With world population increasing, the most likely scenario for a breakdown in the international food infrastructure would be a severe drought in China and/or India, which produce respectively about 95% and 100% of the food-grains required to feed their populations. Such a drought is statistically overdue.
According to Prof. Hendrik J. Bruins of the BIDR Social Studies Unit, there is no nation more aware of the devastation of drought than China. Working with a Chinese postdoctoral student, Bruins is combing hundreds of years of historic records in which Chinese scholars have detailed the many droughts and other climatological disasters that have battered the country. By analyzing the historic data, the BIDR team is making a statistical analysis of drought frequency for the last 2,000 years, which is important for both climate-change studies and for the assessment of the risk of a severe drought hitting China in the future. Such risk evaluations are carried out by approaches similar to those used by geophysicists to predict the likelihood of a major earthquake along a particularly active geological fault.
According to Bruins, the only way to prepare for such a drought is to have sufficient grain reserves to keep the country fed for a few years. The Chinese do have reserves, but their amounts are kept secret. Nevertheless, it is known that their present stores are dwindling. China is the biggest grain producer in the world, much larger than the United States. Nevertheless, because the Chinese have many more mouths to feed, they still have to import some food-grain each year. This makes it difficult to increase reserves from their own production, but — Bruins believes — they must make every effort either to expand production or to purchase additional grain abroad.
Because a future drought is merely a matter of time, and the major exporting countries will certainly not be able to meet world shortages in such an event, it would be wise for small countries such as Israel and other Middle Eastern nations to build up their reserves. Because their requirements are so much less than what is required by China, the extra purchases would not make a great dent in annual available supplies.
A remarkable piece of political advice in this context is given in the ancient Chinese Book of Rights, which is about 2,500 to 2,800 years old. “A country with [food-grain] stocks for less than nine years has insufficient reserves; in one with less than six years’ reserves, the situation becomes tense; and in one with less than three years of stocks, the government will not survive.”
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