From the Wall Street Journal:

The road to Dystopia is paved with dust and hardship.

Such is the gloomy worldview of Jeremy Grantham, chief investment strategist of Boston-based institutional money manager GMO LLC. He envisions a future of scarce resources, where food and the means to produce it is the coin of an unstable realm.

“We are five years into a severe global food crisis that is very unlikely to go away,” Grantham wrote in a letter to GMO clients, published late Tuesday. Read Grantham's letter, and GMO's investment outlook.

“It will threaten poor countries with increased malnutrition and starvation and even collapse,” Grantham predicted. “Resource squabbles and waves of food-induced migration will threaten global stability and global growth. This threat is badly underestimated by almost everybody and all institutions with the possible exception of some military establishments.” Read more: Food and water scarcity could spike prices for years to come.

Food, and the lack of it, will be the world’s foremost social, economic and political priority for several decades, Grantham said. The crisis is unlikely to abate “at least until the global population has considerably declined from its likely peak of over nine billion in 2050.”

The good news is that science and technology is engineering better ways to increase food production, Grantham said. The trouble is that these efforts might not be successful and in any event, demand will most certainly overwhelm supply.

For more, see: GMO investment veteran sees rising prices, global crisis