Environment

The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.

Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.

While some MPs got it, governments as a whole simply don’t seem to understand what we’re facing. It’s this: the global food system is systemically fragile in the same way that the global financial system was before the 2008 crash.

It’s easy to see potential vulnerabilities, such as a fertiliser supply crunch caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, or harvest failures caused by climate breakdown. But these are not the thing itself. They are disruptions of the kind that might trigger the thing. The thing itself is the entire system sliding off a cliff. The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.