We are at the beginning of the 2nd century. After an enormous territorial expansion, Roman civilization is at its peak. The Roman legions dominated regions such as Greece, Egypt, Hispania, Gaul, Britannia, and Palestine.
The empire spans more than four million square kilometers. However, we are not just talking about military dominance, but also cultural dominance. Roman customs began to transform the conquered lands.
Roads and aqueducts, temples and statues of gods became common in the world dominated by Rome. This is because Rome is not simply the capital of an empire, but the most important city in that part of the planet. Any Roman citizen at this time was sure that the glory of Rome would be eternal, and the empire would rule those regions of the world forever.
No one could have imagined that, just a few centuries later, that gigantic empire would turn to dust. Much less that one of the main reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire would be something almost unbelievable: the lack of food. Hello, my dear friends!
All right with you? My name is Felipe Castanhari. Welcome to another lively Nostalgia!
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So let's explain in a simple way, how the fall of the Romans was. Any ancient people had many reasons to fear the Roman legions, who fought in an organized and professional manner. Warriors from Germanic peoples or even armies from older and more powerful civilizations, such as the Egyptians, were simply no match to face Roman forces.
With armies feared by everyone, audacious generals and an ambition for power that was in the Roman blood, Rome increasingly expanded its borders, creating one of the greatest empires in history. And the impressive size of the Roman Empire was precisely one of the reasons behind its fall. Looking today, we can see the Roman Empire as a kind of tree that grew so, so much, so much.
. . That it could no longer support its own weight.
This began in the 2nd century, when Rome decided that it needed to control the provinces it had already conquered more carefully. The idea was to monitor the borders to prevent invasions and looting of people who were outside the limits of the Empire, and to control with an iron fist the most problematic provinces and those furthest from the central government in Rome, preventing any type of rebellion. The problem is that it was precisely the conquest of new lands that sustained Rome's economy.
In fact, we can go further and say that it was the expansion of the empire that literally put food on the tables of Roman citizens. And do you know why? One of the great resources of Rome's military conquests were enslaved people, who belonged to the defeated peoples and were condemned to forced labor.
There are studies that indicate that the Roman Empire had almost five million slaves, which is equivalent to around 10% of the total population at the time, which reached 50 million inhabitants. And half of these enslaved people worked in the fields, especially in food production. With the change in strategy and the decision not to conquer new lands from the 2nd century onwards, Rome simply stopped obtaining new slaves from other peoples.
And over time, people from conquered territories began to have the same rights as Roman citizens, and could no longer be enslaved. This Slavery Crisis created a snowball: Rome was left with a smaller and smaller number of enslaved people, and new enslaved people were no longer brought to the Empire. It wasn't long before farms and plantations began to have less and less enslaved labor.
No labor, no crops. No crops, no food. There came a time when the Empire no longer produced enough food for everyone who lived within its borders.
One of the most glorious and powerful empires of its time found itself face to face with a basic problem: hunger. And then "Roman wine began to sour" from the 3rd century onwards. Without enough food for everyone, food prices began to rise without stopping, generating inflation and social chaos.
This created an unprecedented economic crisis in the Roman Empire, with the government no longer able to maintain its populism with the famous Bread and Circuses policy, nor guarantee the security of borders, which generated waves of violence on all sides. Thus, popular revolts and internal struggles for power began to emerge. Little by little, the very powerful and glorious Rome became smaller and smaller.
Then, the Fall of the Roman Empire began within Rome, and because of the lack of food. And when the Empire no longer had the strength to even monitor the borders, the Germanic peoples began to take advantage of this to plunder and cause terror in the Roman provinces. The Empire, now malnourished and weakened, shrank every day, heading towards total decay.
The final blow was dealt in the year 476, when Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by the Germanic king Odoacer, in an event that marked the definitive fall of the Empire and left a lesson for future generations: no civilization, however rich and powerful, can last a long time without enough food. Over the centuries, other great empires emerged and disappeared, cities grew. .
. And despite all our technological and social evolution, hunger is still one of the biggest problems in our world. In the 20th century alone, around 70 million people died of hunger on the planet, a number equivalent to the population of the United Kingdom.
But what can make a people or an entire region go hungry? The first thing that should come to your mind should be the number of people in the world, right? Yes, this is one of the main reasons, because the world population grows by an average of 80 million people per year.
The more people in the world, the more mouths to feed. But there are other things that help the world go hungry. In fact, any unplanned event can cause famine in a region or an entire country.
Want a current example? The Covid epidemic! The number of people who suffered from hunger on the planet remained reasonably stable for five years, but jumped after the start of the pandemic.
The result is that, during 2020, around 800 million people went hungry as a direct consequence of the pandemic. I'm talking about almost 10% of the planet's population. So there's nothing we can do to resolve this?
Well, we already have smart farms, which use sensors to identify the most fertile land for each type of crop, and satellites that detect pests quickly, before they can harm the harvest. But this alone is not enough, because another fundamental point is to reduce losses during transportation and storage. There are already several technologies to increase the shelf life of food, eliminating microorganisms in different ways, whether with electrical pulses, heating systems or even radiation being applied safely.
Scientists are also working on the idea of having new nutritional sources to overcome hunger. Some examples are algae, extremely rich in nutrients, or cacti, which are resistant to drought and contain several vitamins. There is even an area that is researching the possibility of using insects as the basis of our diet.
Have you ever thought about eating a protein bar made with cricket flour? The point is: all possibilities that do not harm the planet need to be explored. Because the forecast is that, by 2050, the world population will have increased from the 7.
9 billion people we have today to something very close to 10 billion. And of course, all these people will need to eat. So we understand that science is doing its part and looking for a solution.
But is the solution only up to Science? What about big companies? What about governments?
How do they intend to deal with this problem? Yes, here we talk about science and research, but the main issue is economic. You often have countries exporting tons of food to other nations while people living next to the farms go hungry.
The truth is that every food production model needs to be completely rethought, taking into account factors such as waste, respect for the environment, better working conditions, as well as, of course, support for family farming and small producers, especially those who produce food. organic products without pesticides or substances that are harmful to health and nature. In fact, the distribution of income and social inequality is another very important factor when thinking about ending hunger.
There's no point in having plenty of food if most people don't have money to buy a head of lettuce. Not to mention the distribution of land, with huge properties in the hands of just a few large producers. Many people want to plant but don't have the space to do so.
The truth is that this problem, hunger, is not easy to solve. This is such a difficult problem to solve, that one of those responsible for the end of the gigantic Roman empire, is still a very real problem almost 1600 years later. Will humans still be dealing with this in a thousand years?
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