It’s comforting to think that the specter of serious food shortages will fade as the risks from COVID diminish over time, but that’s wishful thinking. While we focused a lot on supply chain problems and weather in our last article, there are more fundamental concerns emerging that continue to affect our available food supply, particularly regarding global issues like population changes, conflicting demands for existing resources, loss of arable land, and cycles of war and hunger. We may feel that we are immune, as residents of the wealthiest nation in the world, but today’s world is far more interconnected than we appreciate.
Long Term Problems
Inadequate Food Stockpiles
Disasters affecting crops and food supplies are not new. One of the ways governments have addressed the risks of crop failures and natural disasters is to establish stockpiles of critical materials. This is an established practice in the US and many other countries. One well known example is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, created to shield the US from 70’s style gas shortages. It’s called upon when oil supplies are interrupted, as they were following Hurricane Katrina and again during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Strategic National Stockpile maintains stores of medical supplies such as antibiotics, vaccines, and even hospital beds. It was heavily used during the pandemic, particularly for ventilators and PPE.
While FEMA stockpiles certain amounts of food and water for immediate disaster relief, it’s the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) that maintains most government food reserves. These supplies have been tapped in disaster response, to provide food to soldiers and allies in wartime, and to assist in feeding needy people both in the US and abroad. In comparison to commercial food stocks, however, government-owned reserves maintain relatively low volumes and are limited in variety. Foods that are commonly available include unprocessed grains like wheat and corn, butter, dry milk, cheese and dry beans. Government reserves don’t include staples like bread, coffee, salt, seasonings or sugar. More complete foods like canned meat, soup mixes, or jellies are seldom kept in inventory. Provision of meat and fresh produce is generally managed by diverting supplies from existing school lunch programs or drawing from military supplies.
While the national food reserves are clearly not meant to guarantee the country a complete diet, the amounts that are stored are also inadequate to meet the needs of any significant fraction of the population even in the short term. Even so, those reserves are being reduced, not only in the US but across the world. In the early 2000s, US grain reserves were reduced by 50%, with the reasoning being that such food stockpiles are inefficient, encourage loss from spoilage and waste, and distort global markets. Instead, world governments are counting on international trade to meet periodic deficits in domestic food supplies. Clearly, that’s not always a reliable strategy.
Rising Prices
In the long term, the world’s growing appetite for even basic commodities like grain is outpacing its ability to produce them. Rising prices, regional shortages, rationing and even famine are closely tied to increasing demand. Even in relatively affluent countries, soaring prices for basic foods are destabilizing governments and triggering violent riots, while in poorer countries, the shadow of hunger and famine looms again.
Emerging Problems
Surprisingly, the increasing affluence of consumers in India and China has further stimulated rising food prices as they seek more and higher quality food for their families. This actually shouldn’t be surprising, since it’s well known that the first thing people do as they emerge from poverty is improve their diet. These improvements focus on high quality protein foods like meat, milk, fish, and eggs, all of which require much more resources to produce, including grains.
Freak weather events emerging from changing climates reduce harvests in unpredictable ways, Spikes in oil prices raise the cost of shipping and thus the price of food. Even the production of farm biofuels diverts key grains like corn, wheat, and soybeans away from the food stream and raises prices on the global market.
The Situation Today
Climate change, supply chain issues, and increasing populations are all thorny problems affecting the world’s food supply, but even the current conflict in Ukraine threatens long term upset of international markets. After all, Ukraine is the fifth largest exporter of wheat in the world and widely known as the breadbasket of Europe. Wheat, corn, oats and barley are produced and exported by both Russia and Ukraine and used for everything from breakfast cereal to pasta to corn syrup, a common sweetener in beverages. Animal feeds are largely made up of grains, so disruption here and rising costs on the world market will contribute to higher prices for chicken and pork around the world.
Weather pattern changes were already causing problems in global food production before the pandemic even started. Now, conflict in this fertile region of the world threatens both grain production and food security for hundreds of millions around the world. This perfect storm of circumstances highlights just how vulnerable to shocks the global food supply chain actually is.
