Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 325

Drawing on a range of archaeological and historical sources, in Food or war, Julian Cribb provides an analysis of the extent to which food security, reliant on access to land and water under certain climatic conditions, has been a more important cause of war than political, religious, ethnic or national differences. He describes how, as a general rule, civilizations and empires emerged in fertile river valleys such as the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges, the Yangtse and the Yellow, the Mekong, the Tiber, the Rhine and the Danube because they needed surpluses of agricultural produce to maintain the armies on which they depended for their expansion and survival. He is aware of non-agrarian and non-environmental explanations as to why civilizations disintegrated and empires declined across Europe, Africa, the Middle East or Asia, such as corrupt and abusive governance; limited technological innovation and stagnant economic performance; ruling class divisions and civil wars; foreign incursions and domestic rebellions; and imperial overreach and associated fiscal mismanagement.

Nevertheless, by and large, Cribb defaults to the crucial interrelations between the breakdown of food production, climate change and population growth that combined with wars to devastate farming communities and contribute to the outbreak of famines. He concludes that: ‘If the pathway to war, government failure, or the collapse of a civilization can be thought of as a series of dominoes, collapsing one upon another, the fall of the food domino and the climate domino lie very early in the sequence and have irresistible impact and consequences.’

As he traces the lineages of a variety of antiquities and feudalisms, Cribb refers to pertinent examples where famines and plagues correlated with the overthrow of monarchs and Emperors, when the capacity to pay and feed their armies was reduced, so that they mutinied and even joined foreign invaders. However, Cribb’s method, which predisposes him to emphasize the role of ecological constraints on food production, leads him to neglect the propensity of states to go to war for territory that may or may not have been suitable for agriculture, which may not have been motivated primarily by food insecurity. There is evidence that pre-modern rulers, who allowed for the diffusion of authority among a broad governing elite, tended to resort to pre-emptive wars to extend borders onto terrain, not necessarily or mainly because it was productive land, but instead to establish provinces, protectorates or colonies with armies to discourage or withstand sudden attacks by neighbouring peoples. By contrast, those monarchs and emperors, who concentrated power in their own hands and were a law unto themselves, were likely to embark on expansionist wars for private gain, because, after all, it was by conquest that they obtained extensive agricultural estates.

More generally, whatever rulers suspected or thought they knew when they decided to go to war, expectations as to the overcoming of food insecurity by taking control of high-yielding land were often superseded by the narrow interests of bankers and manufacturers, who stood to benefit from state borrowing and military spending, as well as by the influence of psychologically robust political ambitions, exaggerated prospects for glory, delusional forecasts of victory, and emotionally charged civilizational beliefs, nationalist ideologies and atavistic attitudes. To give Cribb his due, he is cognizant of how land has been associated with sovereignty, ethnicity, identity and community, whereupon it has proven to be an effective way to mobilize peoples behind warlike leaders.

Of the more than 200 million people who have perished in wars between nation states since the 1850s, Cribb records pointedly that more than half have died of starvation. Whilst Cribb tends to shift his focus between struggles over agricultural or pastoral land and food security as causes of war and war as a source of starvation and malnutrition in the everyday lives of civilians, he explains that many of the fatalities from hunger during wars were due to deliberate policies to control occupied peoples or to deny them sustenance in order to feed invader armies. Additionally, from the outset, famine resulted from the seizure of their produce by a people’s own rulers to supply their military; from sieges and blockades that halted an enemy’s food imports; from the disruption of farming by defensive scorched earth policies; and from the reduction or cessation of the productivity of farmland by the displacement of rural populations.

As Cribb develops his narrative, he reports that the World Peace Foundation has compiled cases of mass starvation or induced famine since 1870 responsible for at least 105 million deaths that resulted from post-revolutionary economic policies as well as from ethnic and religious genocides. He elaborates commendably on how, for a high percentage of internal armed conflicts and violent outbreaks of unrest in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, between 1946 and 2006, their similarities were more pronounced than their differences. This was because they were connected to disputes over natural resources, such as access to or use rights over agricultural or pastoral land and available supplies of water, as well as mineral deposits, intensified by prolonged drought in what were often dry ecosystems.

Although Cribb does not give sufficient regard to the ways these intra-state wars were complicated by outside interventions by current and former colonial powers or by the United States and the Soviet Union, which acted out their international Cold War competition through proxy wars in developing countries, he does acknowledge the influence of local ethnic, regional, cultural and religious rivalries. This was especially so in circumstances where ecological pressures were intertwined with extreme inequalities and fragile institutions where there was unbending opposition from privileged groups against demands from deprived groups.

Looking to the future, Cribb focuses on the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the projected increase of the world population to over and above 10 billion in the 2050s, when he expects that food production could potentially require close to 70 per cent of the world’s usable soil and around 79 per cent of fresh water. He is not alone when he warns that, unless there is a sizeable reduction in carbon emissions and a substantial expansion in environmentally sustainable agriculture, access to soil and water will be increasingly relevant to global, regional and national strategic calculations.