Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic. Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
A wheat disease that could destroy most of the world's main wheat crops could strike south Asia's vast wheat fields two years earlier than research had suggested, leaving millions to starve.
"We apologise for recent price increases," reads the sign over the bread counter, "but they are due to global factors beyond our control." This is not a Third World food stall but an upscale supermarket in Brussels, capital of the European Union, whose farming system was once notorious for the mountains of surplus grain it produced. Those mountains are now gone. The world is down to its lowest grain stocks for decades, and food prices are up around the world.
