Coming Agricultural Collapse? Where are our Josephs?

World population has grown dramatically over the last 100 years.  One reason is that we have learned how to grow much more food in our available space during this time.  But increases in world agricultural production have started to slow down and may reverse direction altogether because we are exhausting the resources needed to sustain them.   Not just one resource either, but several:

• Phosphorus, a critical element in fertilizer.
• Fresh water, used mainly for irrigation.
• Fertile soil, due to
• soil salinization (soil becoming too salty for crops to grow)
• erosion
• nutrient exhaustion (crops taking more nutrients out of the soil than can be replaced.  The article I linked to here is quite technical but the abstract gives you the basic idea.)
• Inexpensive Synthetic Fertilizer.  Much modern agriculture relies heavily on fertilizers made from petroleum (oil).  But global oil production has already peaked and begun to decline.  Unless massive new oil fields are discovered, this decline will continue until all the available oil remaining on earth is consumed.  This process will take a long time but we are already feeling the effects in the form of rising gasoline prices.  The price of oil will continue to rise over the long run.  We will spend some time later discussing oil and other forms of energy.  For this week you should note that the price of fertilizers made from oil will also continue to rise.  Many farmers in other parts of the world are already losing the ability to pay the higher price of fertilizer they need to keep growing crops.  
• Favorable climate.  "Global warming" is a controversial topic.  Some people, including most climate scientists, believe that human beings have caused the earth's atmosphere to warm up by burning too much fossil fuel.  Other people think that recent changes in the earth's climate are caused by natural variations.   Unfortunately, climate science is extremely complex; even if the majority of climate scientists are right, they will have a difficult time presenting a succinct and convincing case to lay people.   But the issue is important.  If they are right, the climate will continue to change for the foreseeable future unless humans drastically change the way we produce energy.  If they are wrong, the climate changes we have seen over the last 40 years may reverse themselves.  In any event, growing food successfully depends on a favorable climate.  And to a farmer, "favorable" means "the kind of climate my crops have always been used to."  Big changes to climate ruin the farmer's crops regardless of what kind of change it is.  Temperatures go up and his crops are ruined one way.  They go down and his crops are ruined another way.  It rains too little and his crops dry out in the field.  It rains too much or at the wrong time and his seeds get washed out of the soil, his produce rots or develops diseases, or he is unable to get out to harvest it properly.  If climate continues to change at its current rate, most parts of the world will be unable to grow as much food as they do today.

One thing we are not running short of is demand for food.  At the same time our ability to grow food is decreasing and the world's population is exploding, so is the number of people who can afford to buy and eat more food than they used to.  The economies of Brazil, India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Eastern Europe are growing rapidly.  The citizens of these countries are growing richer and want to enjoy the type of lifestyle we have in America.  But a typical American consumer uses 32 times as much energy to grow and keep food as a typical African.  There are about 300 million Americans.  With all these other booming economies, the world may add another 2.5-3 billion new "Americans" in the next generation.  Where will we get the food to feed all these new "Americans?"

In short, the ways the vast majority of the human race grows its food cannot be sustained over the long run.  We will use up the natural resources we depend on to be able to grow food and will be forced to adopt other methods or starve. 

What will happen if we don't make changes now?

• Large numbers of people in poorer parts of the world will grow more and more desperate.
• In some places there may be mass starvation, worse than anything we have seen in recent memory.
• Wars will break out between nations competing to control the remaining available natural resources needed to produce food.  The civil war and genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was a foreshadowing of what may be coming.
• Large numbers of people will flee countries facing complete collapse of their agricultural economies to other countries that are not in such desperate condition.
• The United States will most likely be one of the countries that is able to grow enough food to feed its own citizens.  Large numbers of desperate immigrants will crowd into our country.  Depending on how bad it gets, we could be literally overrun and our society may collapse into warfare and/or mass starvation too.

In the book of Genesis we find the story of Joseph (Genesis 37-50).  That story has something to say to us about the kind of situation we have sketched above.  While imprisoned in Egypt,  Joseph was given the chance to interpret a dream of the Egyptian Pharaoh  (Genesis 41).  According to Genesis, God gave Joseph the ability to interpret Pharaoh's dream.  He told Pharaoh that God was sending Egypt seven years of abundant harvests followed by seven years of famine.  Then Joseph advised Pharaoh to store up the surplus in the good years to tide the nation over during the famine.   Pharaoh was so impressed that he adopted Joseph's plan and put him in charge of executing it.  Observe the following points:

• The story makes it clear that Joseph's wisdom came from God.  But the story doesn't explain how God gave it to him.  It certainly did NOT come to Joseph in a book with the name "Bible" on the front cover.  In the same way, none of the evidence presented above comes from the Bible.  It has been gathered painstakingly by thousands of individuals from all over the world trying to solve the problem of producing enough food.  There is wisdom here that we would be foolish to ignore.
• Joseph consistently asserts that the reason he ended up a leader in Egypt was to save people's lives  (Genesis 45:4-7; 50:19).  In that he is a forerunner of Jesus and a model for Christians.  God has a purpose for you and me in the coming decades:  save people's lives.  
• Joseph presented a specific plan requiring advance preparation designed to meet the coming drought with enough food to keep people alive.  He didn't rest satisfied with good intentions.  He proposed a solution, and when offered the chance to execute, he took it. 
• Some Christians will tell you that the proper response for Christians is to preach the gospel.  But what they mean by preaching the gospel is just this:  "tell people to believe in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins so they will go to heaven" -- after they starve to death or get butchered.  IOW, concentrate on communicating the verbal message of eternal life, and don't get bogged down trying to fix problems in this life.  The problem with this kind of Christianity is that it is not Christian.  Christians don't get to choose between helping people in this world or the next.  We are supposed to do both.  Joseph was right; he was sent to save lives HERE and NOW also, not only in some future world.      

Where are our Josephs?  Who will step forward to save lives from the looming food catastrophe? Next week we discuss ways we could follow in those footsteps for the coming decades.