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War in the World’s Breadbasket: Prospects Facing the Indian Farmer By: Ashish Ranjan (The Aryan International School, Varanasi) When Vladimir Putin launched his ruinous invasion of the border state of Ukraine on February 24th, food markets were already at their least stable in 32 years. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food-Price Index (FFPI) had hit an all-time high of 140.7 by then, while the global food inflation maintained a double-digit streak at over 20%. While Covid and the subsequent severe supply crunch claim credit for much, two other factors, namely climate, and conflict, also play a role. On the one hand, increasingly common climate-driven famines have, for instance, pushed over 1.3mn Malagasy people to the cusp of crisis. On the other, 500,000 poor residents of northern Ethiopia suffer critical food insecurity as a direct consequence of a roller-coaster civil war. Under such dire circumstances, by-product opportunities have also emerged, particularly for the farmers of India.
The United Nation’s World Food Programme estimates that an unprecedented 283mn people across 80 countries are now acutely food-insecure. The figure, which counts those surviving on so little nutrition that their lives or livelihoods are in jeopardy, has roughly doubled in the last two years. Many of these live in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where 40% of the consumer-price basket comprises food. Already, they face surviving on grain stocks a third below the five-year average.
