We’re all living in a world of collateral hunger

Text David Beasley, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP)

It might seem jarring to speak of markets when bombs are killing Ukrainian children, destroying hospitals and kindergartens, and burning families from their homes.

But the WFP knows from its work in nations scarred by conflict that marketplaces are key stabilizers in a troubled world. When a town marketplace is hit by a missile, it kills store holders, customers and suppliers. It destroys infrastructure and deters commerce. It wreaks havoc on supply chains that have been carefully forged over decades and which ensure that food is brought as efficiently as possible from farm to table. It drives up prices as people seek to re-establish orderly supply, at much higher replacement cost.

This explains why the consequences of the war in Ukraine are sending a shockwave around the world in energy and food commodity pricing. But the impact of this violent disruption is all too real and is being felt on almost every table around the world. We’re all in this together, from Yemen to Berlin and Los Angeles to Tokyo.

The food crisis in Yemen, due to the seven-year civil war between the government forces and the Iranian-backed Houthis, is growing with the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine.

Rising food and fuel prices hurt the vulnerable the most. In Lebanon, before the Ukraine war, food prices had already risen by 570 percent since 2020. Three quarters of its people now live below the poverty line and over 50 percent depend on assistance. For people living hand-to-mouth, tiny increases in the cost of food have an outsized impact. Wheat prices, now at a 14-year high, will spike the prices of bread, pasta and a bowl of cereal globally. Double the price of wheat and the cost of that bowl of cereal either doubles — or you consume half as much.

A couple of months ago I was in Yemen. A collapse in funding meant that we were already slashing food for 8 of the 13 million people we feed there. Children were getting the equivalent of a bowl of cereal and now, unless we can find the cash in a COVID cash-strapped world, they’ll be getting half a bowl of cereal. Before Ukraine, we were already taking food from the hungry to feed the starving. Now we’ll be taking from the starving to share with the starving.

The war in Ukraine has also pushed other crises off the front pages. For example, food insecurity in Afghanistan is soaring, driven by the impact of decades of conflict, the economic crisis, and recurrent drought. Despite the eyes of the world being focused elsewhere, WFP remains on the ground to offer a lifeline for millions of people in Afghanistan and in dozens of other nations around the world.

Internally displaced people wait for food distribution in a bunker at a factory in Severodonetsk, eastern Ukraine.

But our task is becoming ever harder. With grain ships due for the Middle East and Africa tied-up in Black Sea ports and many months until Australia and Argentina plant extra crops to fill the gap in global supplies, painful price rises in an unstable market ultimately find their mark in the mouths of hungry children across the world.

The link between food and social stability, even in the most conflicted circumstances, is why the WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. In citing the fact that the WFP cultivates the conditions for peace, the Nobel Committee acknowledged an intuitive fact that we all feel — that people will do whatever is necessary to feed their families, be that gruelling work, migration or going to war. Bread shortages and hunger have a well-researched role in igniting revolutions.

Moreover, a destabilized commodity market will certainly spark an ugly scramble to corner available grain for national interests, ignoring the consequences of destabilizing poorer countries. Already battered by COVID, climate change, and often conflict, poorer countries are struggling the most to recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout. About 60 percent of low-income countries are currently in debt distress or close, double that of 2015, including a hit-list of the world’s most fragile states, like Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen.

Wheat prices, now at a 14-year high, will spike the prices of bread, pasta and a bowl of cereal globally.

Yet what must not be forgotten in this new scramble is that we are our brother’s keeper, not just for the sake of ordinary compassion, but because a stable market helps keeps inherently unstable countries on their feet. Wealthy nations also have an “interest” in that.

Yes, the WFP is all hands on deck in Ukraine and surrounding countries, dealing with the hunger fall-out of this war for people trapped in cities. But our work must continue for the hundreds of millions of those most exposed to starvation who live far away from Kyiv. We must stabilize markets in order to preserve and promote peace in the deeply fraught countries in which we serve.

Our leaders have to acknowledge that food security is inextricably linked with social and political stability. Fighting hunger therefore requires not only sufficient funding to relieve immediate suffering, but also long-term investment to address its root causes and help prevent future crises.

If we do not act now, we risk multiplying and amplifying the instability already wrought by two years of COVID pandemic, by conflict, by the burgeoning effects of climate change, and now by the menace of runaway costs hitting a ring of fragile countries circling the globe.

David Beasley

As Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley works across political, religious and ethnic lines for economic development and education.

Before taking his leadership position at WFP in April 2017, Beasley spent a decade working with leaders and managers in more than a hundred countries on projects to promote peace, reconciliation and economic development and was governor of the state of South Carolina from 1995 to 1999.