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

by Peter Zeihan

The areas that will suffer the greatest impact on agricultural capacity will be those that were already marginal: arid but not desert, hot and wet but still serviceable. The pain will be felt more acutely in the dry locations rather than the wet ones for the simple reason that it is far easier in terms of energy and infrastructure to drain overly wet regions than to provide water to overly dry ones. 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.