Nobody starves willingly so you can get a war out of that.
It is introducing a new chapter in world food security.
One that is fraught with risk.
What are the possible results of increased food security?
There will be a very delicate military slash diplomatic problem
in terms of preserving the security, the integrity of the borders,
because we have borders with the countries that will be impacted.
And will be generating the refugees, will be desperate,
will perhaps be driven to what you may call unreasonable measures
because otherwise they starve.
The pressure of refugees, climate refugees if you will,
is going to be so great that it will get beyond being purely a police problem.
And borders will to some extent be militarised,
not against the threat of an invasion, but against the waves of refugees
that are washing up against them.
Like the fence that India is currently building around Bangladesh.
Now it’s there to stop economic refugees,
of whom there are millions in the states surrounding Bangladesh,
but you know, and if you go to Delhi and talk to people they will admit it
that this is also a precaution for a future
where half of Bangladesh, alright 20 percent, has gone under water
and there’s 30 million people trying to get out.
So, let’s get the fence up now.
What is new about 21st century food security?
There are a dozen or more countries trying to acquire land
outside their boundaries in order to ensure their food security.
It’s not land, it’s land and water.
Land without water it’s not worth anything.
Now we see a competition for land crossing national boundaries,
in a way that we’ve not seen before.
And it is introducing a new chapter in world food security.
When grain prices rise again, as they inevitably will,
it’s going to become difficult for the countries that have invested
in hungry countries, like Ethiopia and the Sudan for example,
to get that food out without facing riots and potential insurgencies
from hungry people when they see food from their country
leaving and going elsewhere.
And a lot of the conflicts could ripple around the world in different forms.
They could translate into economic constraints or embargoes,
or what have you, but the stresses are clearly building.
What can be done to address these problems?
No country is going to accept 30 percent of the population
being from way far away and not speaking the local language.
We stop it before that, so, this has got to be stopped.
Yes, there’s a border issue. How do you keep them from sifting across?
There are other ways of addressing the problem
in terms of giving the aid so they can stay home,
which will help the countries that would be generating
these waves to feed their people.
You saw at the Copenhagen Summit in December,
although it was a failure,
a remarkably large number being bandied about:
a hundred billion dollars a year by 2020,
in aid which essentially would be coming from the developed countries
to the developing countries a) to help them get out of fossil fuels
and b) to help them deal with the consequences,
which for them will be earlier and worse, of climate change.
In terms of being able to feed their people
and the wellbeing of the population which is under severe climate strain.
The European Union’s frontiers with the Middle East and,
across the Mediterranean with Africa,
are going to be under enormous pressure as things get worse,
because the sub-tropics take a bigger, worse hit
than the temperate zone that we live in. Now Europe is mostly NATO.
And the rest of NATO, that is to say North America,
will have its own problems with te border
between the developed world and that former Third World,
between the US and Mexico.
Ways of controlling that pressure without getting into confrontation
and possibly some new form of polarisation, like the old Cold War,
have to be found. And I think NATO is probably the organisation
that is going to play the largest role,
other than the diplomats, in doing this.