TheAgricultural Alamo

Migrationsare and will be an indelible feature of mankind’s history for a plethora ofreasons. However, even after the establishment of the United Nations and powerfulNGOs after WW II accompanied by a quantum leap in technological prowess inproviding greater agricultural yields, the ability to mitigate forced migrationsbecause of meteorological induced heat waves and droughts has failed.

Fordecades the humanitarian safety valves for the shipment of food and medicine todistressed regions were readily available from other regions or countries withbountiful surpluses and sent overseas to mitigate the crisis.

Underthe dire present-day global circumstances of droughts and floods, there arelittle to no surplus agricultural foodstuffs. Even the usual resource-rich rescuershave themselves become victims of scarcity and have instituted exportrestrictions in order to feed their own citizens.

“Damnedif you do. Damned if you don’t.”

Thegrowing global food security crisis will inevitably trigger the largestmigration in human history in the hundreds of millions – both internal andexternal – creating the associated exploitation and violence borne out of thedesperate need for survival.

Themind-boggling number of refugees will easily overwhelm the available resourcesby host and destination countries to shelter, feed and provide medical care. Forthis reason we could see civilian casualties that rival those during WW II.

Becauseof the uncertainty where and how much food & water resources are available,these refuges face the ultimate double-bind dilemma with respect to risk. Ifthey remain in their town/city, they die. If they remain in their country, theydie. If they migrate elsewhere, they die.

Thefollowing is a pre-Russo-Ukrainian conflict snapshot of the global refugeepopulation at the end of 2021 in a chart entitled Mapping the World’s RefugeePopulationprovided by the UN Refugee Agency.

Thedisturbing trend has been growing for many years from 2012 to May 2022 asarticulated in the following chart entitled Number of ForciblyDisplaced People Reaches 100 Million provided by the UN Refugee Agency.

Accordingto the report, two-thirds of refugees originated from only five countriesthrough 2021. With the rapidly deteriorating global food situation, thesefigures will inevitably explode initially in sub-Sahara Africa and then progressto emerging and developed countries.

Aswith any desperate journey, the roads to salvation are perilous. The followingchart entitled The Most Dangerous MigrationRoutesfrom 2014 to May 15, 2022, provided by the International Organization forMigration underscore these dangers.

Duringthis period one can expect an explosion in human trafficking, exploitation, andterror given the sheer mass of humanity in motion, millions of transients with limitedlegal protection or enforcement of those laws.

MassMigration Begets Mass Surveillance

Insidiouslyas part of the governmental “crowd control” risk assessment from internal andexternal threats, it would not be surprising that government security services willcollaborate with their neighbors and encourage the eager cooperation of techgiants to track citizen movements within the country as well as refugees enteringthe country. Governments no longer need to refer to satellite images for thepurposes of tracking these migrations, rather the now humble mobile thatprovides real-time locations.

The mobile phone has becomethe new evolutionary human appendage in a world that makes its use ever moreessential in conducting the most banal tasks. It can be used to create abehavioral profile and baseline for each user to the point of becoming eerilypredictive.

Surveillance | The DarkPast is Darker Today

An article published in TheEconomist on April 21, 2012 entitled “WhatMakes Heroic Strife” discussed a software called Condor which reviews datafrom social media and then creates a “sentiment analysis” for the purposes ofpredicting not only the course of existing protests rather predictive beforethey begin.

It added that Lockheed Martin’sWorldwide Integrated Crisis Early Warning System project serves as a “socialradar” for long-term forecasts of potential civil unrest and suggest countermeasures.

If these capabilities were inplace over 10 years ago, imagine the technological surveillance advancement inplace today with more tech firms involved in such operations.

Throughtheir electronic devices, specifically mobiles, participating governments will beable to track these migrants and enough data to predict their destination(s) likethe weather.

Furthermore,the technical profile of the mobile itself could provide enough information onthe large swaths of refugees to create a profile of their racial/ethnic/religiousbackgrounds, languages and dialects spoken, phraseology, etc. It comes as closeas a biometric analysis without using biometrics. Whether these methods are ethical,moral or legal is debatable.

Withrespect to the “good” cop role, this data will enable the destinationgovernments to prepare with enough food, water, shelter and security to better handlethe flood of refugees.

Withrespect to the “bad” cop role, the authorities will already have enoughinformation to create a dossier of every adult migrant even more efficientlythan the Nazis ever did upon arrival at the camps.

Thecost? Food, water, and shelter could be provided in exchange of the collectionof biometric data from each recipient of aid which would expand their alreadycomprehensive database. The difference will be that there will be far morehighly educated refugees among the masses as their biometric data are obtained.

Conclusion

Withthis insidiously Orwellian biometric tag & release program under the guiseof national security, passports will merely be a secondary hard-copy documentfor identification but still an official requirement to enter, reside and workin a country.

Becauseinternational law is reactive the biometric data will have already beencollected by the millions and established as the indelible identifier forhundreds of millions of law-abiding citizens worldwide whose only “crime” wasto cross borders to survive.

© Copyright 2022 Cerulean CouncilLLC

The Cerulean Council is aNYC-based think-tank that provides prescient, beyond-the-horizon, contrarianperspectives and risk assessments on geopolitical dynamics and global urbansecurity.