Por Ruben Bauer Naveira
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Image by Md. Hasanuzzaman Himel. |
This article is a warning. A global food crisis is likely approaching — driven by the collapse of supply chains feeding the agri-food system, a consequence of the war against Iran and the resulting blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The prospect has gone largely unnoticed by most political and economic actors.
Supply crises, as a rule, are resolved through the Law of Supply and Demand. When supply falls, prices rise; those who can afford to pay grumble but pay, while those who cannot find a cheaper substitute. Or do without.
But we are talking about food — and food is indispensable to life.
To those who believe that “the market self-regulates” and that this supply crisis will therefore be absorbed through higher prices — costlier food, but food nonetheless — I would say: there is a threshold. Below a certain level of supply, the problem is no longer that food becomes expensive; the problem is that there is not enough food for everyone, regardless of how much money people have to spend. This article explains the dynamic well. If the Law of Supply and Demand is the global economy’s homeostatic mechanism — its way of restoring equilibrium after a shock — then supply chains are its Achilles’ heel.
Supply chain disruptions and extreme weather events periodically afflict one country or another and are offset through global trade. But never before has there been a situation like the present one, in which farmers across every corner of the world are simultaneously grappling with shrinking supply and rising input costs — fertilizers, pesticides, diesel, lubricants, transport. And one thing is certain: anywhere in the world, a farmer pays closer attention to news about the Super El Niño than the average person does.
Agriculture has always been a business of thin margins and constant uncertainty, where disincentives weigh heavily. Whether to skip this planting season — or to plant less — is a decision each farmer makes individually. Agriculture is a fragmented activity, loosely coordinated at best. There is simply no way to know how many producers have chosen not to plant. But since February 28th, millions across the world have made that choice.
Food planted today will take several months to be harvested, processed, transported, distributed, and finally consumed. What we eat today was planted months ago — perhaps more than a year ago. This includes animal products, since livestock are fattened on plant-based feed. The implication is that the world is locking in a crisis that will not erupt tomorrow, but months from now — possibly next year.
Governments track harvests — food after it has been collected — but not plantings, and certainly not what was never planted at all. Only when the (smaller) harvests arrive will the true scale of the problem become apparent.
Has the world already crossed the threshold between expensive food and genuinely scarce food? There is no way to know. Every day that Hormuz remained closed made the situation worse.
Mass hunger means social upheaval. What is incubating in the aftermath of the war against Iran is advancing quietly toward what could become the greatest economic and social crisis in recorded history.
The Supply Chain Breakdown
Let me be clear from the outset: this is not only a global food crisis. It is a crisis running through virtually every global supply chain, because petroleum derivatives are embedded in virtually all of them:
Shortages of petrochemical naphtha will ripple through plastics, paints, and countless downstream industries — including automotive manufacturing.
Shortages of jet fuel will hit tourism, and through it, hospitality and restaurants.
Shortages of bunker fuel — the heavy oil that powers cargo ships — will disrupt maritime trade worldwide, with consequences that are difficult to fully anticipate.
Shortages of lubricants and greases will impact all of industry, since every machine requires them.
Shortages of sulfur — a byproduct of oil refining — will curtail sulfuric acid production, the single most widely used chemical in the world, present across countless production chains. Mining will be severely affected; losses in copper and nickel mining will reverberate through everything that depends on electricity, including batteries, which in turn will set back the global clean energy transition. Sulfuric acid also figures in urban water and sewage treatment, oil refining, and the manufacture of steel, textiles, pulp and paper, rubber, leather, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics.
Shortages of helium gas — a byproduct of natural gas liquefaction — will threaten microchip production and therefore all electronics supply chains. Even medical MRI machines will be affected, since they require helium to operate (China has just halted its helium exports).
Before the war, Persian Gulf countries also supplied a substantial share of world aluminum exports.
Taken together, all of this will inevitably destabilize the global financial system.
These repercussions are so vast, and so far-reaching, that they cannot be fully grasped until they radiate outward — producing effects, and then effects of those effects. Already at the war’s outset (March 4th, just five days after fighting began), Craig Tindale sketched a general framework for how these disruptions would cascade: twelve sequential transformations unfolding over more than five years, culminating in a broad civilizational reorganization of the world, according to him.
The war has just started again, but even if it had actually ended, these repercussions would still be felt (see, for example, this video). The wishful thinking prevalent in financial markets — the eagerness for a “return to normal” — is likely to be disappointed. Apart from the months that would be needed for maritime traffic to gradually recover and global supply chains to reach whatever normalization would still be possible (a full return to pre-war levels is already out of the question; see this video, minutes 55′ to 59′45″), there are several additional obstacles:
The bombing of oil and gas facilities caused physical damage that will keep part of the supply offline for years.
Resuming production from wells that were forcibly shut down after storage capacity was exhausted — a problem that bears far more heavily on the Gulf states than on Iran, which has spent decades managing precisely this under the pressure of sanctions — will be both slow and incomplete.
Shipowners and insurers carry enormous costs — the value of the vessel and its cargo, extended crew deployments, fuel, port and customs fees, and much more. They will need to feel genuinely secure before routing ships through the Strait again. To illustrate: the Houthis stopped attacking commercial shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait over a year ago, yet traffic through the Red Sea has recovered to only 75% of pre-attack levels (watch this video from minute 6′15″). Why? Simply because the Houthis are still there (so they might now close Bab-el-Mandeb again). The Iranians, likewise, will remain stationed along Hormuz. Analysts estimate — though they cannot predict — that even if Hormuz were reopened today, traffic by year-end would reach only about 40% of pre-war levels (see this video at 1′20″).
For a synthesis of all the above, watch this video starting at minute 27′15″.
The Global Food Crisis
Food supply chains — fertilizers, pesticides, agricultural machinery, diesel, lubricants, transport — will be as disrupted as any other. But food is our central concern, because it is indispensable to human survival. If garbage bags disappeared from supermarket shelves (they are made of plastic, which is made of polymers, which are made of naphtha, which comes from oil), people would cope — they would wash their trash cans. There is no equivalent workaround for a food shortage. Any rupture in food production chains is a reliable recipe for social disorder.
Here’s a summary of the factors that will lead to the global food crisis:
Before the war, Persian Gulf countries accounted for roughly 35% of global urea production, 40% of sulfur production, and 20% of liquefied natural gas (LNG) output. Urea is the primary feedstock for nitrogen fertilizers; sulfuric acid (derived from sulfur) is the primary feedstock for phosphate fertilizers; and LNG is itself a source of urea production. Bangladesh, for example, has urea plants that ran on LNG from Qatar — one of the most heavily bombed industries in the conflict — and they are now idle. The Gulf blockade has severed global fertilizer chains, with direct consequences for global food chains.
Major fertilizer exporters — Russia and China among them — have suspended exports to protect their own domestic food security. India urgently requested fertilizer supplies from China; China refused, citing its own needs.
Following the war, global fertilizer prices skyrocketed. More recently, they have begun to fall, but this is due to demand destruction: so many farmers are stopping planting that a surplus of fertilizer is starting to build up.
The United States has just declared a national emergency on fertilizers (see here and here);
China, the world’s largest producer and exporter of sulfuric acid (accounting for over 40% of global production), has halted exports — jeopardizing copper mining in Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo, nickel mining in Indonesia, and uranium mining in Kazakhstan. About half of all sulfuric acid consumed globally goes into phosphate fertilizer production.
Crops everywhere have narrow planting windows tied to the seasons. Plantings completed before the war began will not be affected, but those harvests are still months away, which will mask the crisis for some time — the world is currently eating food planted or even harvested months ago. Plantings scheduled after the war broke out may also have proceeded normally, provided the relevant fertilizers were already stockpiled. Otherwise, farmers who depended on fertilizer shipments passing through the Suez Canal received them roughly twenty days late, the additional time required for ships to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. Even where those fertilizers were purchased at a premium, the delay alone meant application outside the optimal window, with lower yields as a result. The worst cases are those where rising input prices simply cause farmers to abandon planting altogether — as is already happening as far apart as the United States (soybeans, despite China having reopened its market to American soy — watch this video, from minutes 12′ to 15′) and Thailand (rice — read this report).
If the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked through around September or October, the global sulfur shortage will exhaust reserves in countries without domestic production, shutting down their phosphate fertilizer plants.
Cutting fertilizer use — for the same planted area — is not a viable option. After years of continuous cultivation, soils are depleted; without NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), they simply will not produce. And the relationship is non-linear: 10% less fertilizer can mean 30% less harvest (the ratio varies by crop — corn, for instance, is more fertilizer-hungry than soybeans). Large producers have no alternative to fertilizers that are now both expensive and scarce; smaller farmers are desperately improvising (see here, here and here).
One consequence will be crop-switching: corn farmers shifting to soybeans, for example; in Thailand, there are farmers flooding their rice fields to raise fish. Consumers will eventually have to adapt their diets accordingly.
Beyond fertilizers, agricultural pesticide supply chains will also break down. Pesticide production depends on petrochemical naphtha: toluene- and xylene-rich reformate is extracted from heavy naphtha; benzene-rich pyrolysis gasoline comes from steam-cracking light naphtha. Benzene, toluene, and xylene — known as BTX — underlie the chemistry of virtually all commercial herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. And effective application requires that active ingredients be dissolved in heavy aromatic solvents, which are likewise BTX derivatives. Modern agriculture survives only under intensive chemical protection; without pesticides, today’s crop varieties do not have the intrinsic resilience to withstand pests.
Agriculture worldwide runs on thin margins and heavy fixed costs. On top of scarce and expensive fertilizers and pesticides, farmers are now facing sharply higher diesel prices, rising lubricant costs for tractors and combines, and higher transport and freight charges. It is already common for farmers to simply walk away from this season’s planting, waiting for conditions to improve — a wait that could stretch years — or to leave the business entirely. All of this will happen long before governments grasp the scale of the problem and mobilize a response. Since crops planted (or not) today will not be harvestable for months, the full force of the crisis will not be felt until 2027.
Predictably, small farmers with limited capital will suffer most, fueling black and gray markets for diverted or counterfeit fertilizers and pesticides.
Livestock farming will be hit as hard as crop production. Corn and soybeans are the dietary foundation of the meat industry; a grain shortage will force the premature liquidation of poultry and hog herds.
Countries everywhere will scramble to import food, driving prices up in global markets as well as domestic ones. Any country sitting on stockpiles of grain, potash, phosphates, or pesticides will treat them as strategic assets rather than tradable goods — as China has already done with sulfuric acid. Export controls, emergency rationing, and hoarding will replace normal commerce. Faced with critical food security needs at home, governments can be expected to hoard input materials for fertilizer and pesticide production, finished fertilizers and pesticides, and food in general.
As if all this were not enough, extreme climate events will intensify dramatically in the second half of 2026 and into 2027 — precisely when the food crisis reaches its most acute phase. The result could be a genuine perfect storm. Meteorologists already consider the occurrence of a “Super El Niño” as certain, bringing droughts, floods, and extreme heat waves around the globe (for the effects of heat on food production see here, here and here), potentially on the scale of the Great Famine of 1877 — also an El Niño event — which killed more than 50 million people worldwide. By this point, it’s already known for sure that this will be an absolutely catastrophic weather event.
Both extremes — drought and flood — critically undermine fertilizer effectiveness. In drought-stricken areas, water is the medium through which nutrients dissolve and reach plant roots; without adequate soil moisture, applied fertilizers simply fail to be absorbed. In flood-affected areas, excess rainfall leaches highly soluble nitrogen and phosphate from the soil before plants can take them up.
Farmers already traumatized by climate change may stop planting in advance, anticipating the expected harsh effects of El Niño.
El Niño, an oceanic anomaly in the equatorial Pacific, fundamentally disrupts the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich deep water — and with it, the Peruvian anchovy fishery, the cornerstone of global fishmeal and fish oil production. The result is a protein deficit rippling through livestock and aquaculture feed markets. Fishmeal byproducts are also prized as premium organic fertilizers and soil conditioners. The simultaneous loss of synthetic fertilizers (derived from sulfuric acid and urea) and organic substitutes (due to the collapse of fisheries caused by El Niño, compounded by rising fuel costs for fishing vessels) is yet another perfect storm bearing down on the world’s farmers.
The Shortage of Systems Thinking
Human beings navigate the world’s complexity by seeking to simplify it — because simplification is the route to predictability.
Faced with something that seems complex, we carve the whole into its parts and study each part in isolation, treating the interactions between parts as negligible. We then look for linear cause-and-effect relationships within each part, in hopes of extracting the predictability we crave.
Under reasonably stable conditions, and within acceptable margins of error, this works well enough. The world’s complexity can be managed as though it were simpler than it actually is. A farmer applies X units of fertilizer within a Y-week window to harvest a W-ton crop with an expected profit of Z. And so it goes: cause-and-effect, linear thinking.
Good linear thinkers — specialists rather than generalists, more often than not — are socially valued and rise to the highest positions in corporations and governments. The ability to produce predictability generates results; results generate rewards.
The world, however, has always been fundamentally complex, and it periodically reconfigures itself in ways that overwhelm the tools for simplification — as is happening now, with the impending food crisis. The world has not become more complex; it has always been so. What happens is that the degree of complexity sometimes rises to a level that destroys our capacity for predictability, reducing it to wishful belief. The current expectation of a “normalization” — a return to pre-war export volumes from the Gulf — is one such belief.
Without predictability, people — and companies, governments, societies — are effectively blind.
Complexity science has long argued that genuinely complex systems do not admit prediction. There is no mathematical description that can capture the relationships among causes and effects when the variables are numerous and interdependent. But in place of prediction, complexity science offers a different and attainable scientific goal: understanding — qualitative rather than quantitative — of a complex system’s (as a whole) behavioral patterns.
Under normal conditions, it would have been perfectly reasonable to treat the food production supply chain as a self-contained unit of study. It is of course subject to externalities — credit and insurance markets, transport costs, government intervention — but in stable times their influence is modest. Going forward, however, shocks will propagate until they hit the global financial system (it is only a matter of when), transport costs and availability will swing unpredictably, and governments will intervene in economic activity — withholding inputs that would otherwise be exported. The proper unit of study for food security questions is now the global economic system in its entirety. Which means: no predictability at all.
Decision-makers in business and government will nevertheless cling, by force of habit, to whatever residue of predictability they can still claim. Their instruments: risk dashboards, situation rooms, crisis committees. These tools are necessary and should not be abandoned. But the fundamental posture — at least until the world stabilizes enough for predictability to be meaningful again — must shift: away from prediction and toward the understanding of behavioral patterns. The instrument for that is systems thinking, not linear thinking.
Systems thinkers — generalists rather than specialists — build understanding of behavioral patterns by identifying correlations among seemingly unrelated events, rather than by tracing direct causal chains.
Craig Tindale is one example. He has mapped the cascading shocks in the global economy triggered by the Hormuz blockade, and produced other analyses including this one on the structural vulnerabilities of the US economy. Specifically on the food crisis, he has organized his understanding of the agri-food system’s behavioral patterns under stress into a series of diagrams, designed to make systemic dynamics legible to linear thinkers.
Another notable systems thinker is the economist Michael Hudson, whose writings and videos I strongly recommend to anyone wishing to understand this crisis’s implications for the global financial system (see, for example, here and here). For geopolitics, some essential systems thinkers are Arnaud Bertrand, Emmanuel Todd, and Alastair Crooke.
Because of how most people are trained to think, systems thinkers are rare — and rarer still at the leadership level. The answer is not to find systems thinkers and empower them, though that would also help. The answer is to build coherent systems thinking out of the best available base of linear thinking.
The failure of linear thinking under conditions of high complexity is illustrated by the decisions the United States government has made — decisions that have brought both itself and the rest of the world to the present predicament.
The US is self-sufficient in oil, and its leaders concluded from this that they would be immune to a supply shock. It was even insisted that the Hormuz blockade was a problem “for the rest of the world,” not for the United States. The figure below (source) illustrates where that reasoning breaks down:
Less than three months after the blockade began, lubricant supply chains in the US are already beginning to collapse (see here, here, and here, and also this article). This was practically impossible to predict through linear reasoning — but it could have been understood, and to some degree anticipated, through systemic reasoning. The supply of diesel is likewise becoming a problem for American consumers (and Russia has just suspended all diesel exports — see here and here).
What would the consequences of such a collapse look like? Lubricants are not just motor oil in passenger cars — though they are needed for agricultural machinery too. They are required for aircraft control systems, industrial elevators, hydraulic cylinders, excavators, and much more. In terms of food, a shortage may not arise primarily from production failures but from distribution failures: a lubricant shortage can reduce the operating capacity of the forklifts that are essential to moving food through distribution centers.
Another illustration of the limits of linear thinking was the belief that Hormuz would somehow be reopened quickly enough to avert major economic shocks. On that basis, the US released oil and gas from its strategic reserves onto global markets at below-market prices, aiming to cap international prices and shield American consumers from fuel price spikes ahead of the midterm elections. By doing so, it also gave other countries reason to underestimate the severity of the global crisis. Hormuz may still take considerable time to reopen and is unlikely ever to return to pre-war levels — yet the US has already drawn down its buffer against supply shocks, leaving itself in a far more exposed position (watch this video, minutes 13′45″ to 19′50″; see also here, and here).
But the worst linear-thinking decision of all — one that cannot go unmentioned — was the assumption that physically eliminating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with Iran’s senior civilian and military leadership, followed by weeks of sustained, massive bombing, would necessarily bring down the regime and compel the country’s surrender.
The Failure of the Models, and the Need for New Ones
From the onset of the crisis to its inflection point, there will be virtually no room for anything other than stopgaps and emergency remedies. However, as the crisis descends along its “downward curve,” broader, macro-level questioning — concerning the need for new models — will gain momentum. The current model of large-scale industrial agriculture for food production already presents a host of disadvantages and externalities, including: dependence on long-distance transportation, whether by land, sea, or air (distance between producer and consumer); the production of food of low nutritional value compared to that grown by traditional methods; public health risks from the exposure of both farmers and consumers to chemical agents; soil depletion; the exhaustion of aquifers and water tables through intensive irrigation; the chemical pollution of all of these — soils and water alike; severe greenhouse gas emissions; and dependence on public financing and subsidies. See, for example, this systemic analysis of the full spectrum of these vulnerabilities. Until now, these problems have been tolerated in the name of the need to produce food for the entire global population (as though hunger were not already rampant…). But as climate change becomes outright catastrophe (the Super El Niño event will make it impossible to go on ignoring this), the questioning of the persistence of this model will move to the top of the agenda.
And the need to adopt the alternative model will become evident — agroecology, which does not come close to matching the productivity of the current model, but even in this respect holds an advantage: being labor-intensive, agroecology will make it possible to offer employment combined with subsistence to millions of families in chronic food insecurity.
And the greatest advantage of all: agroecology is grounded in biodiversity, rather than in the ubiquitous monocultures of today. A universal shift to the agroecological model would enable large-scale reforestation of the planet — possibly the only way out toward a mitigation of climate change.
The crisis across virtually all global supply chains (not only in food production) will also severely affect the global financial system. Just as the agri-food model, the financial model adopted since the replacement of industrial capitalism by financial capitalism as the primary driver of the economy — particularly in the countries of the West — will ultimately show clear signs of exhaustion.
One of those signs can already be seen in the inability of governments around the world to perceive the disaster that is approaching. The financial system, were it still even minimally tethered to the real economy rather than self-referential and turned into an end in itself, should long since have been sounding early warnings about the flood of problems that will come crashing down on everyone’s shoulders. Instead, it has been operating as if to deny this emergency (see especially this video by Steve Keen, and also this article, which reveals that JP Morgan modeled the trend in oil prices under a scenario of sustained Strait of Hormuz restrictions — but found the results so inconvenient that they decided not to publish the study).
The value of big tech companies is proportional to the value of (symbolic) bits in computers, while the value of companies in the real economy bears a proportional relationship to the value of the oil and gas derivatives present in their respective supply chains — that is, to the value of the (physical) molecules of hydrocarbons. It matters little that the so-called “market” prices a bit as worth a thousand times more than a molecule with its atoms; new bits can always be created, but in the face of a hydrocarbon shortage, a thousand bits combined will not suffice to constitute a single molecule. The “market” — after decades of making more money from money — will discover, in the worst possible way, that the only economy capable of sustaining people’s lives (which is, after all, what an economy ought to be for) is the real, physical economy.
At that moment, what will the “autopilot” behavior of governments be — especially in the West? To do what they are conditioned to do (and what they did in the 2008 crisis): seek to rescue the financial system rather than the real economy.
And so, in the face of rising food prices, central banks will sound the alarm: “inflation!” And, like Pavlov’s dogs, they will raise interest rates. But in the face of the destruction of demand resulting from the (supply and price) shock of oil, companies in the real economy will be weakening, beginning to lay off workers and close their doors — that is, heralding deflation rather than inflation. At that point, any interest rate increase will be the medicine that hastens the death of the patient.
It will only be a matter of time before the debate is also opened about adopting some other model — such as China’s, in which the financial system serves as a means (for the development of industrial capitalism) rather than an end in itself (there is indeed a private financial system in China, but one that is subordinated and integrated into the public financial system).
Finally, I will venture a prediction: the denial of the dysfunctionality of the economy (financial system, agri-food system, and others) is so profound that the blame for whatever El Niño has and has not caused will end up being attributed to it — since, while those dysfunctionalities go unnoticed by ordinary people, the extreme weather events will be plain for all to see. It will be all too convenient to attribute the totality of the causes of the débâcle to the manifestations of nature, rather than to the failings of institutions as they are.
A Proposal
To track how the crisis unfolds, anticipate coming problems, and identify possible responses, I have argued here that the standard crisis management tools — risk committees, situation rooms, emergency cabinets — need to be supplemented with genuine systems thinking capacity. Concretely, this does not mean searching for systems thinkers and handing them authority (though that might also be done). It means building one coherent and consistent systems thinking out of the many existing strands of linear thinking — each of them narrow, but highly specialized.
The instrument for this is the Dialogue methodology, developed by quantum physicist David Bohm (1917–1992) more than forty years ago — and which has never managed to take hold at scale. To explain why I believe it is the right tool here, some background is necessary before I lay out the proposal.
Quantum physics concerns itself with the behavior of subatomic particles — the smallest constituents of all matter — which can be described as both matter and energy simultaneously. Among its findings is that two particles separated by macroscopic distances can influence each other’s behavior: the principle of non-locality. This is deeply counterintuitive — how can particles “communicate” across distance? — and I illustrate it with an experiment documented in this video: a pet dog that unfailingly sensed the moment its owner decided to return home, even from kilometers away.
Bohm developed the concept of Wholeness: the idea that all subatomic particles in the universe are interrelated, forming a coherent and integrated totality. This level of reality he called the implicate — or underlying — order, the microscopic substrate beneath the explicate order that is accessible to our senses: the world of separate things — animals, trees, rocks, objects, stars, ourselves — each endowed with a relative autonomy within the Whole, and each possessing a temporary existence (even stars die, at which point the particles that composed them dissolve back into the Whole, as everything does when it ends).
Bohm then argued that mental states — thought, knowledge — are composed of subatomic particles just as physical objects are (particles being both matter and energy), and are therefore also part of the coherence of the Whole. He spent his final decades devising ways to reconnect individual thought and knowledge to what he saw as a collective human consciousness, on the premise that all human problems stem from the mistaken belief that we are separate from one another — that we confuse our relative autonomy within the Whole for an actual separateness.
He arrived at a process he called “dialogue” — which bears no resemblance to what we ordinarily mean by that word, which is merely conversation. Dialogue, in Bohm’s sense, is a disciplined, cumulative training of individual minds to connect with a shared stream of collective thought. That collective thought cannot be planned or engineered; it emerges on its own — what complexity theory would call an emergent property of the whole, the whole in this case being the group practicing the dialogue.
In a group of between 20 and 40 people (the size is methodologically important), this training takes place in regular meetings — Bohm recommends weekly or biweekly — conducted according to specific guidelines, until each participant’s individual thinking becomes attuned to the collective stream of thought that is particular to that group, once every other participant is undergoing the same process simultaneously.
Here we arrive at the two reasons why this methodology has never taken root. The first is that it is demanding — not only in the psychic energy each participant must bring (which is why the “training” requires genuine discipline; participants commonly describe it as arduous), but in time. Bohm estimates it takes roughly a year for a group to reach its best results. Though, the current world demands results now. If there were patience to wait for the fruits of dialogue to ripen, those fruits would prove to be of far superior quality to anything produced by faster means. But because collective thought belongs to the implicate order, the world refuses to accept that it were not immediately available on the terms of the explicate order.
The second reason is more fundamental still: the collective thought that emerges is accessible only to those inside the group — not to anyone outside it. In the context of the global food crisis, a dialogue group would certainly arrive, in due course, at proposals of exceptional value. But the decision-maker — the authority who must ultimately act — if not part of the group, will evaluate those proposals through the lens of his or her own linear thinking, and may simply be unable to apprehend their full significance.
Bohm believed dialogue could resolve any human problem. And it was precisely what may be the most intractable human problem of all — the one that lies at the origin of the current war against Iran — that came closest to being resolved through his methodology: the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Between 1992 and 1993, delegations of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, each numbering around twenty, met secretly in Oslo in a dialogue group format and arrived at the terms of a peace agreement. It was signed on September 13, 1993, at the White House, by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. But the collective thought the negotiating group had reached — one that encompassed peace and coexistence between the two peoples — however endorsed by the respective leaders, could not be accessed by those who had not been part of the process. Those people went on to sabotage it until it collapsed. Both Rabin and Arafat were eventually killed: Rabin shot in an assassination facilitated by his own security detail; Arafat poisoned.
The Oslo Accords, along with other cases where the methodology was applied — including the national reconciliation processes in South Africa and Guatemala — demonstrate that dialogue groups are especially well-suited to conflict situations. Every clash of thoughts and views among participants is rich raw material for the process; conflict, after all, is inherent to the human condition. Any new reality beyond the conflict cannot emerge at the level of the parts — the individuals whose ideas are in tension. It can only emerge at the level of the whole, as the group’s collective thought. That is precisely why the process takes time.
Dialogue is also particularly suited to complex problems like the global food crisis, because such problems are necessarily perceived differently by each person involved. The inevitable collisions among these multiple perspectives are themselves a form of conflict — even where there is no personal animosity.
The dialogue process can be difficult, especially in its early stages. Over time, however, it becomes deeply rewarding, as the group develops a collective intelligence — an experience that will be genuinely new for every participant. The dialogue assumes unexpected rhythms and tempos; conversations become more subtle; collective insights surface unbidden. The whole organizes the parts. And the collective thought that emerges will necessarily be systemic, even as each participant’s individual thinking remains linear.
A dialogue group is not a cure for the global food crisis. There will be less food in the world for the same number of people; there will be hunger, and pain. What a dialogue group can do, if implemented, is close the gap in our collective incapacity: the incapacity to construct a reasonably accurate picture of the future from the full body of available data, knowledge, and experience; to update that picture in time to be useful; and to derive from it the solutions that are both possible and necessary.
Ruben Bauer Naveira, a Brazilian activist and pacifist, is also the author of One and all – or none at all: Life after nuclear war.
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