The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - How a New Strain of Wheat Could Boost Brazil || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

What if I told you that Brazil's new tropical strain of wheat could cause the most significant shift to the technological power balance the world has seen in the past two centuries? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/peters-recap-june-week-1

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine, coming to you from McWay Falls in Big Sur. I mean, yeah, that thing would never get permitted in California today. Anyway, today we're talking about Brazil. They've got a new strain of wheat that they're playing around with that is tropical adjusted, and there's open conversation in Brazilian agricultural world about Brazil soon to be a net exporter of wheat. I think that's a little premature. There's a lot that can go wrong. And honestly, that's not even the biggest news here.

A little bit about extory. So, you know, wheat is a very adaptable crop, and it's been humanity's number one crop since the beginning. And as a result, our wheat cultures have done very well versus non-week cultures, because they have more reliable food production, denser calories per acre, and wheat doesn't require tending year-round. So your labor can do things other than farm. So cultures in the wheat zones, whether it's in the northern southern hemisphere, have always done better than the others. That's part of the reason why technology evolved faster in places like Europe or Northeast Asia that it in places like Central America or Africa. This new strain throws the possibility of changing all that.

So let's first talk about the short-term stuff. Brazilian wheat, because of its terrain, yet hotter, wetter conditions, usually more than wheat likes. A new tropical strain would expand the range and maybe increase the bulk of productivity and the early tests with this new strain suggest a productivity that's on par with what you can do in the Great Plains in the United States, which is one of the world's primary wheat growing zones. Now, don't get over-excited here because in the United States, we grow wheat mostly on marginal land. So if you get good land in Brazil producing at the same levels of marginal land in the United States, that's not exactly a great thing, especially when you consider that Brazilian territory is very low fertility. So the input costs are huge in Brazil, compared to the to the United States. The bigger issue, though, is if you are a tropical area, forget Brazil for a mother, if you're a tropical area and all of a sudden you can grow your own wheat, then the food security side of this could potentially be groundbreaking because we have a lot of parts of the world

that have to import their food and or fertilizers. And if they can grow wheat in even moderate amounts, that makes them much more food secure than they've ever been before. And as global supply chains break down, that's going to be more and more important moving forward. But the bigger issue, it's the long-term power difference. Assuming for the moment that this strain actually works out, if you can make the tropics food secure for large populations, then a little bit of the power imbalance that has existed between what we now think of as the global north and the global south goes away.

because if this global south can maintain significant populations without international trade, then for the first time in recorded human history, the food imbalance that is at the root of most regional power imbalances suddenly doesn't exist to the same degree it used to. Now, if you're looking for more on this general issue, the guns, germs, and steel by Jared Diamond is by far the rorous resource that you are after. It goes into all of this in excruciatingly detail. But this is potentially the biggest shift in the technological power balance that we have seen in the last two centuries, at the least as big as industrialization.

If it works, we should know within a few years. And we're talking long term. This isn't going to make like Gabon a world power tomorrow. But if the populations of the global south can maintain themselves without international trade, then over the long run of human history, the path can go a very different way. All right, that's it for me. See you guys next time.