The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Demographics Part 10: Problems in the Middle East || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

The demographic situation in the Middle East can be explained by three factors: water, oil, and food. Water prevented the population from expanding. Oil generated the capital needed to industrialize and help the population grow. Food security will ruin all of this. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/demographics-part-10-problems-in-the-middle-east

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Belford Sound, where my favorite places on the planet, still in New Zealand. Today, we're going to do the most recent of the demographic series, specifically focusing on the Middle East. Now, the key thing to remember about the entire swath of territory between roughly Kuwait and Algeria. That whole stretch, northeast Africa, all the way into the Persian Gulf region, is that there's not a lot going on from a moisture.

point of view. Most of these cultures are centered around oases or narrow river valleys. The Tigris and the Euphrates in many places, the entire coastal plain is less than 10 miles thick, and the coastal plain in places like Libya, very, very similar. Etyp doesn't even have water on its coastal plain. It's just the Nile. So you get these very, very dense population patterns on a very, very, very concentrated foot crit, and the carrying capacity of the land is very, very low. And it wasn't until the 1900. when you could introduce things like artificial fertilizer, that you really got a very dense population footprint,

even within that zone. So this is an area that was among the last parts of the world to enter the industrial era. And so you had kind of a classic pyramidal formation for the population density until relatively recently in their history. You get outside of that zone, and it does get a little bit better, specifically in Algeria, where there is a denser, I'm sorry,

a wider coastal plain of a couple hundred K, as well as, say, Mesopotamia, which is one of the great cradles of civilization, where the zone between the Tigris and the Euphrates, even though it is desert, is irrigated. Same with the Nile Valley itself. Okay, where was I? There are some exceptions. In northern Algeria, you've got a much wider fossil plane, so Agrivolta is more favorable there. Obviously, the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, places that are still desert,

but they have irrigation, figure of the places between the Tiberus and the Euphrates rivers. Obviously, going back to antiquity, these have had a lot of keypling. Now, but the general point when it comes to industrial agriculture stands, if you have a certain concentration, and then it just kind of stopped to be it to the desert, which means that these are some of the last areas in the world to experience industrialization, artifices of fertilizers, mechanized agriculture, that sort of thing. And so they don't, they just have never historically reached the level of population density that you're able to achieve and say the Western world or the East Asia world.

Now what that has meant is that there's been a hard population cap on all of these regions up until today until one thing changed. Oil, whether it's an Algeria or Libya or Egypt or Iraq or Iran or Saudi Arabia, once oil became card to the equation, the income potential for these regents that would spanned it by more than an order of magnitude in some cases almost literally overnight, certainly within a decade. And what that has allowed is these populations to expand beyond the carrying capacity of the land. In the case of Egypt, cotton contributed to well. So these properties could all bring in food and sell the oil to pay for it.

And that generated a very, very different population matrix. And we're back. All right. So what this means is the countries have had it, all these places have a nutritional pyramid going back to antiquity. And then as we hit industrialization, because of boil and the food just kept coming, they were able to maintain very high birth rates.

They were no longer doing this with domestic food production, but instead with imported food. So the pyramid is stayed. It's just gotten broader, broader, broader, broader, broader, because most of these countries have food subsidies in order to maintain political tranquility. But when the food is cheap, but you're not proustity yourself.

We get more and more people, but it eventually becomes more and more unstable from a demographic point of view. And now, whether you're in Algeria or Egypt or Iraq, and especially in places like, say, Lebanon or Libya, you've seen the populations increased by a factor of four or five, even six or seven over the time since 1945, while food production has gone stagnant

or in many cases like in Egypt actually gone vegan, as they switched over to things like citrus and especially cotton, which means that these are the parts of the world that are now most vulnerable to anything that happens with globalization. Because if anything impacts their ability to export their non-staple food products and import weeds, you get a population crash. It'll probably be worse in places like Libya, where food production is maybe doubled since 1945, but hook. The population is increased by a factor of seven or eight and in Egypt where a lot of the wheat has gone away and it's been replaced with

Cotton and Citrus since the population is boomed and now even if they switched all the food production back to wheat You still would have a 50% shortage in the ability of local food production in order to support the local population So these places have seen some of the greatest expansions in population effort in human history and we're not too far far away from them experience some precious population in human history. What we're about to see as the globalization sinks in is a degree of famine that is absolutely unprecedented and is likely to be even far more extreme than what we're about to seek people for China. So remember when you've got a pure pyramidal population structure with lots of people under

age 40, in that sort of situation, you're going to have high growth. because of the consumption, high inflation because of the consumption, and not a lot of productive capacity because you don't have a lot of skilled workers that are age 40 to 65. You also don't have a lot of capital. And so these societies had a hard time lifting themselves out of poverty, except when it comes to things like oil sales, which is then usually the province of the state. And it doesn't generate the sort of velocity of capital that is necessary for good infrastructure, for good education, and for all the other things that we kind of, you know, celebrate as the norm in the first world. It also means that you have a lot of young people who don't

really have a stake in the system because they don't control the wealth. That's controlled by the sheiks and the princes at the top. So you tend to get very politically unstable systems. And if you add in the coming food crisis, the degree of civil breakdown that is possible in these areas are huge. And for those of being who consider yourself students of history, if you look back and the rise and collapse, derives and collapse, the horizon collapse of city, states, and empires throughout this entire region, this is starting to sound a little bit similar. This may be where humanity got it start, but it's also capable of some of the most catastrophic civilizational collapses, and we're going to see that next decade or two. Oh yeah, one more thing. Oh yeah, when we relocated to

Taya now. There is a unique demographic pattern for some countries in the Middle East that is largely based on their intense wealth. Because once you get to a certain level of income, you start paying people to do other things. So, for example, if you're in the United States and your top 1%, you probably have a housekeeper. Well, you carry that into the Middle East where you've got this oil and natural gas income, and you're surrounded by places with a pyramidal demographic structure, and you start hiring people to do everything.

So it's not just menial chores or raising the kids. building roads, it's building bridges, it's doing your oil infrastructure. You bring in labor for absolutely everything. And so if you look at countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or especially the United Arab Emirates, you will notice that they have a pyramidal demographic structure, but on the men's side between roughly age 15 and 40, there's a huge bulge that goes out, which is in essence foreign guest workers, who for the most part, unless you're on that top end that's like doing the air traffic control and stuff. Basically slave labor. And in some cases, that is not just a significant percentage of the population. In the case of Gutter, that is like half

the population for the UAE, almost three quarters. So when you're looking at the geopolitics of the region, you're like, oh, you don't like the Iranians or oh, we don't like the Iraqis. Just keep in mind that the countries that the Israelis and the Americans to a certain degree have identified as potential allies of the future, Saudi Arabia, Gutter, UAE. You are dealing with slaveocracies, so have fun with that.