War and Hunger: An Endless Spiral?
It has become a seldom-examined truism that global food crises don’t really exist. In fact, the world’s farmers produce plenty of food - it’s simply a matter of distribution. Supporting this argument, pundits point to famine relief efforts in the ‘80s when wealthy countries shipped millions of tons of grain and other foods to war-torn African nations and blamed incompetent or corrupt governments for failing to distribute it to their starving population. Until recently, that assumption of adequate supply was true, but circumstances have changed, and the facts need to be re-examined. In fact, today, because of rising oil prices, climate change, and loss of arable land, current levels of food production are no longer adequate to meet the world’s needs.
As we consider the possibility of severe food shortages and how they affect our own families, it’s important to recognize that world famine won’t be a single event affecting everyone at once. It will emerge regionally and periodically, but no matter where it emerges, it will continue to destabilize the world’s governments and power the cycle of repeated crises. As we contemplate these emerging disasters, we need to keep the big picture in mind: hunger isn’t just a poverty issue, it’s a global security risk. Hungry people are not peaceful people.
Indeed, there are already clear examples of this cycle in action:
Tortilla Crisis in Mexico
The first in a series of disturbances in 2007 related to rapidly increasing prices for commodities like wheat, rice and corn, Mexico’s violent tortilla riots forced President Calderon to take swift action to control prices. In Haiti, those same price increases led to collapse of the government after continued deadly riots over food prices.
Other food disturbances broke out in poor countries, particularly in Africa, over rapidly increasing food prices, attributed to “record oil prices, rising demand for food in Asia, the use of farmland and crops for biofuels and other factors such as market speculation”
The Arab Spring Protests
Amid the fallout from the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 (The Great Recession), food prices in the Middle East skyrocketed, driven by shrinking farmland, bad weather and water scarcity, leading to a series of widespread anti-government protests, followed by political turbulence, civil war, and continuing economic difficulties.
Trade Restrictions and the Rice Crisis
As food prices rose across the world markets in 2008, the trading price of rice tripled over a span of 6 months, due largely to trade restrictions, oil prices, a weak dollar, and panic buying following similar spikes for wheat, corn, and soybeans. Since rice is critical to the diet of about half the world’s population, rice producing countries began to limit exports to protect from price inflation at home. At the same time, some countries stockpiled grain, others raised export taxes while a few restricted or banned exports altogether. Most of the world’s population that depends on rice live in developing countries, with many spending at least half of their income on food. For these populations, the critical combination of scarcity and increasing prices led to food riots in developing countries across the globe.
The painful effect of trade sanctions does not affect only the targeted country. The producing country may lose the economic benefit of selling their product, but those countries that depend on that product suffer as well, and as the market rises to compensate for greater demand, poorer countries far removed from the conflict may find themselves priced out of the most basic food resources. Even the wealthiest countries are not immune and will experience the squeeze of rising prices across a broad range of products.
Clearly, these crises are not a thing of the past:
Soaring food prices, especially bread, have been a trigger for protests, civil unrest, and revolutions in France, Russia, and the Middle East in the past. With wheat prices up 70% in the last month, experts worry that countries with an unstable food supply that rely on Ukraine and Russia are at particular risk. Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Yemen, in particular, get more than half of their imported calories from the region — they're looking at a possible surge of severe malnutrition and starvation. (Lalljee 2022)
Protracted and Sweeping Effects
It’s simple to focus exclusively on the price of bread in your local grocery store or the images on your computer with starving children when you try to visualize the effect of conflict and food shortages. It’s hard to see how struggles halfway across the world might fundamentally affect your ability to feed your family. But the fallout spreads far beyond this season’s crops and reaches directly into your cupboard and garden. Who would guess that the current struggle in Ukraine would lead to far-reaching shortages of both fertilizer and farm equipment?
Fertilizer
It may not be widely known, but Russia and Belarus are major exporters of potash, urea, and other crucial fertilizer components and in fact produce much of the world’s fertilizer. Trade sanctions against Belarusian potash, imposed by the US and much of Europe, was recently followed by Russia blocking its own fertilizer exports. Now farmers worldwide are facing significant difficulties obtaining adequate fertilizer for their operations. Switching on a dime to manure is difficult, and it’s not necessarily a guarantee that sufficient supplies are available. Cutting back on production is often the only possible response. As farmers and governments attempt to control the damage, ripples spread down the line. One example is Brazil, the world's largest producer of coffee, soybeans, and sugar, which imports nearly 30 percent of its fertilizer from Russia and Belarus and is now considering opening protected indigenous lands to potash mining.
Farm Equipment
Modern farm equipment, like today’s automobile engines, make use of internal computers to manage emissions, monitor sensors, control complex operations like those in combines, and collect data in planters. We’ve already seen lowering stock and rising prices for both new and used automobiles due to a global semiconductor chip shortage, initially triggered by shipping problems associated with COVID 19, but the problem isn’t likely to get better now that Ukraine is disrupted by the Russian invasion. The element neon is a critical component of semiconductor chips, and fully half the world’s supply of neon comes from Ukraine. No matter how many US companies are ordered to divert their domestic manufacturing facilities to semiconductor production, they still need neon.
