International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Christopher S. Browning Page A
Authors: Christopher S. Browning
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security. The issue is most dramatically framed by considering how increasing scarcity may provoke future conflicts as states feel compelled to fight to secure access to their share of the global resource pie.
Increasing scarcity is being driven by three key dynamics. First, as the world’s population increases greater demands are being made on the Earth’s resources. In 2012 the world’s population reached seven billion, with the UN estimating it will top nine billion by 2050. Such an increase poses obvious problems concerning how to meet people’s basic needs, let alone provide them with a reasonable level of welfare. The second cause of scarcity compounds this problem and concerns increasing levels of global economic output, projected by some to quadruple over the next fifty years. Thus, while economic growth and the emergence of consumer cultures in the world’s most populatedcountries, India and China, may lift people out of poverty it also creates additional demands on planetary resources. This feeds into the third issue of environmental degradation, which is that to feed this increasing population and provide for the economic growth needed to stave off poverty, the expropriation of land for human activities (agriculture, housing, industry) is increasing. For example, in 2010 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that between 2000 and 2010 13 million hectares of forest were lost, most converted for agricultural use, with an area the size of Costa Rica disappearing every year. Deforestation not only impacts on biodiversity, but combined with systematic overexploitation it enhances rates of land degradation, which makes feeding the global population harder. For example, in Haiti, as a result of rapid population growth, unsound agricultural practices, and the chopping of wood for fuel, the area of forested land has decreased from about 60 per cent in the 1920s to about 2 per cent today. In consequence, no longer protected from heavy rains, soil erosion has undermined agricultural productivity, with the country prone to food shortages and increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events ( Figure 8 ).
Underlying such concerns about scarcity are predictions most famously articulated by the political economist Thomas Malthus. In an influential essay published in 1789 Malthus argued that population growth always outstrips increases in food supply. At critical junctures, and to restore the necessary equilibrium between supply and demand, the global population is culled by epidemics, famines, and wars. Understood this way, questions of scarcity can easily foster Darwinian mindsets emphasizing the survival of the fittest, and which in International Relations has resulted in widespread predictions that resource scarcities will result in conflicts.
Such conflicts, however, may take different forms. Most evocative is the idea of inter-state ‘resource wars’, the idea being that powerful states will use their military might to defend or enhance their slice of the global resource pie. One example of such logic at play was President Jimmy Carter’s assertion in 1980 that the USA was prepared to use military force to prevent an outside power gaining control of the Persian Gulf region, owing to the vital importance of the region’s oil reserves in meeting US energy needs (see Box 3 ). For its critics American policy towards the Middle East ever since, and even in the context of the post-2001 War on Terror, only makes sense if seen within this strategic context.
8. The stark contrast of Haiti’s landscape (left) on the Haiti/Dominican Republic border
However, with the economic rise of China great power competition over resources is also increasingly evident in Africa, as China seeks to safeguard its continued economic growth by acquiring mining and extraction rights. In contrast to the West, which when seeking such deals typically imposes free trade agreements and requirements designed to protect human rights
Increasing scarcity is being driven by three key dynamics. First, as the world’s population increases greater demands are being made on the Earth’s resources. In 2012 the world’s population reached seven billion, with the UN estimating it will top nine billion by 2050. Such an increase poses obvious problems concerning how to meet people’s basic needs, let alone provide them with a reasonable level of welfare. The second cause of scarcity compounds this problem and concerns increasing levels of global economic output, projected by some to quadruple over the next fifty years. Thus, while economic growth and the emergence of consumer cultures in the world’s most populatedcountries, India and China, may lift people out of poverty it also creates additional demands on planetary resources. This feeds into the third issue of environmental degradation, which is that to feed this increasing population and provide for the economic growth needed to stave off poverty, the expropriation of land for human activities (agriculture, housing, industry) is increasing. For example, in 2010 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that between 2000 and 2010 13 million hectares of forest were lost, most converted for agricultural use, with an area the size of Costa Rica disappearing every year. Deforestation not only impacts on biodiversity, but combined with systematic overexploitation it enhances rates of land degradation, which makes feeding the global population harder. For example, in Haiti, as a result of rapid population growth, unsound agricultural practices, and the chopping of wood for fuel, the area of forested land has decreased from about 60 per cent in the 1920s to about 2 per cent today. In consequence, no longer protected from heavy rains, soil erosion has undermined agricultural productivity, with the country prone to food shortages and increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events ( Figure 8 ).
Underlying such concerns about scarcity are predictions most famously articulated by the political economist Thomas Malthus. In an influential essay published in 1789 Malthus argued that population growth always outstrips increases in food supply. At critical junctures, and to restore the necessary equilibrium between supply and demand, the global population is culled by epidemics, famines, and wars. Understood this way, questions of scarcity can easily foster Darwinian mindsets emphasizing the survival of the fittest, and which in International Relations has resulted in widespread predictions that resource scarcities will result in conflicts.
Such conflicts, however, may take different forms. Most evocative is the idea of inter-state ‘resource wars’, the idea being that powerful states will use their military might to defend or enhance their slice of the global resource pie. One example of such logic at play was President Jimmy Carter’s assertion in 1980 that the USA was prepared to use military force to prevent an outside power gaining control of the Persian Gulf region, owing to the vital importance of the region’s oil reserves in meeting US energy needs (see Box 3 ). For its critics American policy towards the Middle East ever since, and even in the context of the post-2001 War on Terror, only makes sense if seen within this strategic context.
8. The stark contrast of Haiti’s landscape (left) on the Haiti/Dominican Republic border
However, with the economic rise of China great power competition over resources is also increasingly evident in Africa, as China seeks to safeguard its continued economic growth by acquiring mining and extraction rights. In contrast to the West, which when seeking such deals typically imposes free trade agreements and requirements designed to protect human rights
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