breasts costing more per pound than all steak cuts save filet mignon itself.*)

This simplifies things from a forecasting point of view. There is nothing about American chicken production that will be adversely impacted by deglobalization.