These were facts about the increasing the population in the world. Another key part is the fertilized land need for growing food and the food supply. Increased fertilizer application and more water usage through irrigation have been responsible for over 70% of the crop yield increase in the past. Yields, however, have nearly stabilized for cereals, partly as a result of low and declining investments in agriculture. In addition, fisheries landings have declined in the past decade mainly as a result of overfishing and unsustainable fishing methods.
Food and nonorganic resources supply, however, is not only a function of production, but also of energy efficiency. Food and nonorganic energy efficiency is our ability to minimize the loss of energy from harvest potential through processing to actual consumption and recycling. By optimizing this chain, food and nonorganic supply can increase with much less damage to the environment, similar to improvements in efficiency in the traditional energy sector. However, unlike the traditional energy sector, food and nonorganic energy efficiency has received little attention. Only an estimated 43% of the cereal produced is available for human consumption, as a result of harvest and post-harvest distribution losses and use of cereal for animal feed.
There has been a growing trend all over the world in converting cropland to other uses due to increasing urbanization, industrialization, energy demand and population growth. China, for example, lost more than 14.5 million ha of arable land between 1979 and 1995 (ICIMOD, 2008).
Current projections suggest that an additional 120 million ha – an area twice the size of France or one-third that of India – will be needed to support the traditional growth in food production by 2030, mainly in developing countries (FAO, 2003), without considering the compensation required for certain losses. The demand for irrigated land is projected to increase by 56% in Sub-Saharan Africa (from 4.5 to 7 million ha), and rainfed land by 40% (from 150 to 210 million ha) in order to meet the demand, without considering ecosystem services losses and setbacks in yields and available cropland (FAO, 2003; 2006). Increases in available cropland may be possible in Latin America through the conversion of rainforests, which in turn will accelerate climate change and biodiversity losses, causing feedback loops that may hinder the projected increases in crop yields. The potential for increases is more questionable in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa due to political, socio-economic and environmental constraints. In Asia, nearly 95% of the potential cropland has already been utilized (FAO, 2003; 2006). Even if such increases are not restricted by other land use and the protection of tropical rainforests, changes in the proportion of non-food crops to food crops may have even greater impacts on the available cropland for food production.
The scarcity of other resources may prove serious as well. For example, today one in four people on the planet do not have access to safe drinking water; 12 percent of the world’s population consumes 86 percent of available fresh water. With global consumption of fresh water doubling in the next twenty years, there are all sorts of water war scenarios. Already five million people die a year from diseases related to contaminated water. China’s rapid industrialization has been accompanied by water contamination affecting 300 million people, that is nearly a third of the population. If present trends continue two out of three people on the planet will live in countries considered to be “water stressed.” The World Bank projects that 40 percent of the people living in the world of 2050 will face some form of water shortage. In Palestine, Israel’s commandeering of scarce water is a major issue and on many other borders water conflicts are major occurrences.
There several types of wars for resources according to me: traditional wars when one country invade other, internal, civil war (Africa’s counties), war masque as piece operation, but it’s real goal is to grab the resources of attacked country (Iraq, Libya etc), and economic war leaded usually by some kind of sanctions and by the help of the world institutions and multinational companies.
It should be pointed out that when we speak of wars in the last third of the twentieth century we are talking about civil wars. Between 1965 and 1999 if we look at those wars in which more than a thousand people were killed a year, I find information that there were seventy-three civil wars, almost all driven by greed to control resources—oil, diamonds, copper, cacao, coca, and even bananas. Countries with one or two primary export resources have more than a one-in-five chance of civil war in any given year. In countries with no such dominant products there is a one in a hundred chance. In these civil wars more than 90 percent of casualties are civilians. At the start of the twentieth century war casualties were 90 percent soldiers. Such “traditional” wars are rare today. Resource wars with their devastating impacts on civilians have become the norm.
Indeed, the oil rich countries of Africa have long histories of coups, military rule, and strongmen. Millions have died of hunger and disease as a result of wars over oil, diamonds, copper, and other resources as armed rebels steal, rape, and murder making life-generating economic activity difficult if not impossible. In the Congo, one of the resource richest countries on the planet, a half dozen countries have armies deployed and countless rebel groups have fought to control rich deposits of gold, diamonds, timber, copper, and valuable cobalt and coltan in what is often referred to as “Africa’s First World War.”
Africa bleeds because of its abundant wealth. The resources of Liberia were privatized by selling rights to resources to foreign companies and pocketing the money. There is the case of Dafur in the oil rich Sudan. There is Nigeria, exceedingly rich in oil and corruption, where foreign aid is badly needed. The environment of the Niger Delta is being destroyed, and people are killed by army thugs protecting Shell oil. Equatorial Guinea is a criminalized state which receives half a billion in oil revenues. Because of this, it ranks sixth in the world in per capita income but third from the bottom in the UN’s human development index table, third of the population has been killed or driven into exile. The revenues of the Cameroon-Chad pipeline operated by Exxon-Mobile, with additional investment from ChevronTexaco, do not help the people of the area who remain among the poorest of the poor as the natural wealth of their land is looted.
Wherever there are resources to be plundered we find foreign companies ready to cooperate. Often there is the World Bank to put a smiley face on these atrocities, claiming things would be worse if they did not supervise the corruption. The reality of the bank’s role however is quite different. Emil Salim, a former Indonesian environment minister who led the World bank Extractions Industries Review, has written, “The bank is a publicly supported institution whose mandate is poverty alleviation. Not only have the oil, gas and mining industries not helped the poorest developing countries, they have often made them worse off.” That is from the man the World Bank chose to review its past practices. He points out that scores of academic assessments as well as the bank’s own reports correlate corruption, civil war, and growing poverty with reliance on extractive industries, comparing unfavorably with the performance of more diversified economies.
If we take a look in Indonesia, it can be seen as analogous to a nineteenth-century empire. The central government exploits the territories, especially those rich in resources, along lines similar to what was done by the Europeans. Jakarta conducts a dirty war in Aceh, its northern province rich in natural gas and rife with civilian killings and disappearances. The Indonesian state has waged a campaign of terror and near genocide in oil and natural gas rich East Timor. Exxon-Mobil is the largest long-term investor in Indonesia.
Today situation has been changed since the end of the Second World War when the so-called seven Sisters dominated the world oil market. Today Exxon-Mobil produces less than 3 percent of world output and the seven largest oil companies control less than 5 percent of world reserves. This does not mean that Exxon-Mobil is not the world’s most valuable and most profitable company nor that the oil giants do not benefit from high oil prices. They do however face more sophisticated national oil companies from China, India, Brazil, and elsewhere who compete for supply which is increasingly under the control of state-controlled producers. The seven largest national oil companies, like Kuwait Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Oil, Algeria’s Sonatrach, and the more familiar Saudi Aramco, hold at least half the world’s proven resources and account for a quarter of current production. Like Venezuela’s national oil company, which fuels Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, they have changed the distributional equation nationally as well as globally.
The days of unalloyed Anglo-American petroleum dominance are gone, and that is why the hegemonic state and its coalition partner, no-longer-so-great Britain, are using force to reassert dominance not through corporate control so much as state terror and coercion. While there can be no question that the national oil companies have changed the distribution of revenues from the grossly exploitative terms of pre–Second World War Anglo-American total dominance, the governments of the Middle East retain limited room to maneuver where the national interests of the United States and its thirst for oil are concerned. The long shadow of Washington darkens and dominates the politics of the region. Price-supply conditions have been set in the past by Saudi Arabia, which has acted to prevent problems for the advanced capitalist economies. It is less certain that they can continue to do so. It is surely in the interest of the hegemonic state and its British ally to gain greater purchase over supply conditions through regime change and closer working relations with new producers in the Caspian Basin and in Africa.
As to peak oil, predictions of the end of oil have been made often in the past and it is not clear that frightening scenarios will play out in the short run that some suggest. There are complex issues of geology, technology, and prospective efficiency considerations. The accepted definition of proven reserves includes what is known and can be exploited economically with existing technology. Both price and potential supply are conservatively estimated for this purpose, although some experts suggest that producers have a strong interest in overestimating their reserve position. Because OPEC quotas are based on proven reserves it is in the interest of members to greatly exaggerate their reserves so they can pump more. Such “political barrels” are estimated to be 44 percent of the total reserves OPEC claims. Russia’s reserves are also uncertain but probably 30–40 percent lower than officially claimed. Some countries have been extracting large amounts of crude but maintaining the same proven reserves figures. Companies too have incentive to exaggerate their reserves. In 2006 Shell had to admit it had overestimated its reserves by nearly a third and its stock price promptly fell. Finally it is also the case that for the past two decades the oil taken out of the ground has exceeded new discoveries.
The U.S. state through threat, intimidation, and violence wants its ham fist on the spigot, allowing it to blackmail other countries. U.S. imperialism has exerted control over the Global South through the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. During the Cold War it used the threat of communist Russia and China to keep Europe and Japan under its “leadership.” It is now attempting to use terrorism in the same way, not altogether successfully as it is turning out since its invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have failed to produce stable governments. Its actions have produced more terrorists and alienated most of the world.
The most effective resistance to this imperialist pattern now is coming from Latin America where Hugo Chávez has been repeatedly elected and won referenda because he has stood up to the United States and used his country’s oil revenues to raise living standards of the poor of his nation. In April 2006, Petroleos de Venezuela increased its stake in major projects to 60 percent from 40 percent as well as increasing its royalty cut. In Bolivia Evo Morales nationalized the energy industry, causing the United States to express disapproval regarding Morales’s “weak commitment to democracy” (echoing its charge against Chávez). However, Bolivia’s first elected indigenous president, according to the leading polling organization in the country, enjoyed an 80 percent approval rating in the spring of 2006. The major enemies of the United States somehow seemed to be oil producers, a group of countries that given the current high energy prices cannot be easily intimidated through economic sanctions or political pressure.
The resource war against the environment will be better avoided when we stop counting consumption of nature as income, as a free good, while we deplete our natural capital. The past rates of accumulation of capital which are now blithely projected forward were possible because of the unsustainable usage of natural resources. Mainstream economists have a great deal of responsibility for ignoring the distinction between natural capital and human made capital.
When we sum up everything, we can conclude that world resources are spendable, and this is basic mathematics, world population is growing and it needs more and more necessities. Organic, nonorganic resources, place to live and service quality. This was one of the main causes because wars happens, and my opinion is that the question is not “is there possibility of wars for resources?” because there is already war for resources. West countries are already use different excuses, just for one goal- to grab world resources. They use their armies to protect big multinational corporation’s interests in foreign countries. With every new day rises, this situation and pressure goes up. How we respond to these resource pressures will determine what kind of society we shall have and what sort of planet ours will be.