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Patrick Galey takes a deep dive into why the global food crisis prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a sign of things to come
Three years ago, a United Nations science panel released a special assessment on land use and climate change. As with all UN climate reviews, it was highly technical and filled with caveats, dedicating chapters to subjects such as desertification, habitat degradation and sustainable development.
But lurking within the 1,300-page assessment was a stark warning: the food we need to survive is under threat and so is nearly everything we use to produce it.
Carbon pollution from human activity is already impacting crop and livestock production through “increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and greater frequency of some extreme events,” it said.
As temperatures continue to rise this century in step with the global population, the assessment predicted lower yields, decreased nutrient content and greater harvest failures of staple crops, increased food losses due to pests and invasive species, and sky-rocketing grain prices.
“Given increasing extreme events and interconnectedness, risks of food system disruptions are growing,” it found.
In the three years since this warning, the pandemic ravaged economies, plunging millions of people into poverty. Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent the cost of basic foodstuffs soaring and stoked fears of a hunger crisis.
The World Food Programme says that as many as 323 million people will face acute food security this year. Forty-four million are at emergency levels of hunger and some 750,000 are currently experiencing what the UN classifies as a food catastrophe, the highest number in more than a decade.
Globally, some 821 million people are under-nourished and more than 150 million children are stunted due to a lack of nutrition.
The hoped-for resumption of some grain exports from Ukraine’s blockaded Black Sea ports has eased short-term concerns for importing nations. But experts fear that the pandemic and Ukraine have exposed the underlying frailty of the global food system as climate change withers staple crops and inflation spirals out of control.
“The food system is broken,” said Fatima Denton, director of the Institute of Natural Resource for Africa and an author of the 2019 UN report. “This is a huge emergency that has already landed on most of our doorsteps, and one which we need to find a rapid solution to.”
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Warning Signs
The war in Ukraine catapulted food security into public and government focus. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned in June of an “unprecedented world hunger crisis”, adding there was a risk of “multiple famines” this year.
Putin’s war plunged several countries into food insecurity almost overnight, particularly those across the Middle East and north Africa heavily reliant on wheat and sunflower oil imports from Ukraine and Russia.
But the warning lights were flashing well before.
After the pandemic squeezed transportation routes and sent shipping costs soaring, the prices of wheat, maize, and soy at the beginning of 2022 were already at multi-year highs.
Daniel Maxwell, a professor in food security at Tufts University, said that the world had been approaching several “critical points” in food prices for months if not years. “Global food prices were already at the level of more or less the level of 2011 which was when we had the famine in Somalia,” he said.
Maxwell said that the last time wheat was as expensive as it was in February 2022 was just before the Arab Spring, when governments across the MENA region were toppled by mass protests.
The World Food Programme says that conflicts since 2009, including in Syria and Yemen, as well as exceptional droughts across the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and Central America, means the world is less able to cope with food price spikes than a decade ago. “Incomes are still depressed, labour markets are still struggling to recover, and debt is at record levels,” a spokesman said.
Gerald Theis, chairman of CEREMED France, a leading grain trader, said that cereal price inflation was a concern long before Russia’s invasion. “Basically it started more than three years ago with COVID,” he recently told a food security conference. “We started to see some protectionist behaviour, mainly with China, who started to buy grain massively – especially corn – in order to cap domestic meat price inflation.”
China is the world’s largest wheat producer but most of its grain imports – some 28 million tonnes of maize in 2021, more than Ukraine exports in a typical year – go to feed its pig herds.
Although the world produced a record wheat crop in 2021, extended dry periods are now hampering major wheat producers’ ability to step in and cover the export shortfall from Ukraine and Russia.
China’s Agriculture Minister warned back in March that this year’s crop was likely to be the “worst in history” following lower than average rainfall. After an unprecedented heatwave, last month Beijing warned its autumn harvest was now under “severe threat”.
In May, India, the world’s second-largest producer, banned nearly all wheat exports following a record-shattering heatwave across its northern breadbasket.
Nearly 70% of US wheat growing areas are experiencing drought, with the Department of Agriculture classifying just 32% of this year’s crop as “good condition” – the lowest since 1991.
In a recent crop bulletin, the department warned how the drought was “depleting topsoil moisture and significantly stressing rangeland, pastures, and various summer crops”.
Major European exporters France and Germany have both warned their 2022 harvest will be several million tonnes lower than forecast as northern Europe struggles with a persistent drought that the European Commission now believes is the worst in the last 500 years.
Shouro Dasgupta, environmental economist at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, said that drought was one of the most “critical climate stressors” impacting global food supply.
“We are seeing the intensity and frequency of droughts due to climate change,” he said. “They affect crop yields, but at the same time there is a direct impact on labour. “Unless we see drought-resistant crops scaled up then the problems we are seeing now are going to seem small by comparison in future.”
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Resource (Mis)use
Going by the numbers, the last six decades mark a food success story unprecedented in human history. Food production has more than tripled since 1960 and food supply per capita, even with a surging population, has grown 30%. But this boom has come at a cost.
Food production and transportation now account for as much as 37% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. A recent UN biodiversity assessment found that one-third of Earth’s land surface is dedicated to farming, as is three-quarters of freshwater supply.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that the use of nitrogen fertilisers has soared 800% since the early 1960s. As well as degrading the quality of freshwater, nitrogen fertilisers rely on natural gas for their production, leading to more warming.
And our reliance on them is putting even further pressure on food supply.
Russia is the world’s top producer, and its invasion of Ukraine sent prices soaring even after hitting close to all-time highs last December.
Steve Mathews, senior vice president at the Gro Intelligence food security monitor, said the disruption in fertiliser supply from Russia, as well as from Belarus, would have “multi-year effects on food security globally”.
“Even if everything gets resolved today it’s not clear that we will recover to prevent a slow-moving disaster,” he added.
Mathews estimated that an additional five million people would go hungry each day due to disruptions in fertiliser supply.
Wheat, which makes up 20% of the world’s daily calories, is especially fertiliser-intensive, as it uses up soil nutrients such as phosphorus which aren’t easy to replace naturally.
Fergus Sinclair, chief scientist at the CIFOR-ICRAF climate and biodiversity research institute, said that food security in several nations – including major producers – was directly linked to fertiliser supply.
“We can see that a lot of countries think they’ve got a high food security because they’re producing a lot in their own country, based on the import of fertilisers and pesticides that might require foreign exchange to purchase,” he said. “It means that they don’t have much food security at all.”
At the same time, an over-reliance on just a handful of staple crop varieties makes it much harder for the global food system to adjust to unexpected crises.
“The big emphasis on crop breeding over the last century has been around a very few staple crops and breeding them for monoculture,” said Sinclair. “There are some quite big issues about the way we organize our entire society that create quite major stresses for an agricultural system.”
An additional stressor to food supply is just how many crops are grown that don’t end up on human plates. As much as 80% of all agricultural land is either used to rear or feed animals, and 4% is used for biofuels.
Mathews calculated that the amount of energy contained within the corn and soy products that go to either feed animals or make biofuels would be enough to provide an additional 1.9 billion daily meals for humans.
Choke Points
For many observers, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine exposed several weaknesses in the global food chain.
Supply lines have been stripped back over th