Top Economist: The Unthinkable Is About to Happen to the Global Food System

Indexed: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]I've I've been saying for quite some time and it it sounds racist, but it's actually inverse of racism. The West won't take global warming seriously until lots of white people start to die.

[00:00:10]Okay. When there's a famine in the third world, the attitude of the West, the Europeans and the Americans is fundamentally, well, that's what happens to brown people.

[00:00:18]They don't really take it seriously.

[00:00:21]Now, this crisis because it's going to cut food production at the global level by as much as 30% is quite feasible.

[00:00:30]Uh then there'll be less food available for everyone, particularly those countries that don't produce more food than they consume.

[00:00:39]Now, that includes a large number of Western economies.

[00:00:43]Okay. You we know that some you know, there's a lot of third world countries do have to import food for their population, but one of the most the classic example of a Western country that has to import food to be able to survive is the UK, United Kingdom. And the UK imports something of the order of 40% of the food that it consumes. Now, we have had a recent crisis where there was a bad harvest in India. India being one of the world's major producers of and exporters of rice. And the decision of the Indian government at that time was to cut off exports of all forms of rice apart from basmati rice, which is the rice that's particularly appealing and highly priced and consumed by Western consumers. That that particular crisis passed and now India is is exporting both basmati rice and ordinary forms of rice. But if this crisis strikes again, then a country like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh will decide that they have to keep what they can produce for their own people and they'll cut off the export flow. Now, that is going to hit countries like the UK, which have relied upon a permanent reliable supply of food from the rest of the world to enable them to continue surviving that they only produce enough food for say 60% of their population.

[00:02:03]Now, if there is the UK is suddenly thrown upon its own resources courtesy of this crisis and also of course if it lacks the fertilizer that it needs to produce even the proportion that it does produce, then white people are going to start dying. And I think frankly the only way the humanity is going to wake up to the seriousness of global warming and the seriousness of the damage that we've done to the biosphere is when lots of white people start to die. And I was expecting that to happen when global warming, for example, might cause a a set of droughts in in in vital grain growing regions of the planet or it could have caused floods, something which destroys the flow of of exports. Then that would have been when people woke up. The one thing I can say for Donald Trump doing this ridiculous, stupid, unnecessary, unjustified wall is that he's giving us felt taste of what global warming is going to do when that strikes. So, we should learn from this experience, realize just how fragile our production systems are, realize how reliant we are upon a sustainable natural environment and we have to now work to enable that natural environment to recover from the damage we've done to it already. So, Donald Trump he's he's a bit like it's actually appropriate to say this because we all talk about Donald Trump as the orange man or the you know, he he sprays himself with the yellow spray to make him look okay. It's a bit like a canary.

[00:03:26]Okay? The canary is yellow. A canary used to be carried down by miners into mines to find when there was a excess of carbon dioxide in the mines because the canary would die before the levels of carbon dioxide got so large that the humans who were doing the mining would die. So, the canary in the coal mine, that's a classic expression from the past. The canary gives you warning of what's going to happen if you don't make immediate and drastic changes to your current situation. So, in that sense, it's rather appropriate that the canary of Donald Trump has generated this crisis that is making us realize how dangerous the situation we are in now. We have to change our behavior very, very rapidly. Just like miners used to have to evacuate from mine shaft when the canary died, this is the same story. The canary is not dying this time. The canary is killing people by this ridiculous war, but it's not just killing Iranians. It could kill tens, maybe hundreds of millions people around the planet, including people who are white.

[00:04:27]And and I I've come back all the time I think about the fragility of the United Kingdom, which has neglected its need to produce food because again the attitude of the West is globalization. UK's not going to be importing food, producing food. That's okay. The UK can sell debt.

[00:04:43]It can arrange insurance. It can make money out of the city of London. And then the funds from the city of London can enable us to buy the food that the rest of world sells to us, and the UK comes out ahead. Now, the UK may be the place that finds that oh dear, we can't get the food anymore. It doesn't matter what we can do out of selling financial services. We can't get the food for our own people. And that is again the wake-up call maybe coming coming out of the canary in the coal mine. The coal mine being the Strait of Hormuz, and the canary being Donald Trump.

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