These extracts, taken from the Synopsis of the 53rd edition of the Barclays Capital Equity Gilt Study published on 13th February 2008, highlight the breakneck depletion of the world's natural resources:

"Resource scarcity is the single most important social, political and economic factor of our era and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We are depleting the global stock of natural resources in the broadest sense of that term at an accelerating pace....The scale of the potential increase in aggregate demand is large enough to warrant doubts that it can be satisfied... Given the pace of economic growth in the developing world, the supply/demand balance in most resources becomes critical within a one to two decade timetable."