The world is teetering on the edge of global hunger catastrophe. A perfect storm of increasing food, energy, and fuel prices, caused by rising global inflation, the ongoing war in Ukraine, rapidly developing man-made climate change, and universal pressures brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, is causing widespread food insecurity, and threatens to plunge the most vulnerable areas of the world into unprecedented famine.
The fact that famine, a danger so medieval in its concept, is still endemic is 21st Century society is almost laughable, especially when the most developed parts of the world wastes an eye-watering amount of food each year.
Until 2018, global hunger was in steady decline, with fewer than 150 million people experiencing food insecurity in that year. However, since 2018, those numbers have been steadily rising, with the numbers more than doubling between 2019 and 2021. As of 2022, around 800 million people around the world regularly go hungry.
The most immediate cause of this crisis is, predictably, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain and vegetable oil exporters, has had to halt all of its exports since the Russian invasion. Russian blockades around Ukrainian ports have meant that 25 million tonnes of grain are stuck in Ukraine, enough to feed all of the world’s least developed economies for a year.
This has led to the prices of grain to rise exponentially. Countries in Africa and Asia that are reliant upon Ukrainian grain exports now have to look further afield for their food to countries such as Australia, the US, or Canada. This also increases freight and transport costs for grain, and coupled with the already increasing cost of the grain itself, the situation is quickly becoming unsustainable.
The rising costs of food, but also of fuel and fertilisers, both vital commodities for farmers, is leading to reactionary economic policies from those nations still with supplies of these commodities. Protectionist policies, export controls, and stockpiling are becoming widespread, and countries including Argentina, India, Russia, and Pakistan, four of the six largest grain producing nations in the world, have severely limited or even banned exports of grain.
On top of the obvious effect of limiting global food supply, driving prices up even further, protectionism has been proven time and again to be detrimental to the nation that enforces them, as well as the nations reliant on those exports.
Farmers who produce the stockpiled commodities often switch to different crops owing to the lack of potential for international trade, leading to an overall drop in supply. This pushes prices still higher, leading to more protectionism, less supply, and so on. Protectionism may seem like a sensible policy in the short term, but it has been proven time and again to damage not only the global economy, but individual economies as well.
The key to solving this issue, as with so many other problems facing the global community, is co-operation. Those nations with a surplus of food, those who waste large quantities of food, must engage with the poorest nations, those who will undoubtably suffer the worst from this crisis, to save lives and work together to beat back the coming catastrophe.
Action is already being conducted to help ease the burden; Turkey is acting as a moderator between Ukraine and Russia on the food issue, leading to Russia agreeing to lift its blockade on Ukrainian ports. Turkey will conduct checks on Ukrainian vessels carrying grain to the developing world to alleviate Russian concerns of the shipments being used to smuggle weapons. If this deal works out, then the 25 million tonnes of grain stuck in Ukraine will be able o find its way to Ukraine’s customers, and feed those millions of people currently under threat of starvation.
This is not a solution to the problem as a whole, merely a step towards it, and a small step at that. The wider economic, political, and diplomatic intricacies of the food crisis need equally nuanced solutions; nations dependent on grain from a few select ‘bread basket’ countries need to diversify their portfolio of suppliers to safeguard against famine. Protectionist policies must be reversed, and nations that can fill in the gaps in the international supply of grain must be obligated to do so.
We are in uncharted waters. There cannot be ‘business as usual’ in response to the challenges we all face, and the food crisis is only one part of the puzzle. Famine, war, and disease are widespread. One could be excused for believing the situation is far, far worse than being reported. Make no mistake, it has the potential to become just that, but only if we don’t co-operate. There are mutually beneficial solutions to the current global crises, but wether they will be reached by the international community is a different question.
stay safe
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