Towards the end of 2008, a report issued by the National Intelligence Council (summarised here) offered its predictions on what the world may look like in 2025. Among its best guesses are increased conflicts over scarcer resources.

The report has stimulated a lot of reflection on the mechanism we most often use to maintainsecurity and stability; namely, trade. It is frequently said that economic systems are best suited to keep the world at peace. The example of the EU, for one, demonstrates a group of formerly warring states successfully held together by trade and mutual economic interest.

While the trade = peace maxim may be true in times of relative prosperity over the short term, it may not hold up in the long-term—at least not using our current economic model. Prosperous trade ideally creates wealth for all nations involved; however, most trade is based upon unsustainable extraction of natural capital. Economic ties keep the peace only until the fruits of those economic ties (the financially uncounted social and environmental damage we incur to create trade) come crashing down on us.

Once conditions of natural capital and ecosystem services deteriorate, a number of unpleasant scenarios become possible For example, there may be landslides from erosion due to profitable logging, or water shortages from selling or diverting profitable water. With too many converging “natural disasters,” isolated misery turns easily to shared discontent and anger, and social forces can be brought to bear on natural ones. Domestic stability unravels, nationalism gains popular appeal, sabre-rattling begins, and border tensions simmer as a convenient outlet for internal problems. Conversely, a neighbour may decide it is really a regional stability-promoting favour to annex another neighbour in trouble (and, conveniently, its water/natural gas/oil/good cropland).

Most simple of all, trading nations that have been eating up the same forests and water and soil begin to fight over the dregs. A recent article in the UK Times discusses how water shortages have had a more catalytic role in wars over the past 500 years than previously thought. 

Once a country is domestically shaky, it just takes one stress that is otherwise manageable in isolation (e.g. a bad crop year, or the breaking point in an economy built on debt and borrowing) to tip the situation towards instability and violence. Domestic upheaval creates regional instability.

There are three critical steps to ensuring peace:

1. Healthy environment and people

2. Stable international trade based on #1

3. Peace based on #2

Yet our international diplomatic efforts typically begin with trade negotiators at the level of #2. We try to base peace on trade as if trade were divorced from healthy environment and people. This is an incomplete picture of where stability actually comes from. And, if the authors of the National Intelligence Council report are correct, we are coming to the point where we will experience more conflict over the resources we diminished trying to generate trade and stability.

Lastly, does it not seem somehow disingenuous to base peace on the desire for profit, on a few more percentage points growth over last year? To base peace on the slippery scare to greed?

[Read More]