The world’s agriculture and food systems are a perfect storm. Overlapping crises, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, supply chain bottlenecks for both inputs such as fertilizer and outputs such as wheat, and natural disasters induced by climate change have together caused what the United Nations called “the biggest costs” have – of the crisis of life in a generation. World leaders cannot afford to allow this catastrophe to develop: rapidly rising food prices not only cause widespread human suffering, but also threaten to destabilize the political and social order. Already, along with skyrocketing energy costs, rising food prices have helped bring about the collapse of the Sri Lankan government.
But storms are increasingly predictable, and severe damage from them is therefore increasingly preventable. This applies to the current food crisis as well as extreme weather events. Politicians and business leaders have for too long ignored key fissures such as insufficient safety net coverage and lags in agricultural and policy innovations that leave agri-food systems – and the billions of people whose lives or livelihoods depend on them – vulnerable to the effects of others . disasters. If the global response to the current food emergency neglects even these critical points, it may inadvertently exacerbate underlying problems, worsen and prolong unnecessary human suffering, and hasten the arrival of the next perfect storm. Conversely, serious efforts to address not only the current crisis, but also the long-standing issues that have helped move the world towards healthier, more equitable, resilient and sustainable agri-food systems. World leaders and international organizations have a chance to make food emergency and widespread acute hunger problems of the past; they must not waste this crisis.
A CRIPPLING FOOD INSECURITY CRISIS
The clearest evidence that the world is in an emergency is the spike in food prices: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that global food prices in May 2022 were 23 percent higher than a year earlier. Moreover, they are now more than 12 percent higher than at the height of the 2008-12 global food price crisis, a disaster that pushed tens of millions of people back into poverty and sparked political unrest in dozens of countries. This may interest you : Battle over sex and gender in books divides a Texas town. In fact, the social and political upheaval in the Middle East that led to the Arab uprisings of 2010-11 was driven in part by the high cost of food.
Dramatic increases in food prices pose serious health risks, including acute malnutrition or even famine, especially in developing countries. According to the World Food Program (WFP), a record number of up to 323 million people are now, or are at risk of becoming, acutely food insecure (the technical term for nutrient deficiencies that put a person’s life or life in immediate danger. ). In more than a dozen desperately poor countries – Afghanistan, Angola, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Yemen and Zimbabwe – hundreds of millions of people have already facing severe food insecurity. In the absence of adequate, appropriate, rapid humanitarian response, many people die unnecessarily.
There is more than enough food in the global system to go around. Even in the current crisis, the global daily food provides an average of about 3,000 calories, 85 grams of protein, and 90 grams of fat per person, far exceeding human metabolic needs for a healthy life. The core drivers of hunger and malnutrition are poverty and wrong distribution, including excessive food loss and waste, insufficient agricultural production. Today, about three billion people are too poor to afford a healthy diet and perhaps a billion more could soon suffer similarly. Higher food prices disproportionately harm the poor for the simple reason that they spend a much larger portion of their income on food. Without adequate safety nets, preferably ones that are automatically triggered for people with incomes below a certain threshold or when food prices rise too high, people will suffer needlessly.
Unfortunately, history and the current crisis show that the discretionary responses of Western politicians routinely prove insufficient and even exacerbate existing inequalities. In Ukraine, for example, the global humanitarian response is commendably fast. As a result, it is not among the countries facing food emergency, despite the fact that the invasion of Russia has driven more than 12 million Ukrainians from their homes. High food prices are also causing mass starvation among the displaced Ukrainians. But in Yemen, which has suffered a horrific civil war for eight years, the WFP estimates that a record 19 million people are food insecure. If the international community were equally generous, where brown-skinned peoples are similarly faced with war and acute food insecurity, the global food system would have adequate supplies to address the problem.
BUILD BETTER SAFETY NETS
If the international community is serious about addressing the food crisis—and about strengthening a global agri-food system that leaves vulnerable and marginalized communities unequally exposed to hunger and famine—it needs to build better safety nets. Food price spikes only cause mass malnutrition if safety nets are inadequate. The world has enough food supplies to feed everyone a healthy diet, even in the face of natural and man-made disasters. Read also : Is your passion ready to become a business ?: Jennifer Juguilon-Hottle. But it lacks mechanisms to trigger responses that equally protect people in places less geopolitically important than Ukraine, or among populations of the global South that are less visible to leading Western governments. Building automatic global safety nets, through a combination of financial arrangements contractually triggered by disasters and treaty obligations between governments, could effectively build safeguards that are increasingly needed in the face of climate change.
The G-7 countries have just pledged an additional $4.5 billion for emergency global food aid, which sounds generous. Unfortunately, this brings global commitments to only 14 billion dollars, less than one third of the 46 billion dollars in current total humanitarian appeals worldwide. And international aid is down amid the pandemic. The massive costs that governments have incurred in funding domestic COVID-19 responses have understandably limited humanitarian spending abroad. But penny-pinching by the world’s richest countries risks triggering crises in the coming years that could be far greater, both in monetary cost and in human suffering, than the current crisis.
Policymakers must also work to promptly and fully address humanitarian emergencies, or risk downstream crises that may be much more serious. Ignoring food emergencies does not make them go away even cheaper to deal with later. In fact, it often leads to more challenging problems that are more difficult to address, mostly because higher food prices and more acute food insecurity are strongly associated with forced migration. When people grow desperate to feed their families, they take risks, mostly by fleeing their homes. Any humanitarian agency can confirm that it is much more expensive to meet the needs of displaced people than it is to help people in their own homes before circumstances force them to leave. And the number of displacements is growing. By the end of 2021, a record 89 million people had already been forcibly displaced, even before the Russian invasion drove 12 million Ukrainians to flee their homes.
There is more than enough food in the global system to go around.
Furthermore, there are steep sociopolitical costs to the failure to address humanitarian needs, both in countries that need aid and in those that provide it. High food prices lead to an increased risk of conflict and political unrest in countries with weak social safety nets. About four dozen countries experienced internal political unrest or civil war during the 2008-12 global food price crisis. Governments in Haiti, Libya, Madagascar and Tunisia have fallen, sometimes violently, and protracted civil wars have erupted in Syria and Yemen.
These problems can also spill over into high income countries. Europe’s migrant crisis began in 2011 with mass unrest across North Africa and West Asia over spikes in food prices; it peaked in 2015 as waves of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and others fleeing civil war sought Europe. The nationalist, anti-immigration domestic political response that presumably followed has heralded a marked rightward shift in European – as well as US – politics over the past decade. Russian President Vladimir Putin may be looking to replicate Europe’s migrant crisis by exacerbating the pre-existing global food crisis.
In fact, the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not cause the food price crisis so much as it exacerbated an already existing problem. Global food prices were already rising rapidly before the war. Even though food prices fell at the very beginning of the pandemic, they quickly rose through the last year – in October 2021, they blew past the December 2010 global food price record. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the blockade of its Black Sea ports certainly accelerated this trend by disrupting wheat, sunflower oil, corn and fertilizer exports, which caused global food prices to rise by 18 percent just from January to March 2022. Nevertheless, global food prices reached a one-month high. and the invasion and have since weakened a little in response to reasonably favorable growing conditions in other major producing countries, the risk of recession in large economies, and an agreement to open a Black Sea corridor to evacuate Ukrainian export goods. This is because the supply shock resulting from the Ukraine war is relatively small. Of the roughly three billion tons of grain produced worldwide each year, the loss of perhaps half of Ukraine’s exports—which is probably the upper limit—implies a supply shock of less than one percent. That’s less than what was lost in the severe 2012 drought in the Midwest of the United States – not enough to cause a crisis.
TIME FOR NEW TRADE AGREEMENTS
As they devise a response to the current food emergency, politicians should also assess the need for a global agreement to tie the hands of governments when domestic political forces agitate for export bans. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not the only cause of the February-March increase in food prices. Ill-advised export bans by some major food-producing countries, seeking to insulate domestic consumers from rising global market prices, have also contributed to this spike in costs. India banned wheat exports, Indonesia blocked the export of palm oil, and China banned the export of agrichemicals. On the same subject : Secretary Antony J. Blinken in Press Availability – United States Department of State. Repeating mistakes made during the 2008-12 global food price crisis, some governments surrendered to domestic political pressure and imposed export bans in the hope that they could prevent global price shocks from affecting the domestic market. Such policies inevitably fail quickly. Meanwhile, the bans temporarily prohibit faster and larger — if short-term — price increases among importers, who must scramble to find new suppliers to fill interrupted supply chains, temporarily driving up prices in the process.
Only about one quarter of the food consumed worldwide depends on international trade. Trade does not feed the world’s population so much as it stabilizes prices, distributing varying demand and supply shocks around the world quite effectively. No nation can reliably be self-sufficient and adequately nourished. The world needs orderly trade regimes to absorb the shocks that will inevitably occur, especially if climate change continues. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was created in a period of constantly falling real food prices; they hit an all-time low in December 1999. Because its rules were negotiated during an era of falling prices, the WTO has effective tools for governments to limit the ability of domestic political pressure for protectionism around imports at lower prices leading But when prices rise, the protectionist impulse affects exports, not imports, and the WTO lacks appropriate agreements to limit governments’ ability to restrict exports. New trade agreements to correct this oversight are necessary if the world is to get food prices under control.
REIMAGINING THE AGRI-FOOD SYSTEM
Policymakers must also recognize the urgent need to promote innovation in agricultural systems. Through greater investment in research and development and more creative policies, it would be possible not only to boost agricultural productivity, but also to reduce food loss and waste, and the demand for agricultural goods as animal feed and transport fuel, rather than food . A huge structural problem in the agricultural system is that the demand for grains and oils for biofuels, and especially for animal feed, has grown much faster than the demand for food.
Public agricultural research and development has a very high return on investment. But US public investment in agricultural research has fallen by one-third over the past two decades, and ongoing investment remains heavily focused on refining traditional crops and methods. Part of the problem is that governments and politicians often look for short-term results, while the most effective agri-food innovations pay off handsomely over years and decades. Among long-term innovations, governments should invest in circular systems that can recycle waste products into fertilizers and feed; controlled environment agriculture, which can reduce land, pesticide and water use and reduce crop loss to pests and pathogens; and alternative proteins that can produce healthy, tasty products at a fraction of the agricultural, land and water costs of current systems. They must also push for the institutional and political innovations that can encourage private investment in these new technologies.
There are steep sociopolitical costs for failure to address humanitarian needs.
Private investment in agro-food systems is much larger than public investment but only slightly better, tending to focus on luxury goods and services rather than on projects that can address high food prices and massive acute food insecurity. Although rising food prices boosted venture capital agri-food tech funding to $52 billion in 2021, an 85 percent increase over 2020, the largest single category was online grocery. While an understandable response to COVID-19 losses, fancy delivery apps do little to nothing to reduce food insecurity, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss or water stress, and they may exacerbate the global obesity epidemic.
The estimated $26 billion it will cost to eliminate global hunger represents less than one percent of the $2.7 trillion cash on hand in early 2022 among the 500 companies listed on the S&P index. If governments build policy and institutional innovations to attract even a modest fraction of that money to address the underlying imbalances that leave the world vulnerable to perfect storms like the one it faces now, that would be a game changer for the transformation of to accelerate agri-food systems. Real leadership – from the private, philanthropic and public sectors – will manifest itself to fight for smart and substantial investments in the transformation of agro-food systems.
Like extreme weather events, perfect storms that cause massive acute food insecurity are occurring more and more frequently. It took 35 years for the world to experience another food crisis after 1973-74, but less than a decade after the 2008-12 disaster for the current emergency to strike. Policy makers, international organizations and the private sector must develop an appropriate, timely and sufficient humanitarian response regime – not only to prevent unnecessary human suffering now, but also to address the larger-scale, longer-term challenges to which the world is increasingly vulnerable. let Food crises triggered by a wide range of shocks. These key points—safety nets, immediate action, limits on export bans, better research and development, and thoughtful investment—must guide public and private policy. Policymakers must address the immediate global food emergency with prompt and generous humanitarian aid and orderly international trade. They must also marshal the major research and development investments and policy and institutional innovations needed to bend the arc of agri-food systems away from increasingly frequent and calamitous crises and towards a healthier, more just, resilient and sustainable world. .
