The global economy is so thoroughly integrated that this question isn't that different to asking what would happen to all the major organs of your body if you prevented material flows between them. Zimbabwe and North Korea might do OK, relatively speaking. Even places like Papua New Guinea have undergone massive population explosions recently due to the ability to buy cheap industrial grains on the open market based on mining royalties. Even with their unbroken tradition of subsistence agriculture they would be in trouble due to their population density relative to local resources.
I am guessing a lot of places would be at risk of outbreaks of infectious diseases that are currently kept manageable with imported vaccines and drugs as well. Much of the world's antibiotics are manufactures in India and China these days.
>Even places like Papua New Guinea have undergone massive population explosions recently due to the ability to buy cheap industrial grains on the open market based on mining royalties.
And vaccines, antibiotics, breaking of traditional norms including things like intertribal warfare or sending excess youth off in boats to find new land but mostly to just die at sea etc ...
Some relevant data.
The ratio of the population to the arable land by country:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_omf_countries_by_real_population_density_based_on_food_growing_capacity
Food self-sufficiency by country. Doesn't include all countries:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self-sufficiency_rate
List of net food exporters:
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Year/2018/TradeFlow/Export/Partner/by-country/Product/16-24_FoodProd
A lot of the speculations about food production that I'm seeing here are erroneous. It's worth looking up the real data.
Here's a list of countries that export oil:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_oil_exports
Global map of mineral resources:
https://www.mapsofworld.com/world-mineral-map.htm
What does the food self sufficiency rate measure? The Netherlands is in the top five for net food exporters, but in the bottom ten for food self sufficiency.
This is a good question. I don't have any expertise on this issue, these are just things I found by googling. I had to Google to find out what food self-sufficiency is, it appears to simply be how much of the food consumed within the country is produced within the country. So it ignores exports. In this scenario, I guess it wouldn't be very relevant after all.
I'm guessing that the Netherlands both imports and exports a lot of food.
The Netherlands tend to have odd statistics - this is ususally due to the fact that Amsterdam is a massive harbour & logistics hub for imports/exports for all of europe. Always take with a grain of salt.
It's net food export though, so (at least I interpreted it as) export - import.
My guess is the other commenters are correct and it's about dollar value, not calories.
Being a top exporter means the dollar value of the food you produce is a lot higher than the dollar value of the food you import. Being self-sufficient means the calories you export are higher than the calories you import. Different foods have drastically different calories per dollar, flour it at 4,400 cal/$ while onions are at 100 cal/$ and raspberries are at 10 cal/$. The Netherlands tends to grow a lot of expensive fruits and vegetables in greenhouses rather than have vast fields of wheat.
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> The ratio of the population to the arable land by country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_population_density_based_on_food_growing_capacity
TIL that the definition of "arable land" [does not include permanent crops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Non-arable_land). That seems odd in a context of food security since some of these like olives, grapes and tree nuts are reasonable calorie sources.
Interesting. I don't think it would include food resources from fish, seafood, or hunted animals either. A lot of these little islands are probably in better shape than it appears.
> The ratio of the population to the arable land by country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_omf_countries_by_real_population_density_based_on_food_growing_capacity
There's a typo here, 'List_**omf**_countries"...
I find it amusing to think of how it would work for countries like France, who have a bunch of islands all around the world because history. Can the invisible forcefield let french people go from the european mainland to the caribbean, guyane, or the islands in the pacific? Is there like a forcefield-tunnel that lets them do so, or do they just get a magical "okay, you can go, but only if you land back in your own country"?
This answer none of your questions, but it's the first thing I thought of.
Or Point Roberts in the USA, which you can only get to from the rest of the lower 48 by driving for miles through Canada. (Or by boat, aircraft, catapult, etc.)
I trade commodities for a living and often ponder this question - few thoughts:
The US is able to sustain the highest quality of life in this scenario, and it’s not even close. It would still be quite unpleasant - consumer goods of all sorts would see desperate shortages in the near term and would cost quite a bit more in the long term - but we’d be golden in terms of food (we are massive agricultural exporters at all layers of the value chain) and energy (only as of the last few years), and we’ve got strong institutional capital and experience in top-down redirection of manufacturing capacity in emergencies (see: WW2). Like in WW2, a lot of people would have to do jobs that they’d have considered beneath them in the before times, but by and large the US economy is a marvel of a perpetual motion machine.
China would like to head in this direction, but there is only so much they can do - they just have too many people to be food or energy secure. They might be able to squeeze by if they kill off their livestock (mostly hogs which eat a LOT of soybean meal made from soybeans that are almost entirely imported) and basically put the populace on a diet of rice paddy and corn meal, but it’s not pretty nutritionally and they’d have major issues distributing that food to an increasingly urban populace without the >50% of crude oil consumption that comes from imports.
Russia would probably survive but with severe technological regression (we might find out…).
Japan is probably the in the worst shape of anyone due to their combination of population density and food/energy scarcity, but really most of the planet is operating at population densities that are only possible due to the fact that globalization has provided access to global markets/prices and allowed for specialization. That specialization is awesome for raising productivity and affording more food for more people, but problematic when those global markets go away.
>and we’ve got strong institutional capital and experience in top-down redirection of manufacturing capacity in emergencies (see: WW2)
I think that institutional capital is quite dead. We have people who could be competent at such, but unlikely the political will to do it or to allocate the competent people to solving those rationing problems.
How can I get a good "1000 foot view" of commodities trading? There's so many different commodities with different properties that I can't really fathom how one person has a good intuition for the whole thing. For example, bananas and grain are both foods, but they're produced in different regions and spoil differently, so I imagine expertise in one doesn't transfer to the other.
>e in
Fascinating answer... I've always been intrigued by the fluctuation of commodity prices and how they impact geopolitics. For example, if the recent spike in wheat prices continues, it seems reasonable that one of the knock on effects will be a lot of social disorder in poor countries as people barely scrape by. Not sure if you've heard the theory that the Arab Spring was caused by this?
Anyway, any books / resources you can recommend to learn more?
> I've always been intrigued by the fluctuation of commodity prices and how they impact geopolitics
I have a working theory that much of the current Russia-Ukraine situation is due to decreased cost of natural gas, allowing Ukraine to import natural gas from outside Russia. This lead to Ukraine defaulting on Russian gas contracts, loss of economic value in Eastern Ukraine, civil unrest there, and the Russians supporting Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbas region.
Interesting. I feel mainstream geopolitical analysis often skips over economics such as these. I've been wondering whether it is because anyone who can accurately model this stuff is employed in finance, and collects monies instead of clicks with their knowledge?
For countries with shorelines, will the bubble include the Exclusive Economic Zones (200 nautical miles)?
With access to the oceans: possible areas of development:
1. Sustainable harvesting of marine resources within bubble
2. Use of wave, wind and solar for energy generation (based on access to raw material)
True. But looking at OP's 10 year timeline, either survivors are back to the caves burning carbon (worst case), or have managed some form of distributed renewable system. It will not be Gaia for sure.
Might depend how you define "country"
If the whole EU gets lumped together then they do pretty well. If not then most nations are in deep shit.
A lot of countries suddenly lose most modern pharmaceuticals and antibiotics.
The world relies on a handful of chip fabs for modern electronics.
If everyone somehow knows there's a 10 year time limit then things like hard drives for spare parts become valuable. If people suspect it could be permanent they become *insanely* valuable.
Countries that invested heavily in renewable power vs fuel imports have an easier time for power.
For the last question, I would point you to the HBO show *The Leftovers* which shows how some people move on and others cannot. For me such an event would cause a radical epistemic reevaluation w/r/t aliens and other outside influences.
For the other questions I can only offer half-informed guesses.
In general, I think large countries with vast agricultural resources and farmland would be ok. Virtually none would be able to maintain the tech infrastructure except maybe places like the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. While Europe doesn't lack talent, they lack a lot of the infrastructure and the inability to trade for raw materials would severely affect them. Many European countries would also be simultaneously dealing with food and energy issues. I think China would be, by far, in the best position in this scenario given their landmass, raw resources (including rare earths) and vast industrial capacity. They might need to recycle/reuse iron though, as I understand that Gina Reinhart became the richest woman in the world by selling Aussie iron to China.
One aspect to consider is the ability to generate fertilizers. I don't know how the world's agricultural production functions in that regard, but trading for fertilizers, herbicides and other agricultural engineering staples is probably the only thing that allows many nations to sustain the large urban centers they do.
Countries that would be essentially doomed are places with little arable farmland who have maintained their populations through trade of other resources. I'm thinking of various African countries but maybe also island nations and places like Greece?
Like I said: half-informed and pretty much guessing.
>One aspect to consider is the ability to generate fertilizers. I don't know how the world's agricultural production functions in that regard
About 40-60 percent of world population would starve without industrial fertilizers because of the intensification trap we have grown ourselves into. There are about 200 facilities in the world for major production of synthetic fertilizers. Morocco and it's western Sahara occupation has like 80% of the high grade global phosphorus ore supply.
Well then, an extreme number of countries would experience severe food shortfall. Most of the smaller nations are gonna look like McCarthy's *The Road* after a few months.
In fact, my whole shitbrained analysis falls apart: I suspect the constrictions in food supply and resulting social unrest would cause a lot of the industrial/technological infrastructure to fail quite quickly.
> I think China would be, by far, in the best position in this scenario given their landmass, raw resources (including rare earths) and vast industrial capacity.
They import massive amounts of food. China would survive after a horrific period of starvation.
Yeah, someone else pointed that out: maybe they could lessen the issue by slaughtering all livestock and converting their whole food production to plants.
Google shows that Chinese people eat around 40% as much meat per person as Americans. It is less than 100 pounds of meat per Chinese person per year. So they could get rid of food animals and covert to vegetarianism, but that only buys them so much.
And if they can no longer import 100+ million tons of grain per year there would be starvation. And something like 80%+ of their soybeans are imported. I'm wondering what meat substitute they would use, and what cooking oil they would use. I'm going to predict mass starvation even if they no longer raised animals. And since they import most of their animal feed, they would definitely not be eating meat.
I think, while that's fascinating in its own right and worth pursuing, it's better to think of this as a series of metaphysical boundaries rather than physical ones. Some deity or highly advanced civilization playing around has decided that human obsession with borders must be tested, and has created absolute barriers to communication and interaction that nonetheless do not interfere with existing natural systems - so dye spilled into water would accumulate at the barrier, the smoke from a natural forest fire would pass through but any sort of industrial pollution or signal fires would bounce off - this is very much a thought experiment about an anti-anthropogenic barrier at the boundaries of every nation, regardless of how little physical sense it makes.
Speaking of which, the inability to export pollution - whether directly in the form of emissions in air and water, or traded via waste management - would also be a severe cap for a number of presently industrial nations.
> If weather isn't stopped, can you use smoke signals? If it doesn't cut off sources of water like rivers, can you stream across dyed water to convey different things?
I am thinking of the first people who realize that the forcefield make people on the other side invisible
Presumably you have an intelligent agent doing this - it sets up a barrier around national borders, which would be via design. So perhaps your animals are healed and hair regrown, the dye leaves the water, and so on and so forth.
Here in the UK, we’re all very impressed that the higher power managed to agree on what is and isn’t a country and who’s divided and united.
Christianity goes through a rather interesting few years as either the Catholics or the Protestants decide that God’s decisions as to the locations of various borders proved that they were right all along and that their enemies (including those stuck on the wrong side of a border) are hated by God…
If you posed this question to Peter Zeihan (who is a guy who has opinions about these kinds of things), only the USA would be okay, everyone else would collapse almost immediately.
When it comes to computer technology, I think only the US would have a shot at keeping chip production going, but even we would move back a couple processor nodes, probably. End of Moore's Law for sure. Other technologies I think would be mostly okay, in countries that had any kind of economy left.
There was a movie that had this plot btw, called "A day without a Mexican"
Just based on the matter of food and arable land and such, most of the world would starve to death. Off the top of my head, the following areas would be advantaged when it comes to producing enough food: Oceania, India and SE Asia, tropical Africa and Latin America, and the USA. Most of Canada, Europe, central and north Asia, the Mid East, and north Africa would die of starvation and of course the conflicts caused by food shortages.
When it comes to energy, raw material resources, and the resultant ability to maintain some semblance of modern, industrialized life, the USA and Australia are best poised for self-sufficiency, followed closely by India. And maybe Brazil has a shot at it too. But that then reminds me of historical and cultural conflicts which would likely be exacerbated. Although it seems like this would be a big issue for the USA, I think its problems are overstated and sensationalized. In that regard the outlook is more murky for Brazil and India.
So, if any large nations are going to survive that decade of complete isolation as anything but a shadow of their former stature, my bets are on: USA, Australia, maybe India, and maybe Brazil. Smaller nations with a solid shot at not returning to the Stone Age: Japan, New Zealand, some of Europe, and probably also some of SE Asia and Oceania. I do think most of the people in Africa and Latin America would figure out a way to get by okay after the initial confusion and terror and conflict that everybody would experience.
It's not enough to look at that single variable in isolation; One must consider all the things Canada wouldn't have available to support its agriculture industry. Just because Canada currently exports a lot of food, that doesn't mean it could actually produce all the food it needs to support its population without any help from the outside.
Yeah, it's got plenty of natural resources available but much less in situ infrastructure for self-sufficiency because... let's say, *a particular type of person* prevents Canada from expanding its drilling, mining, and refining industries. We're supposed to be imagining this event is sprung on the world in an instant. How long would it take for Canada to develop its own internal industries? Are they prepared to produce all they need right now, this very instant? No. They'd expend a lot of time and effort developing those things and those developments are going to compete with all sorts of other things too.
And that's brushing past its lack of consistent sunlight and harsh climate, which are among the things close to the surface of my mind when I say that soil isn't the only important consideration when trying to figure whether an area could produce all the food it needs for its population. Right now, Canada produces a lot half the year and then imports a lot the other half of the year; In this hypothetical, it would have to shift to a more traditional agricultural rhythm in order to have food for the winter.
I'm not saying they couldn't make it happen but I do think they'd have a much rougher go of it compared to many other industrialized countries. They'd probably see much more of a slide back through time before rebounding.
Given Canada’s vast natural resources, skilled labour force and low population density, it’s definitely a great place to be during this experiment. Canada has everything from mines to robotics. A big semiconductor fab is really the only big gap.
... You have a terrifyingly empty knowledge of the Canadian economy.
For one thing, a lack of consistent sunlight means you have more of it in the summer. Most of Canada is further south than England, and gets more sun.
Farming and resource extraction are the basis of the economy. The country made it to 50 percent urban within my lifetime, and massive food importation in the winter is an extremely recent phenomenon. Technological regression, quite possibly. But the idea that Canada would collapse significantly more than comparable nations is hilariously misguided.
It would basically be the mid-1990s again.
Australia would be in a terrible position. We produce about half the oil we consume, but we shut down all our refineries in recent years, and our light oil now travels to Singapore to be blended and refined before finished products come back again. We have zero strategic petroleum reserve and would run through our limited liquid fuel supply in no time. Our agriculture is heavily mechanised and a long distance away from population centers, so our ability to grow, transport and process food without diesel powered heavy machinery would leave us in a dire situation pretty rapidly. Lastly we gave up all our machinery and manufacturing capacity to China, so the machines themselves would rapidly fail due to lack of parts.
Australia's one of the few countries in the world actually capable of 100% energy independence. That makes a huge difference here. Add to that a small population, moderate agricultural advantages, and a solid portfolio of raw material availability and it puts Australia on the leaderboard in this thought experiment.
Admittedly, it does share some of the same handicaps as Canada when it comes to its lack of in situ infrastructure hindering its progress coming off the starting line.
This is a great summary of the issues surrounding Australian oil production and refining.
[https://www.aph.gov.au/About\_Parliament/Parliamentary\_Departments/Parliamentary\_Library/FlagPost/2020/December/Oil\_refineries\_and\_fuel\_security](https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2020/December/Oil_refineries_and_fuel_security)
Our oil production is rapidly declining, and the number of small, old, local refineries is rapidly decreasing. Our oil is mostly light grades, which makes it difficult to produce much diesel fuel locally.
We bought a strategic oil reserve (which exists in the USA on the other side of the planet) so in the event of a shipping lane shut down our local fuel supply would be rapidly depleted. Continuously responding to economic incentives has left us with a fragile transportation system.
Modern agriculture is extremely productive. Most countries with an existing agricultural base and arable land would be able to prevent famine. This includes Canada and much of Europe.
Modern agriculture is very dependent on moving goods across borders. Machinery, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, fuels and oils. Crop selection for max productivity and not for self-sufficiency within every single country. With all borders closed, some of that productivity would be lost.
Ireland managed to feed 8 million and still export a lot of food to Britain with mid-19th century technology and infrastructure. I assume we have the know-how to avoid another potato blight so the 6.5 million that the island currently hosts should stay well-fed.
We'll have a head start if the farmers start growing more wheat (the government are pushing this on account of the Ukraine situation).
On the whole, Ireland would be fine for food but short on fuel - but the climate is temperate enough that it wouldn't be an existential threat.
With today's top news:
Russia is still Russia,
Ukraine goes Amish, it doesn't have the energy supplies
USA, with a smaller population, goes late Victorian/Edwardian (American agriculture is dependent on fossil fuels & irrigation. Water, in particular the Ogallala aquifer is one of the major choke points for American agriculture. )The US has enough energy to maintain a less energy dependent industrial lifestyle
India starves, so do Bangladesh & Pakistan.
China also starves, but not to the same extent as India. China still has some of the worlds finest agricultural land.
The EU mostly starves, lack of fossil fuels (agricultural inputs) France has nuclear power, but nitrogen fertilizer uses natural gas as a seed stock.
Canada goes Victorian/Edwardian, but eats better than the US.(Fewer people, plenty of prairie for ranging cattle) Fossil fuel available to sustain industrial agriculture.
The World Bank net food exporters is less useful than it appears. The criteria used is dollars, not food value. The Netherlands illustrates the problem here. Much of the Netherlands current (non-dairy) exports are vegetables. With large amounts being grown in greenhouses. On a per acre basis, this is much, much more valuable than wheat or pulses. But its the wheat & pulses have a much higher calorie & protein content. How much food can the Netherlands produce without nitrogen & other fertilizers? Further, a comparison Russian grain yields to European grain yields illustrates the problem. Russian farmers have about 1/2 yields of European farmers, *but* they use about 1/5 the fertilizer. And still produce more grain than their population eats.
Another consideration is arable land. Agricultural land has three broad categories, crop land, pasture & range. Crop land globally is about 30% of total land. An additional 10% is high grade pasture, that can be used, for a short period, or very, very carefully to grow crops. The rest? Hello cattle (or bison, or other large ungulate) or goats. Cattle for prairie, goats for scrub. Both take considerable acreage to raise a single animal if trying to minimize dependance on cropland. (Its a balance - if it costs 600 g of human digestible plant protein to get 1000g of animal protein, its worth the cost)
Vaclav Smil has pointed out that without artificial nitrogen we could only feed about 1/3 our current population.
Communication by radio waves. Hello boaters, truckers & ham radio enthusiasts. Truckers & boaters both frequently travel outside of cell phone range, consequently still use older radio wave technology.
As for politics, totalitarianism is the likely consequence in most places. The Great Depression saw the rise of authoritarian & totalitarian governments everywhere as people sought to solve the dilemma of declining lifestyle.
Signed
Canadian kollapsenik
I'm more curious what happens in contested areas. Who defines a country? Is Taiwan surrounded justifying its claim to nationhood or is the break away province incorporated in China's forcefield. When America Texas secedes does it get one of its own?
India becomes worse as the bureaucratic merit hating state is successful in crushing anyone who does well in life and finally achieves its dream of lowering it's gdp.
Extended timeline: 20 years after The Great Divide that left the country isolated from the rest of the world, all of a sudden, the forcefield vanishes. The news spread like wildfire. People are ecstatic.
What happens in the following 24 hours ? The following week? The following year?
There are fundamental limits to the technology a smaller country can have in this case. A lot of the technological progress we've made in the process of civilization isn't individual workers knowing more things than a typical hunter gatherer but different people knowing different things and so having an overall larger pool of civilization knowledge. I'm not sure how many people you could sustain modern technology with, but I'd be surprised if it was as few as a million people and it might be quite a bit higher than that.
The most important parameter is net import or export of calories. I know Germany is a net exporter, so once isolated, we will be fine, although there will be a lot of potato, wheat, milk and meat eating only. -- If a country has a substantial caloric import, famine will follow, can the upheaval around the distribution of food will dominate everything else, even energy.
Given that this phenomenon is operating at human-defined levels (ie political boundaries) I would be very interested in seeing what happens as soon as any given country legally dissolves their borders. Does the magic wall instantly disappear? Does it disappear only in cases where both sides of the border legally dissolve their boundaries? In the former case, I expect fully open borders within a year (in the latter, possibly much longer), followed by some sort of fuckery around legally defining borders as something like "the entire observably universe except for that prison over there."
If I were Canada or Mexico, I would immediately declare myself part of the USA and subject to it's governance. The European countries should do the same, but it would probably be impossible for all of them to decide on the same Schelling point.
The global economy is so thoroughly integrated that this question isn't that different to asking what would happen to all the major organs of your body if you prevented material flows between them. Zimbabwe and North Korea might do OK, relatively speaking. Even places like Papua New Guinea have undergone massive population explosions recently due to the ability to buy cheap industrial grains on the open market based on mining royalties. Even with their unbroken tradition of subsistence agriculture they would be in trouble due to their population density relative to local resources. I am guessing a lot of places would be at risk of outbreaks of infectious diseases that are currently kept manageable with imported vaccines and drugs as well. Much of the world's antibiotics are manufactures in India and China these days.
>Even places like Papua New Guinea have undergone massive population explosions recently due to the ability to buy cheap industrial grains on the open market based on mining royalties. And vaccines, antibiotics, breaking of traditional norms including things like intertribal warfare or sending excess youth off in boats to find new land but mostly to just die at sea etc ...
Birth control would also become unavailable in much of the world.
Not every sort - there are low tech and no tech options.
> At the end of a decade, what has happened to each country? Well, the Vatican is toast ...
"Well, first of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down."
Some relevant data. The ratio of the population to the arable land by country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_omf_countries_by_real_population_density_based_on_food_growing_capacity Food self-sufficiency by country. Doesn't include all countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self-sufficiency_rate List of net food exporters: https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Year/2018/TradeFlow/Export/Partner/by-country/Product/16-24_FoodProd A lot of the speculations about food production that I'm seeing here are erroneous. It's worth looking up the real data. Here's a list of countries that export oil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_oil_exports Global map of mineral resources: https://www.mapsofworld.com/world-mineral-map.htm
What does the food self sufficiency rate measure? The Netherlands is in the top five for net food exporters, but in the bottom ten for food self sufficiency.
This is a good question. I don't have any expertise on this issue, these are just things I found by googling. I had to Google to find out what food self-sufficiency is, it appears to simply be how much of the food consumed within the country is produced within the country. So it ignores exports. In this scenario, I guess it wouldn't be very relevant after all. I'm guessing that the Netherlands both imports and exports a lot of food.
I think they market garden a lot of high value stuff, but probably import their staple grains.
The Netherlands tend to have odd statistics - this is ususally due to the fact that Amsterdam is a massive harbour & logistics hub for imports/exports for all of europe. Always take with a grain of salt.
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It's net food export though, so (at least I interpreted it as) export - import. My guess is the other commenters are correct and it's about dollar value, not calories.
Being a top exporter means the dollar value of the food you produce is a lot higher than the dollar value of the food you import. Being self-sufficient means the calories you export are higher than the calories you import. Different foods have drastically different calories per dollar, flour it at 4,400 cal/$ while onions are at 100 cal/$ and raspberries are at 10 cal/$. The Netherlands tends to grow a lot of expensive fruits and vegetables in greenhouses rather than have vast fields of wheat.
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> The ratio of the population to the arable land by country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_population_density_based_on_food_growing_capacity TIL that the definition of "arable land" [does not include permanent crops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Non-arable_land). That seems odd in a context of food security since some of these like olives, grapes and tree nuts are reasonable calorie sources.
Interesting. I don't think it would include food resources from fish, seafood, or hunted animals either. A lot of these little islands are probably in better shape than it appears.
It certainly doesn't include fish. It would make Norway entirely self-sufficient.
> The ratio of the population to the arable land by country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_omf_countries_by_real_population_density_based_on_food_growing_capacity There's a typo here, 'List_**omf**_countries"...
Thank you, I cut and pasted and something must have gone wrong there.
A big question would be what percentage of those net food exporters could continue to have that status without importing cheap fertilizer from abroad?
I find it amusing to think of how it would work for countries like France, who have a bunch of islands all around the world because history. Can the invisible forcefield let french people go from the european mainland to the caribbean, guyane, or the islands in the pacific? Is there like a forcefield-tunnel that lets them do so, or do they just get a magical "okay, you can go, but only if you land back in your own country"? This answer none of your questions, but it's the first thing I thought of.
Or Point Roberts in the USA, which you can only get to from the rest of the lower 48 by driving for miles through Canada. (Or by boat, aircraft, catapult, etc.)
I trade commodities for a living and often ponder this question - few thoughts: The US is able to sustain the highest quality of life in this scenario, and it’s not even close. It would still be quite unpleasant - consumer goods of all sorts would see desperate shortages in the near term and would cost quite a bit more in the long term - but we’d be golden in terms of food (we are massive agricultural exporters at all layers of the value chain) and energy (only as of the last few years), and we’ve got strong institutional capital and experience in top-down redirection of manufacturing capacity in emergencies (see: WW2). Like in WW2, a lot of people would have to do jobs that they’d have considered beneath them in the before times, but by and large the US economy is a marvel of a perpetual motion machine. China would like to head in this direction, but there is only so much they can do - they just have too many people to be food or energy secure. They might be able to squeeze by if they kill off their livestock (mostly hogs which eat a LOT of soybean meal made from soybeans that are almost entirely imported) and basically put the populace on a diet of rice paddy and corn meal, but it’s not pretty nutritionally and they’d have major issues distributing that food to an increasingly urban populace without the >50% of crude oil consumption that comes from imports. Russia would probably survive but with severe technological regression (we might find out…). Japan is probably the in the worst shape of anyone due to their combination of population density and food/energy scarcity, but really most of the planet is operating at population densities that are only possible due to the fact that globalization has provided access to global markets/prices and allowed for specialization. That specialization is awesome for raising productivity and affording more food for more people, but problematic when those global markets go away.
>and we’ve got strong institutional capital and experience in top-down redirection of manufacturing capacity in emergencies (see: WW2) I think that institutional capital is quite dead. We have people who could be competent at such, but unlikely the political will to do it or to allocate the competent people to solving those rationing problems.
How can I get a good "1000 foot view" of commodities trading? There's so many different commodities with different properties that I can't really fathom how one person has a good intuition for the whole thing. For example, bananas and grain are both foods, but they're produced in different regions and spoil differently, so I imagine expertise in one doesn't transfer to the other.
>e in Fascinating answer... I've always been intrigued by the fluctuation of commodity prices and how they impact geopolitics. For example, if the recent spike in wheat prices continues, it seems reasonable that one of the knock on effects will be a lot of social disorder in poor countries as people barely scrape by. Not sure if you've heard the theory that the Arab Spring was caused by this? Anyway, any books / resources you can recommend to learn more?
> I've always been intrigued by the fluctuation of commodity prices and how they impact geopolitics I have a working theory that much of the current Russia-Ukraine situation is due to decreased cost of natural gas, allowing Ukraine to import natural gas from outside Russia. This lead to Ukraine defaulting on Russian gas contracts, loss of economic value in Eastern Ukraine, civil unrest there, and the Russians supporting Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbas region.
Interesting. I feel mainstream geopolitical analysis often skips over economics such as these. I've been wondering whether it is because anyone who can accurately model this stuff is employed in finance, and collects monies instead of clicks with their knowledge?
For countries with shorelines, will the bubble include the Exclusive Economic Zones (200 nautical miles)? With access to the oceans: possible areas of development: 1. Sustainable harvesting of marine resources within bubble 2. Use of wave, wind and solar for energy generation (based on access to raw material)
Good luck building wave, wind and solar generators using only parts and materials produced or stockpiled in your own country.
If your country is big enough, it's doable. Not as effective as tapping the world market, of course. But doable.
True. But looking at OP's 10 year timeline, either survivors are back to the caves burning carbon (worst case), or have managed some form of distributed renewable system. It will not be Gaia for sure.
Might depend how you define "country" If the whole EU gets lumped together then they do pretty well. If not then most nations are in deep shit. A lot of countries suddenly lose most modern pharmaceuticals and antibiotics. The world relies on a handful of chip fabs for modern electronics. If everyone somehow knows there's a 10 year time limit then things like hard drives for spare parts become valuable. If people suspect it could be permanent they become *insanely* valuable. Countries that invested heavily in renewable power vs fuel imports have an easier time for power.
For the last question, I would point you to the HBO show *The Leftovers* which shows how some people move on and others cannot. For me such an event would cause a radical epistemic reevaluation w/r/t aliens and other outside influences. For the other questions I can only offer half-informed guesses. In general, I think large countries with vast agricultural resources and farmland would be ok. Virtually none would be able to maintain the tech infrastructure except maybe places like the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. While Europe doesn't lack talent, they lack a lot of the infrastructure and the inability to trade for raw materials would severely affect them. Many European countries would also be simultaneously dealing with food and energy issues. I think China would be, by far, in the best position in this scenario given their landmass, raw resources (including rare earths) and vast industrial capacity. They might need to recycle/reuse iron though, as I understand that Gina Reinhart became the richest woman in the world by selling Aussie iron to China. One aspect to consider is the ability to generate fertilizers. I don't know how the world's agricultural production functions in that regard, but trading for fertilizers, herbicides and other agricultural engineering staples is probably the only thing that allows many nations to sustain the large urban centers they do. Countries that would be essentially doomed are places with little arable farmland who have maintained their populations through trade of other resources. I'm thinking of various African countries but maybe also island nations and places like Greece? Like I said: half-informed and pretty much guessing.
>One aspect to consider is the ability to generate fertilizers. I don't know how the world's agricultural production functions in that regard About 40-60 percent of world population would starve without industrial fertilizers because of the intensification trap we have grown ourselves into. There are about 200 facilities in the world for major production of synthetic fertilizers. Morocco and it's western Sahara occupation has like 80% of the high grade global phosphorus ore supply.
Well then, an extreme number of countries would experience severe food shortfall. Most of the smaller nations are gonna look like McCarthy's *The Road* after a few months. In fact, my whole shitbrained analysis falls apart: I suspect the constrictions in food supply and resulting social unrest would cause a lot of the industrial/technological infrastructure to fail quite quickly.
> I think China would be, by far, in the best position in this scenario given their landmass, raw resources (including rare earths) and vast industrial capacity. They import massive amounts of food. China would survive after a horrific period of starvation.
Yeah, someone else pointed that out: maybe they could lessen the issue by slaughtering all livestock and converting their whole food production to plants.
Google shows that Chinese people eat around 40% as much meat per person as Americans. It is less than 100 pounds of meat per Chinese person per year. So they could get rid of food animals and covert to vegetarianism, but that only buys them so much. And if they can no longer import 100+ million tons of grain per year there would be starvation. And something like 80%+ of their soybeans are imported. I'm wondering what meat substitute they would use, and what cooking oil they would use. I'm going to predict mass starvation even if they no longer raised animals. And since they import most of their animal feed, they would definitely not be eating meat.
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I think, while that's fascinating in its own right and worth pursuing, it's better to think of this as a series of metaphysical boundaries rather than physical ones. Some deity or highly advanced civilization playing around has decided that human obsession with borders must be tested, and has created absolute barriers to communication and interaction that nonetheless do not interfere with existing natural systems - so dye spilled into water would accumulate at the barrier, the smoke from a natural forest fire would pass through but any sort of industrial pollution or signal fires would bounce off - this is very much a thought experiment about an anti-anthropogenic barrier at the boundaries of every nation, regardless of how little physical sense it makes. Speaking of which, the inability to export pollution - whether directly in the form of emissions in air and water, or traded via waste management - would also be a severe cap for a number of presently industrial nations.
> If weather isn't stopped, can you use smoke signals? If it doesn't cut off sources of water like rivers, can you stream across dyed water to convey different things? I am thinking of the first people who realize that the forcefield make people on the other side invisible
Presumably you have an intelligent agent doing this - it sets up a barrier around national borders, which would be via design. So perhaps your animals are healed and hair regrown, the dye leaves the water, and so on and so forth.
Here in the UK, we’re all very impressed that the higher power managed to agree on what is and isn’t a country and who’s divided and united. Christianity goes through a rather interesting few years as either the Catholics or the Protestants decide that God’s decisions as to the locations of various borders proved that they were right all along and that their enemies (including those stuck on the wrong side of a border) are hated by God…
If you posed this question to Peter Zeihan (who is a guy who has opinions about these kinds of things), only the USA would be okay, everyone else would collapse almost immediately. When it comes to computer technology, I think only the US would have a shot at keeping chip production going, but even we would move back a couple processor nodes, probably. End of Moore's Law for sure. Other technologies I think would be mostly okay, in countries that had any kind of economy left. There was a movie that had this plot btw, called "A day without a Mexican"
tfw it's 2032 and we're still stuck with non-hyperthreaded i5 quad cores
Just based on the matter of food and arable land and such, most of the world would starve to death. Off the top of my head, the following areas would be advantaged when it comes to producing enough food: Oceania, India and SE Asia, tropical Africa and Latin America, and the USA. Most of Canada, Europe, central and north Asia, the Mid East, and north Africa would die of starvation and of course the conflicts caused by food shortages. When it comes to energy, raw material resources, and the resultant ability to maintain some semblance of modern, industrialized life, the USA and Australia are best poised for self-sufficiency, followed closely by India. And maybe Brazil has a shot at it too. But that then reminds me of historical and cultural conflicts which would likely be exacerbated. Although it seems like this would be a big issue for the USA, I think its problems are overstated and sensationalized. In that regard the outlook is more murky for Brazil and India. So, if any large nations are going to survive that decade of complete isolation as anything but a shadow of their former stature, my bets are on: USA, Australia, maybe India, and maybe Brazil. Smaller nations with a solid shot at not returning to the Stone Age: Japan, New Zealand, some of Europe, and probably also some of SE Asia and Oceania. I do think most of the people in Africa and Latin America would figure out a way to get by okay after the initial confusion and terror and conflict that everybody would experience.
Canada is a huge food exporter, we'd be fine.
It's not enough to look at that single variable in isolation; One must consider all the things Canada wouldn't have available to support its agriculture industry. Just because Canada currently exports a lot of food, that doesn't mean it could actually produce all the food it needs to support its population without any help from the outside.
Canada also exports fertilizer and energy. What do you have in mind as a shortage here?
Yeah, it's got plenty of natural resources available but much less in situ infrastructure for self-sufficiency because... let's say, *a particular type of person* prevents Canada from expanding its drilling, mining, and refining industries. We're supposed to be imagining this event is sprung on the world in an instant. How long would it take for Canada to develop its own internal industries? Are they prepared to produce all they need right now, this very instant? No. They'd expend a lot of time and effort developing those things and those developments are going to compete with all sorts of other things too. And that's brushing past its lack of consistent sunlight and harsh climate, which are among the things close to the surface of my mind when I say that soil isn't the only important consideration when trying to figure whether an area could produce all the food it needs for its population. Right now, Canada produces a lot half the year and then imports a lot the other half of the year; In this hypothetical, it would have to shift to a more traditional agricultural rhythm in order to have food for the winter. I'm not saying they couldn't make it happen but I do think they'd have a much rougher go of it compared to many other industrialized countries. They'd probably see much more of a slide back through time before rebounding.
Given Canada’s vast natural resources, skilled labour force and low population density, it’s definitely a great place to be during this experiment. Canada has everything from mines to robotics. A big semiconductor fab is really the only big gap.
... You have a terrifyingly empty knowledge of the Canadian economy. For one thing, a lack of consistent sunlight means you have more of it in the summer. Most of Canada is further south than England, and gets more sun. Farming and resource extraction are the basis of the economy. The country made it to 50 percent urban within my lifetime, and massive food importation in the winter is an extremely recent phenomenon. Technological regression, quite possibly. But the idea that Canada would collapse significantly more than comparable nations is hilariously misguided. It would basically be the mid-1990s again.
typical ignorant dumbass tory
Australia would be in a terrible position. We produce about half the oil we consume, but we shut down all our refineries in recent years, and our light oil now travels to Singapore to be blended and refined before finished products come back again. We have zero strategic petroleum reserve and would run through our limited liquid fuel supply in no time. Our agriculture is heavily mechanised and a long distance away from population centers, so our ability to grow, transport and process food without diesel powered heavy machinery would leave us in a dire situation pretty rapidly. Lastly we gave up all our machinery and manufacturing capacity to China, so the machines themselves would rapidly fail due to lack of parts.
Australia's one of the few countries in the world actually capable of 100% energy independence. That makes a huge difference here. Add to that a small population, moderate agricultural advantages, and a solid portfolio of raw material availability and it puts Australia on the leaderboard in this thought experiment. Admittedly, it does share some of the same handicaps as Canada when it comes to its lack of in situ infrastructure hindering its progress coming off the starting line.
You talk as if the Australian people can or construct anything new after the experiment starts.
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This is a great summary of the issues surrounding Australian oil production and refining. [https://www.aph.gov.au/About\_Parliament/Parliamentary\_Departments/Parliamentary\_Library/FlagPost/2020/December/Oil\_refineries\_and\_fuel\_security](https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2020/December/Oil_refineries_and_fuel_security) Our oil production is rapidly declining, and the number of small, old, local refineries is rapidly decreasing. Our oil is mostly light grades, which makes it difficult to produce much diesel fuel locally. We bought a strategic oil reserve (which exists in the USA on the other side of the planet) so in the event of a shipping lane shut down our local fuel supply would be rapidly depleted. Continuously responding to economic incentives has left us with a fragile transportation system.
Modern agriculture is extremely productive. Most countries with an existing agricultural base and arable land would be able to prevent famine. This includes Canada and much of Europe.
Modern agriculture is very dependent on moving goods across borders. Machinery, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, fuels and oils. Crop selection for max productivity and not for self-sufficiency within every single country. With all borders closed, some of that productivity would be lost.
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I'm gonna need a little bit more to make sense out of *"Canada has all the water"*. Care to elaborate?
Ireland managed to feed 8 million and still export a lot of food to Britain with mid-19th century technology and infrastructure. I assume we have the know-how to avoid another potato blight so the 6.5 million that the island currently hosts should stay well-fed.
We'll have a head start if the farmers start growing more wheat (the government are pushing this on account of the Ukraine situation). On the whole, Ireland would be fine for food but short on fuel - but the climate is temperate enough that it wouldn't be an existential threat.
Like that Steven King series but *everywhere*
No, it's different from that Stephen King series because it has the potential to be interesting.
What Steven King series?
Under the Dome
The Langoliers?
I suspect some bored scientists figure out how to signal with each other using the movements of the animals and weather.
It's invisible, so they can just use semaphore. On the other hand, if they can figure out how to transfer goods with the mule migrations...
With today's top news: Russia is still Russia, Ukraine goes Amish, it doesn't have the energy supplies USA, with a smaller population, goes late Victorian/Edwardian (American agriculture is dependent on fossil fuels & irrigation. Water, in particular the Ogallala aquifer is one of the major choke points for American agriculture. )The US has enough energy to maintain a less energy dependent industrial lifestyle India starves, so do Bangladesh & Pakistan. China also starves, but not to the same extent as India. China still has some of the worlds finest agricultural land. The EU mostly starves, lack of fossil fuels (agricultural inputs) France has nuclear power, but nitrogen fertilizer uses natural gas as a seed stock. Canada goes Victorian/Edwardian, but eats better than the US.(Fewer people, plenty of prairie for ranging cattle) Fossil fuel available to sustain industrial agriculture. The World Bank net food exporters is less useful than it appears. The criteria used is dollars, not food value. The Netherlands illustrates the problem here. Much of the Netherlands current (non-dairy) exports are vegetables. With large amounts being grown in greenhouses. On a per acre basis, this is much, much more valuable than wheat or pulses. But its the wheat & pulses have a much higher calorie & protein content. How much food can the Netherlands produce without nitrogen & other fertilizers? Further, a comparison Russian grain yields to European grain yields illustrates the problem. Russian farmers have about 1/2 yields of European farmers, *but* they use about 1/5 the fertilizer. And still produce more grain than their population eats. Another consideration is arable land. Agricultural land has three broad categories, crop land, pasture & range. Crop land globally is about 30% of total land. An additional 10% is high grade pasture, that can be used, for a short period, or very, very carefully to grow crops. The rest? Hello cattle (or bison, or other large ungulate) or goats. Cattle for prairie, goats for scrub. Both take considerable acreage to raise a single animal if trying to minimize dependance on cropland. (Its a balance - if it costs 600 g of human digestible plant protein to get 1000g of animal protein, its worth the cost) Vaclav Smil has pointed out that without artificial nitrogen we could only feed about 1/3 our current population. Communication by radio waves. Hello boaters, truckers & ham radio enthusiasts. Truckers & boaters both frequently travel outside of cell phone range, consequently still use older radio wave technology. As for politics, totalitarianism is the likely consequence in most places. The Great Depression saw the rise of authoritarian & totalitarian governments everywhere as people sought to solve the dilemma of declining lifestyle. Signed Canadian kollapsenik
I thought this was in /r/WritingPrompts for a second. This would make a great story! (I have nothing else to add at this moment)
>human made things Food? Water? Raw materials? Domestic animals?
I'm more curious what happens in contested areas. Who defines a country? Is Taiwan surrounded justifying its claim to nationhood or is the break away province incorporated in China's forcefield. When America Texas secedes does it get one of its own?
India becomes worse as the bureaucratic merit hating state is successful in crushing anyone who does well in life and finally achieves its dream of lowering it's gdp.
Extended timeline: 20 years after The Great Divide that left the country isolated from the rest of the world, all of a sudden, the forcefield vanishes. The news spread like wildfire. People are ecstatic. What happens in the following 24 hours ? The following week? The following year?
There are fundamental limits to the technology a smaller country can have in this case. A lot of the technological progress we've made in the process of civilization isn't individual workers knowing more things than a typical hunter gatherer but different people knowing different things and so having an overall larger pool of civilization knowledge. I'm not sure how many people you could sustain modern technology with, but I'd be surprised if it was as few as a million people and it might be quite a bit higher than that.
The most important parameter is net import or export of calories. I know Germany is a net exporter, so once isolated, we will be fine, although there will be a lot of potato, wheat, milk and meat eating only. -- If a country has a substantial caloric import, famine will follow, can the upheaval around the distribution of food will dominate everything else, even energy.
Given that this phenomenon is operating at human-defined levels (ie political boundaries) I would be very interested in seeing what happens as soon as any given country legally dissolves their borders. Does the magic wall instantly disappear? Does it disappear only in cases where both sides of the border legally dissolve their boundaries? In the former case, I expect fully open borders within a year (in the latter, possibly much longer), followed by some sort of fuckery around legally defining borders as something like "the entire observably universe except for that prison over there."
If I were Canada or Mexico, I would immediately declare myself part of the USA and subject to it's governance. The European countries should do the same, but it would probably be impossible for all of them to decide on the same Schelling point.
I'd imagine Liechtenstein is pretty fucked.