Analysis | Food is likely the next global crisis
As part of our New Global Commons Working Group series on emerging diplomatic challenges, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Bridging the Gap Initiative, ISD hosted a working group this spring on the nexus between food insecurity, instability, and conflict. This post draws on those discussions and the final working group report, released in August.
“In the early 2030s, the world was in the midst of a global catastrophe. Rising ocean temperatures and acidity devastated major fisheries already stressed by years of overfishing. At the same time, changes in precipitation patterns depressed harvests in key grain producing areas around the world, driving up food prices, triggering widespread hoarding, and disrupting the distribution of food supplies, leading to global famine. A wave of unrest spread across the globe, protesting governments’ inability to meet basic human needs and bringing down leaders and regimes. In one of many incidents in the Western world, thousands of people were killed in three days of violence in Philadelphia triggered by social media rumors about bread shortages.”
Every four years, at the start of a new presidential administration, the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) Strategic Futures Group publishes its “Global Trends” report. This year’s report, “Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World,” presents four possible scenarios and paints a fairly dark picture of potential futures in the United States and globally. In its most dire prediction ,“tragedy and mobilization,” climate change and resource depletion cause a global food crisis. The Chinese government and the European Union band together and lead a coalition, without the United States, that “is implementing far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty.”
As the United Nations convenes a pre-summit next week in advance of the Food Systems Summit in September, the international community has an opportunity to mobilize action on food security to avoid the tragic scenario that the NIC report envisions.
Food today
Less than a decade ago, the international community celebrated how it had decreased global hunger, and even set a UN Sustainable Development Goal to end hunger by 2030. Innovations in science, fertilization, and irrigation, oftentimes through public-private partnerships, increased food production in the last half of the 20th century, allowing farmers around the world to feed a global population that increased from 1.6 billion in 1900 to almost 8 billion today.
However, in the last half decade, the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition has consistently increased. Adverse climate events, distribution breakdowns, poor resource management and governance, conflict, disease outbreaks, gender inequality, and profit-driven research and development, among other drivers, have led to structural imbalances and inequities in the food system, which limit consistent and sustainable access to nutrition for an increasing number of people. For instance, a new study states that the Amazon rainforest, once a carbon sink, now produces more carbon dioxide than it stores, a trend that is likely to worsen before it gets better.
In early July, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released its annual report on the state of food security, and like the NIC’s, it paints a bleak picture. Mostly driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, the report “estimates that around a tenth of the global population — up to 811 million people — were undernourished last year. The number suggests it will take a tremendous effort for the world to honour its pledge to end hunger by 2030.”
A likely scenario?
The NIC report’s “tragedy and mobilization” scenario is a worst-case hypothesis. But numerous examples today show that hunger is increasing and history tells us that it has led to political instability and conflict for millenia. From ancient Rome to the origins of World War II, to current fighting in Yemen, food insecurity and conflict have a cyclical relationship.
World Food Program studies have shown that food insecurity is a key driver of conflict and instability, while ongoing conflict creates hunger and famine. This month in Cuba, for instance, the island saw the largest protests against the socialist regime since the 1959 revolution. These mass protests were brought on, in large part, because “food shelves in government stores across Cuba are bare. What few goods are available in hard-currency shops require hours-long waits in line.”
Across the Atlantic, the United Nations announced that more than 350,000 people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region are suffering famine conditions and more than 5.5 million people need food aid. The hunger and famine comes directly on the heels of internal fighting between the Ethiopian government and a breakaway faction in Tigray that erupted in the fall of 2020. As of today, thousands have died in fighting and the war has forcibly displaced over 2 million people. In late June, government forces were driven out of Tigray, and they have since begun to isolate the already beleaguered region. There are now hints of an impending government offensive, all of which will exacerbate the food crisis.
Avoiding the worst case
Pandemic-induced food and supply shortages in the early half of 2020 vividly demonstrated, even to those in high-income countries, that distribution shortages, production delays, and panic buying, can affect any city or region. Food security is a deeply complicated problem with overlapping drivers, from climate change, to poor governance, and distribution issues, to name just a few. Understanding this dynamic is key to achieving food security. Just growing more food will not suffice.
Ultimately, the key to ending food insecurity as a driver of instability and conflict is to reframe universal food security as a means to achieve stability and peace, to reimagine our food system and distribution networks, and to re-envision food as a basic right. In addition to humanitarian interventions in vulnerable regions, researchers and policymakers should rethink the location and variety of food production, and reassess their approach to development. The drivers of food insecurity and the issues that it creates are cross-cutting and affect a multitude of local and international players. Renewed international action through this year’s Food Systems Summit and beyond is necessary to break the nexus of instability and food insecurity.
Food system reconfiguration would also help to deal with the underlying drivers of protectionist food policies that we have seen in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. A shift toward recognition of food as a global common good to which all have a right — rather than a commodity — is an imperative early step.
Kelly McFarland is a U.S. diplomatic historian and the director of programs and research at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. Follow him on Twitter @McFarlandKellyM
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