Excerpts from an article by Adam Hanieh on the FT “The new high-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution, by contrast, could only deliver their promised output through large and repeated applications of industrial fertilisers, especially nitrogen-based products such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Since many of these fertilisers are derived from natural gas, the Green Revolution meant that the world’s food production became ever more closely tied to a constantly increasing supply of hydrocarbon inputs. “Doubts have long been expressed about the sustainability of this fossil fuel-based food system. But as oil and gas prices have risen steeply amid the US-Israeli war on Iran and a significant part of the global fertiliser trade has been brought to a standstill, its potential vulnerabilities have been made clear. “The current moment differs from those earlier crises in one crucial respect. During the past two decades, Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Em...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51