The food-exporting superpowers are easy to identify.As my esteemed colleague Michael Snyder chronicled in a recent Zero Hedge post, world agricultural production is under assault from extreme weather and diseases such as African swine fever. Floods & Drought Devastate Crops All Over The Planet; Is A Global Food Crisis Be Coming?
Everyone understands extreme weather is a danger to food production. The overuse of antibiotics is less well understood. As this article explains, most antibiotics are given to livestock, which then become breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant microbes, which are known as superbugs once they develop immunity to all conventional antibiotics. Are antibiotics turning livestock into superbug factories?
Almost 80% of all antibiotics in the United States aren’t taken by people. They’re given to cows, pigs, and chickens to make them grow more quickly or as a cheap alternative to keeping them healthy. These drugs could give rise to superbugs—bacteria that can’t be treated with modern medicine—and things are only getting worse. In 2013, more than 131,000 tons of antibiotics were used in food animals worldwide; by 2030, it will be more than 200,000 tons.
Here’s the problem with superbugs: you can’t kill them with standard-issue antibiotics. They spread like wildfire through monoculture crops and livestock yards and kill with indiscriminate alacrity. The only solution, poor as it is, is to kill every animal that might be infected–tens of millions or hundreds of millions in the case of African swine fever.
Pigs and chickens are breeding grounds for diseases that jump the low barrier between livestock and humans. So the superbug that starts out killing animals can, with generally modest genetic modifications via variability, start infecting and killing humans with the same alacrity. Super scary: animal agriculture linked to global ‘superbug’ threatHow industrial farming techniques can breed superbugsSuperbugs to Kill More People than Cancer if Industrial Agriculture Doesn’t Ditch Antibiotics and PesticidesHow Drug-Resistant Bacteria Travel from the Farm to Your Table
The rise of Candida
A handful of industrial-scale super-farms raising monoculture crops
As many others have pointed out, oil and food production are now essentially one system: industrial-scale agriculture depends on industrial fuels and petrochemical fertilizers; no oil and natural gas, no food. But we can’t eat oil. A nation might have the financial means to buy energy or be blessed
And hungry people topple governments.
So let’s project what happens when some nations don’t have enough food and others manage to have a surplus.

The majority of many commodity crops feed livestock, not humans, and as a general rule it take five or more kilos of grain to produce one kilo of meat. No corn and soybeans, no meat.

Wheat and rice are staples of the human diet, and the exportable surpluses of wheat are concentrated in a few hands.

The same is true of soybeans, a source of protein in Asia and livestock feed everywhere. This chart shows the top producers and the top consumers.

The asymmetry between exporters and importers delineates the power implicit in food. Those with surpluses to sell hold power over those who need the surpluses to feed their restive, hungry populations. The food-exporting superpowers are easy to identify: The U.S., Russia, Ukraine, France, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and weather permitting, Australia. This reduces down to three superpower regions: North America at the top, Russia and Ukraine, and Brazil and Argentina, with France replacing Germany as the continental superpower once food matters. As for rice, the top exporters are India, Thailand and Vietnam. Recalibrate their potential power in the era of food scarcity accordingly. It only seems farfetched to say that food will, with energy, redefine political power in the decades ahead because the superbugs haven’t yet devastated global tradable food. Rivals without enough food will surrender power to those with scarce surpluses to use to reward allies and cripple enemies.
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