The World’s Warring States Period

The Next Century of Land Use and Food

13 min readAug 7, 2024

The fear of climate change overshadowed a much more eminent threat to humanity, which has now come to pass unremarked. The world is at its maximum utilization for land dedicated to livestock.

Put another way, we cannot produce much more meat annually than we currently do.

What are the implications for human population growth? What about ecosystem management? Supply chains?

My take is that we are about to enter the World’s Warring States Period. We will be enmeshed in a battle for dominance via resource distribution. Over the next 100 years, we can expect to see occasional skirmishes due to resource contention, resulting in borders and population centers relocating. Ultimately, I believe the global map of political borders will look similar to the current one at a glance, but on closer inspection, many seats of power will be quite shuffled around.

So then, let’s take a survey of the history of food so that we can envision the future of it. What does our current food production system look like, and how did we get here?

History of Food

Agricultural Revolution

It’s always shocking to consider the true scale of time on which humanity has existed. While homo sapiens are theorized to have evolved roughly 300,000 years ago,¹ we have only been practicing agriculture for about 12,000 years.² The leading theory as to why we began farming would be due to climate change — in this case, a global ice age had just ended, and new plant and animal species were flourishing. Previously, humans had been a migratory species, following animal migration paths; now, humans saw that they could form stationary communities if they cultivated their own plants and animals rather than subsisting by hunting and gathering, which had forced them to roam large areas for food. Forming stationary communities would allow them to keep surpluses, and led to the formations of villages with more complex social orders, eventually leading all the way to long-term calendar keeping and multi-generational society planning.

Once humans settled down into stationary communities, with their food surpluses, they were able to host feasts for the first time. This led to stronger inter-tribal relations, as feasts facilitate marriages and peace offerings. There are also multiple tongue-in-cheek theories that humans’ predilections for drug and alcohol indulgence contributed to the advent of agriculture. The stoned ape theory postulates that cultivation of psychedelic mushrooms led to leaps in human cognitive ability, as well as ultimately contributing to the agricultural revolution.³ There is also the recurring beer-agriculture link, in that it is unclear when we began fermenting fruit juice into wine, but the most credible theory of the origin of beer is that it was likely first brewed around the beginning of the agricultural revolution. The theory is that cooks accidentally left out boiled grain, and natural yeast began fermenting, leading the cooks to do their own experiments and ultimately create beer.⁴

Humans were largely subsistence farmers for thousands of years following this, as they slowly refined the genetics and cultivation of grains.⁵

Industrial Revolution

Agricultural technology took a huge leap forward during the Industrial Revolution. Previously powered mainly by human and animal labor, starting in the 18th century, human inventions cut down the need for manual labor in farming significantly, thus increasing crop yields per farmer.⁶ The spread of the steam powered engine, as well as new farming innovations such as the winnowing machine and the cotton gin, revolutionized the food supply chain in Britain to the point of a complete societal reorganization — historian R. C. Allens notes that “[b]y 1800 each English farm worker produced enough to support two workers in manufacturing and services.”⁷

Modern Farming Advances

The Industrial Revolution ushered in a series of innovations resulting in significantly increased crop yield.⁸ Prior to 1700, it took about 1.5 hectare of farmland to feed a single human for most of humanity’s agricultural history.⁹ This fell about 10% during the Industrial Revolution, but then successive land destruction and trade interruption by wars effectively nulled the gains, back to the previous necessity of 1.5 hectare per person, for the first half of the 20th century.¹⁰ It was then that the post-WW2 spread of synthetic pesticides as well as the introduction of diesel engine tractors revolutionized crop yields; since 1950, we have seen a decrease in the necessary farmland to feed an individual go down from 1.5 hectares to an astounding 0.28 hectares per person.¹¹ Unfortunately, this does not suddenly clear up tons of land for humans to dwell in; as necessity is the mother of invention, the increases in crop yields have been driven by increases in population demanding that we feed more and more people. In 1950, the world population was 2.5 billion people;¹² now in 2024, the world population is estimated to be 8.1 billion people.¹³

Monocultures
One major change to the food supply due to the linking of global trade between the Old World and the New World was the spread of corn. Having been cultivated in North America for several hundred years at that point, it was vital to the colonists’ survival, and future generations of immigrants continued to turn to it as a staple crop.¹⁴ The United States government heavily promoted the usage of pesticides in crops from the 1950s onwards, and concurrently with that, pest- and pesticide-resistant strains of seeds were bred (and eventually genetically modified) and sold on the market for a high price.¹⁵ Monsanto released their Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996, their first biotech crop capable of tolerating the Roundup herbicide, as well as genetically engineered cotton that was resistant to insect damage.¹⁶

These changes ushered in huge increases in crop yields, at the expense of long-term human health; cancer rates have increased continuously since the 1920s,¹⁷ with many studies linking pesticides to the increase in cancer rates.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ The predominance of corn in the American diet, and then the global diet, is linked to the increase in obesity rates via high fructose corn syrup consumption.²¹ However, with this, we have seen the lowest rate of humans dying due to famine in all of history over the last 50 years.²² Perhaps it’s a worthy trade to not die of starvation, even if the food will eventually give you some type of cancer; you either die young or die old.

Factory Farming
An estimated 99% of livestock cultivated in the United States are raised in factory farms.²³

In a factory farm, animals are raised in as dense enclosures as possible. For pasture raised chickens, it is recommended that farmers limit their number of chickens to about 1,000 chickens per 2.5 acres of grazing land, giving each chicken about 108 square feet of space to roam.²⁴ In contrast, on a factory farm, you may see 20,000 chickens in a 16,000 square foot enclosure, resulting in less than a single square foot of space for each bird.²⁵ This is accomplished with battery cages for hens, preventing them from moving much but especially from attacking other birds, as animals get aggressive when caged. The proportions for pasture vs. factory raised cows and pigs are similarly stark; for a cow, you need an estimated 4 acres of land for each cow to graze on,²⁶ but in a feedlot, you can expect a density of about 2 cows per acre.²⁷For pigs, it’s recommended to keep pasture-raised pigs to about 25 pigs per acre,²⁸ resulting in about 1742 square feet of space per pig, but in factory farms, they’re packed in dense crates that allow little movement, typically resulting in about 8 square feet of space per pig.²⁹

The consequences of animals living in such confined spaces is that their meat is often lower quality than pasture raised animals,³⁰ as it is fattier with the Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acid ratio reversed from the ideal for human health, resulting in long-term health problems if you consume a lot of factory farmed meat. Perhaps a more cogent concern is that the cramped conditions that these animals are raised in leads to the germination of superbugs; an estimated 73% of antibiotics produced worldwide are used directly on farm animals, leading to drug resistance in the animals that may transfer over to the humans that consume them.³¹ As more than 90 million chickens have been slaughtered since the current bird flu outbreak began in 2022,³² one has to wonder if the uptick in resistance to influenza antivirals is the culprit.³³ Given the abundant theories that COVID-19 originated from an animal market,³⁴ ³⁵ ³⁶ this highlights the strong possibility that more pandemics are coming due to our livestock rearing practices.

Globalization

Land Use

The distribution of land usage has shifted significantly in the past several centuries. While one might expect the huge gains in crop yields to result in less land used for farming overall, the reverse is true; on average, we now eat meat heavier diets than at any other point in history,³⁷ resulting in a global arable land utility of 50%.³⁸ In other words, there is simply no more land for us to begin farming; we are using as much land as is possible to produce food for humans.

One makeshift solution could be to shift people’s tastes away from meat; it’s estimated that more than 75% of that utilized arable land is used for animal agriculture, either directly for livestock grazing or for growing crops fed to livestock.³⁹ However, I question if it really matters in the end; while India only uses 3.52% of its arable land to raise livestock, it uses 51.95% of its arable land for farming crops for human consumption,⁴⁰ so it seems like it all comes out in the wash. India is also in a different situation than many other countries due to the predominance of Hinduism; cows wander the streets in Hindu villages unbothered,⁴¹ whereas I’d surmise that in any other country they’d be eaten pretty quickly.

However, from that, we can envision what the world would be like without animal agriculture at all: wild animals would be roaming the streets. Animal agriculture is humanity’s primary method for population control of wild species. Through artificial selection, we have cultivated breeds that are docile and tasty; without that process, we would still be hunting all manner of wild animals. The maintenance of prey animals means that farmers are invested in keeping predator species in check. Since it doesn’t seem like humanity is about to abandon land that we’ve cultivated so it can be reclaimed by nature, the alternate course that reducing captive animal populations could lead to is even more terrifying to me; there could be a resulting species die-off of any remaining wild predators that cull herds as a food source. In reality, it seems like we should look at the current land allotment as very near the maximum utilization for feeding humans on this planet.

One could also raise the point that we can shift tastes towards seafood, so that the oceans could become a more major source of nutrition. Unfortunately, the oceans may be approaching their own limits as well; there are dead zones arising from agricultural runoff⁴² as well as the infamous Pacific Garbage Patch spanning 1.6 million square kilometers and home to 79 million tons of plastic waste.⁴³

We must simply confront the truth: We are rapidly approaching hard limits for food production.

Shipping and Logistics

Perhaps one lever that we could hope to pull in order to ease the upcoming tension would be to optimize trade routes. After all, if 38% of food is lost to spoilage,⁴⁴ then surely there are opportunities to salvage some of the food that currently goes to waste. However, considering that the majority of that spoilage is due to consumer behavior, not due to the supply chain,⁴⁵ any optimizations would be minor gains.

As it is, the international food supply chain largely owes its modern origins to the spread of fast food. From 1950 to 1997, the average American farm doubled in size while the number of farms was halved.⁴⁶ The share of Americans employed in agriculture decreased from 47% to a mere 2%.⁴⁷ With that, we began exporting huge amounts of meat; across the same time frame, North American meat exports tripled, from 19.58 million tons in 1961 to 63.99 million tons in 2022.⁴⁸ A huge factor in enabling this trade was the expansion of American fast food restaurants into other countries. China, for example, opened its first KFC in Beijing in 1987,⁴⁹ and its first McDonald’s in Shenzhen in 1990.⁵⁰ Given that McDonald’s purchases just under 1 million tons of beef annually,⁵¹ they are a huge driver in shipping their product around the globe. As they flash freeze every patty and even note that most burgers are then served 2 to 3 weeks after the cow is slaughtered,⁵² this time frame would fully account for shipping times and logistical concerns. In other words, their supply chain is probably not losing much product due to spoilage in transit.

All in all, any salvaging of food along the supply chain would only result in marginally more available food overall; we may be able to save a fraction of the food that gets wasted, but it seems that food will inherently go bad and get damaged in transit, and people will always lose some of their groceries due to spoilage.

The Future

So then, now we get to the big question: What is the future of food? How many people can we sustain on this planet? With what diets?

Veganism?

A knee-jerk reaction may be to recommend veganism, as a vegan diet purportedly only requires 25% of the land usage compared to an omnivorous diet,⁵³ but as I pointed out above, we have cultivated the earth to enable animal husbandry, and suddenly dismantling that wouldn’t result in the romanticized return to nature that some envision. It could result in an immediate ecosystem collapse, or a piecemeal failure of the nearby civilization. Grazing pastures aren’t necessarily suited to be repurposed as farmland for crops; if the soil quality is poor, the land would remain unchanged, but would now be bereft of livestock and thus would get overrun by wild animals, resulting in less available food to humans.

And then, if we were all vegans, what exactly would we do with the animals that we have to kill by necessity? Wouldn’t it be worse to have to kill invasive species and then have nothing to do with the remains? The result would be that we’d toss the corpses into the woods and that would lure predators into human settlements.

Pastures overrun by wild prey, luring in wild predators — a return to nature, in which we all get eaten by bears!

Of course, the biggest and most obvious barrier is that most people simply don’t want to stop eating meat. The arguments about ethics or climate change do nothing to sway them; if our consumption of cooked meat allowed our brains to evolve to be capable of higher thinking,⁵⁴ then presumably there is a very strong drive in people to continue eating meat.

There are minor logistics chains improvements on the horizon, such as robots that will prepare our food,⁵⁵ and self-driving delivery cars,⁵⁶ which could potentially reduce food waste towards the end of the retail chain.

However, one large question remains — how do we feed the whole planet?

Current estimates indicate that the population of the earth will be 10.3 billion by 2080.⁵⁷ The major problem with raising livestock, as compared to housing humans, is that humans can be stacked vertically, but livestock cannot. Animals need to be raised in a single-story building. Their compounded weight is beyond any regular building code; they also need sunlight every day, ideally with time to run around outside, and the concept of evacuating them in a fire scenario is too chaotic for me to imagine. And to be real — can you imagine the smell and the noise? What would a farmer do with all the poop? There is no “parking garage for chickens” on the horizon. We must instead confront that we are at the limit for meat production.

The World’s Warring States Period

Unfortunately, there is no pithy conclusion to this. This dilemma will, instead, give rise to the World’s Warring States Period for the next 100 years.

All of humanity will have to shift its mindset to reflect that infinite population growth on this planet is not possible. What that will mean is that individuals will have to sacrifice in times of scarcity, and skirmishes over food, water, and land access will become common. Meat producers and countries with other food and water surpluses will gain power, while countries that cannot export food will lose influence on the world stage. Ultimately, borders may be retooled a bit to reflect shifting alliances and power seats, but my prediction is that the world map in 100 years would look largely the same at a quick glance.

However, human culture will change. Now that we are all connected by the internet, people will have to recalibrate their brains to understand the impact of their decisions: which decisions affect just them, vs. their community around them, vs. the whole world. As always, education will be paramount in importance, but as we know in America, a cutthroat attitude in business gets the job done as well.

Bon appétit! 🍝