George Monbiot

It could be this fertilizer supply shock or indeed the oil supply shock.

um it could be something else completely i mean no one predicted that the subprime mortgage crisis would be the event which tipped the financial system i mean that is tiny by comparison to the size of the financial system but you know this is what happens when a system is prone to collapse a small knock can tip the whole thing over and if that does happen

I mean, it's just unthinkable.

It's very hard to get your head around the scale of what that would mean, because it would suddenly mean the global supply chain's breaking.

It's not that food would disappear, but the food would be stuck in the fields or in the silos or in the container ports, and it wouldn't be reaching people.

So, for instance, if just one of the big corporations goes down, and on one estimate, four corporations control 90% of global grain trade, one of those goes down, triggers a domino effect in that market, which is pretty well what happened with the banks, then, poof, that whole supply chain has just disappeared.

So there might still be food being produced, but it can't get to the people who need that food.

And suddenly we're in a situation where rich people will get to eat and poor people won't.

Oh, we can't leave it till then.

I mean, if we sit around and wait for collapse, there might be no coming back from that because it has a whole series of ripple effects, which then basically the whole structure becomes financially inviolable.

The farmers go bankrupt because they can't sell the produce.

The traders go bankrupt because they can't shift the produce.

The shelves clear, there are riots, people starve.

You know, there could be no coming back from that.

It could be a sort of civilisational end point.

I know.

Well, this is why we desperately need protest movements and we desperately need people to mobilize.

And, you know, we need to get the politicians by the lapels and say, you've got to deal with this and you've got to deal with it now.

And, you know, the fundamental problem is that they listen to the very rich and they don't listen to the rest.

You know, it's the billionaires, it's the oligarchs, it's the corporations that they're listening to.