There is enough food. Why does the world feel unsafe?
Over the past six decades, humanity has traveled a path that once took centuries. The world’s population has grown from three to more than eight billion people — the fastest demographic expansion in history. Intuitively, such growth should have resulted in acute resource shortages, especially food. Yet the facts suggest otherwise: food production has grown faster than population, and average calorie availability per person has increased across all continents. Hunger and extreme poverty, despite persistent local tragedies, have declined globally.
And yet the paradox is unmistakable. As material well-being increases, the sense of instability intensifies. A world capable of feeding itself increasingly lives in a state of anxiety, fear, and conflict. This gap between objective abundance and perceived threat is key to understanding the current phase of societal development.
From a society of scarcity to a society of risk
For most of human history, social dynamics were governed by scarcity. Economies, politics, and wars revolved around the production and distribution of limited resources. Population growth almost automatically translated into greater pressure on land, food, and energy. In this paradigm, industrialization and economic growth appeared to be universal solutions.
In the second half of the twentieth century, this logic began to break down. Technological progress, global trade, the Green Revolution, and productivity gains allowed humanity to overcome fundamental resource constraints. At the same time, however, society entered a new phase that sociologist Ulrich Beck described as the “risk society.”
The essence of this transition is straightforward: the central challenge is no longer the production of goods, but the management of the consequences of our own success. Economic, technological, and political systems have become increasingly complex and interdependent — efficient, yet fragile. Risks are no longer external; they are produced by society itself.
Why abundance does not eliminate anxiety
Statistics show that there is enough food in the world. But access to it is determined not by physical availability, but by institutional and social conditions. Economist Amartya Sen demonstrated as early as the late twentieth century that hunger arises not from the absence of food as such, but from people losing their entitlement to access it — through income, markets, social protections, and state institutions.
Globalization amplifies this dynamic. Supply chains stretch across thousands of miles, markets become sensitive to geopolitics, and local disruptions quickly take on systemic dimensions. Even under conditions of resource surplus, societies increasingly operate “just in case”: stockpiling reserves, restricting exports, and tightening controls.
This is where the behavioral logic of scarcity comes into play. When the future is perceived as unpredictable, fear becomes an independent force in politics and economics. Decisions are made not because resources are objectively lacking, but because of anticipated losses.
New types of conflict: struggles over control, not resources
Contemporary conflicts rarely revolve around direct physical survival. More often, they concern control over flows — food, energy, finance, logistics. Those who control these flows control risk.
This explains why grain, gas, or rare earth minerals have become geopolitical instruments. The issue is not so much whether resources exist, but who determines the rules of access and on what terms. In this sense, wars and sanctions are symptoms of a broader crisis in global trust and coordination mechanisms.
The institutional gap
Economic sociologist Karl Polanyi warned in the mid-twentieth century that markets detached from social constraints inevitably provoke protective reactions from society. Today, we are witnessing a global version of this process. The economy has become transnational, while institutions of solidarity and risk-sharing remain largely national.
The result is a widening gap: risks are global, but mechanisms for managing them are fragmented. This fuels national strategies of self-insurance, distrust toward international institutions, and a return to bloc-based logic.
Where we are now
Contemporary society is in a transitional phase between an industrial, growth-driven model and a new one in which stability becomes the key resource. It is a world of objective abundance and subjective anxiety — a world in which the central problem is not scarcity, but the inability of institutions to align production, distribution, and trust.
This phase does not imply inevitable collapse. But it does reveal the limits of a development model based exclusively on expanding output. Without renewed mechanisms for risk management, redistribution, and collective guarantees, growth will increasingly be accompanied by instability.
The personal cost of systemic instability
Modern society has sufficient resources for a comfortable life today, but lacks confidence that this comfort can be preserved tomorrow. The world is becoming wealthier and living longer, yet the horizon of individual responsibility for the future continues to expand. More people recognize that collective institutions no longer guarantee protection and therefore feel compelled to build their own “architectures of self-insurance.”
This is where macroeconomics meets everyday experience. The challenge of the future lies not in food or resource shortages, but in the need to rebuild trust and construct resilient mechanisms that connect present abundance with confidence in the future. As long as this gap persists, societies will continue to live in a state of background anxiety — both at the level of global politics and in the daily lives of individuals.
The question is not whether uncertainty will disappear, but whether society can learn to trust and manage this uncertainty institutionally rather than shifting the burden entirely onto individuals. On this depends whether abundance becomes a foundation for stability — or continues to reproduce fear and conflict.
