“There are lots of different components to food security,” the Guardian columnist George Monbiot tells Nosheen Iqbal. “If you are totally dependent on the production within your own borders, well, one bad harvest can throw you into insecurity.

“So, a large part of our national food security, and this applies to many countries around the world, is now highly dependent on global trade. It means that if you have harvest failure in one part of the world, then the gap can be filled by production elsewhere.”

However, George argues, our global system has now lost its resilience – and presents risks that could be catastrophic.

“In order to maintain these incredibly high levels of food production, we need a great deal of inputs, lots of fertiliser, lots of trade around the world,” George explains. “And those are delivered through a system which has been losing some of the absolutely crucial elements of systemic resilience. And my concern, which I’ve been voicing for several years now, is that the global food system looks rather like the global financial system in the approach to 2008.

“Once a system loses its resilience, you can’t predict what event could cause a tipping point, what event could cause that system to slide off a cliff, to collapse completely. In the end, it was the US subprime crisis which caused the very near collapse of the global financial system, requiring a bailout of trillions. It could be the Iran war which does it for the global food systems.”

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