Global Food Catastrophe Looms

Displaced women and children gather a displacment camp in Baidoa, Somalia where a catastrophic food crisis is looming.

Grace Fors

The world is approaching an unprecedented food crisis that will put the lives of millions of people at risk. This comes on top of, and is compounded by, myriad other crises created by capitalism including climate change, supply chain dysfunction, pandemic stress, and soaring prices. But while all of this poured lighter fluid on the world’s food systems, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine set it ablaze.

The unprecedented public health crisis that the food shortage will soon present is a symptom of the new era of global disorder characterized by deglobalization. If recent years have shown us anything, it’s that the world economy is a Jenga tower constantly on the brink of collapse from new developments. When it hits such a basic necessity as food, it can only further feed into the cycle of volatility, conflict, and destabilization. The only way out is through the socialist transformation of society.

Fuel to the Fire

Food security has been on a downward spiral for many years, with climate change-induced droughts, floods, fires, cyclones, and hailstorms a key driving factor. Food production all over the world has been relentlessly jeopardized by damaged ecosystems, diminishing crop yields, unstable temperatures, and too much or too little rain. The Horn of Africa is currently seeing its worst drought in 40 years, heat waves have compromised India’s wheat harvest leading to a ban on wheat exports, and floods battering South Asia have utterly destroyed crops and farmland. La Niña-induced droughts have been devastating agricultural activity in a number of countries throughout Africa and Asia, among them Afghanistan which was just hit with a major earthquake.

According to the latest UN report, in 2021 an estimated 29.3% of the global population — 2.3 billion people — were moderately or severely food insecure, and 11.7% (923.7 million people) faced severe food insecurity. World Food Program director David Beasley, points to the even more shocking number who are “marching toward starvation” which shot up from 80 million to 276 million over the past several years. As a result of the war, it has increased again and stands at an estimated 323 million. Beasley further warns that 49 million people in 43 countries are “knocking on famine’s door.” Famine is defined by the UN as an extreme deprivation of food where “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident.”

Extreme food insecurity and malnutrition has been concentrated in places like northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen, but its scope will only grow as the course of events points toward major wheat importers across Africa and the Middle East paying dearly for the war’s impact on the price and supply of traded grains.

The UN suggests that South Sudan, engulfed in ongoing conflict and extreme weather, is headed toward the “worst hunger crisis ever.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the situation in Somalia has hit devastating new highs. “The young victims of an intensifying global food crisis are being buried in unmarked graves. In crowded malnutrition wards, families are

waiting for one ailing child to be discharged before bringing in the next.”

According to Oxfam, COVID-19 had already caused a sixfold increase in people suffering famine-like conditions.The economic shock of the pandemic with its impact on production and supply chains has imposed a number of major strains. Lockdowns in China, for example, reduced the availability of labor, fertilizer, and seeds in the country, putting it in a desperate situation to produce and harvest wheat. An outbreak of swine fever has swept Thailand’s pig farms, devastating small farmers and halving their herds. All this while, new waves of COVID variants continue to break out, and a large part of the world remains unvaccinated.

Climate disasters and the effects of the pandemic on supply chains in turn drove up food prices dramatically even before the war. There has been a 40% price increase across major food crops since December. In turn, climate disasters and food shortages are associated with increased conflict. While war has contributed to an 88 percent spike in people living in these crisis conditions, the current war in Ukraine takes the crisis to a whole new level.

War Threatens Global Food Supply

In addition to the millions displaced and thousands killed in Ukraine itself, far more could be displaced or die globally from the war’s impact on energy and food supplies.

Russia and Ukraine together supply 28% of the wheat, 29% of the barley, 15% of the maize, and 85% of the sunflower oil traded globally, altogether 12% of all calories in the world market. North Africa and the Middle East are heavily reliant on these exports with more than 26 countries relying on one or both for more than half of their grains.

Ukraine alone provides food to 400 million people worldwide and supplies half the grain for the UN’s World Food Program. With the onset of the war, its supply has virtually disappeared. Wars drive people off land, kill crops, destroy infrastructure, create shortages, and drive up prices.

In late June, as Ukrainian farmers harvest wheat they planted in winter, everything stands in the way of the product making it to the market. Half of it is in occupied or contested territory in the southeast, where unexploded ordnance in fields is a real hazard and farmers work armed in helmets and bulletproof vests. The yield is expected to be 20-30% smaller than in normal times as applying fertilizer and addressing diseases and pests have been abandoned.

What can be salvaged and harvested among Ukraine’s agricultural products has nowhere to go. Truckers have been enlisted to fight. Fuel, water, and power that has been cut off by Russia is in short supply. And the country’s grain silos are half full with over twenty-two million tons stranded by the Russian naval blockade. The Black Sea ports needed to transport Ukraine’s massive share of the world’s agricultural products have become a battleground, holding massive resources hostage.

This is to say nothing of the war’s impact on the supply of fertilizer globally, the costs of which had already doubled to disaster levels before the invasion. Rising energy costs had begun forcing European fertilizer plants to curtail production for months before the war. But the widening energy crisis and the impact of sanctions have made things much worse.

Russia and Belarus between them account for more than 40% of the global exports of potassium fertilizer, a key nutrient for major crops like corn, soybeans, and produce. U.S. sanctions on Belarus, which exports 10-12 million tons annually and accounts for a fifth of global supply, took effect in December forcing producers to back out of their contracts. Russia alone is the largest fertilizer exporter in the world, responsible for 15% of the world’s traded nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer. Russia for its part is still able to sell its grain, but is disrupted by sanctions and lacks seeds and pesticides usually bought from the EU, spelling future shortfalls. Russian farmers are being instructed to use home grown seeds instead, which have a productivity 30% lower than imported seeds. Western sanctions and Putin’s ban on fertilizer exports in early May will have global reverberations, driving a huge contraction in agricultural productivity worldwide, with many farmers scaling back the use of fertilizer and the amount of land they’re planting.

On top of this the energy crisis triggered by the war is making transport of food and fueling of agricultural activity prohibitively expensive or impossible. This is a perfect storm of missing animal feed, fertilizer, fuel, and financing in the midst of a record-breaking affordability crisis that will leave no corner of the world unscathed. The world hasn’t run out of food or the capacity to produce food, but obstacles and shortages created by inter-imperialist conflict are directly imperiling the supply of food. Masses of people are left to drown in misery and deprivation.

Food Wars: A Global Battlefield

The humanitarian disaster resulting from millions sliding into food insecurity will be unfathomable. Acute malnutrition, stunted development in children, starvation, and a severely weakened immune response — in an era of devastating pandemics — will rise to epidemic levels. People in low- and middle-income countries, in regions experiencing conflict and economic crises, and those who directly experience the most catastrophic effects of climate change will be worst impacted.

Households in poor countries spend 25% of their income on food. With massive price hikes on the one hand, and extreme weather diminishing people’s ability to rely on their own production, local sources or to earn income on the other, direct aid is desperately needed. Their governments — many deeply indebted to rich countries and with depleted financial reserves — will be under immense strain and have limited resources to provide the assistance needed.

It is certain that the masses of people will not take this sitting down. Protests are already rocking Sri Lanka, Indonesia,

Pakistan, and Peru. Fear of uprisings, and of new refugee crises from mass displacement, has begun to raise alarms for the ruling class. Major multinational financial institutions like the World Bank have begun pledging billions in aid to address the food crisis, but the problems are intensifying far faster than the sums pledged. While food aid increased by nearly $667.7 million in 2020, the number of undernourished people also increased, and this trend is expected to continue. A UN Security Council press report stressed “the international community must coordinate a global response and eschew a ‘to each their own mentality.’” They also noted the rising danger of “political instability” should mass movements become powerful enough to challenge the system starving them.

However, the level of international coordination required to stave off total chaos from the food crisis is completely foreign to capitalism, especially in this period of sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry and economic protectionism. Instead, we’re seeing the mirror image of “vaccine nationalism” in the new and alarming trend of food nationalism. Twenty-three countries have declared severe restrictions on food exports since the start of the war, removing a further 10% of globally traded calories from the market. India, the world’s second-largest wheat producer, has banned food exports. Such protectionist measures will only make the crisis much worse by further reducing the supplies available for those countries most in need and raising prices even more. Global inequality will worsen as richer countries hoard or buy up energy and supplies while leaving the rest of the world to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, the major imperialist powers are playing a blame game. And it won’t just be poor countries that are hit. The U.S. and Europe are going to see empty shelves and higher prices as their farmers are also being hit by rapidly rising fuel and fertilizer costs. Biden’s only response is to place the blame squarely on Russia, as have NATO members and allies in the UN. Indeed the shortages and price rises will only get worse the longer the war goes on. Meanwhile Putin, with some support from China, blames Western sanctions for impeding the global trade needed to feed the world. Both are unequivocally to blame, but the much more important reality is that the system was already failing.

Fight the System That Starves Us

We are living through a particularly devastating stage in capitalism’s long declining ability to meet even humanity’s basic survival needs. We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people at 3,000 calories a day, but 2.5 billion are malnourished or hungry and 30-40 percent of the world’s food production goes to waste. The world’s food supply is over-reliant on very few commodity crops, and controlled overwhelmingly by a small number of multinational corporations.

This crisis could not be a more clear and urgent demonstration of the need for the working class to run society and democratically plan the use of resources in the interest of people and the planet. To prevent the worst-case scenario of mass starvation, immediate and direct aid is needed to countries in or nearing famine. We also need an immediate end to the war in Ukraine and its blockade of the Black Sea, as well as all wars which spell nothing but deprivation and chaos for working people. The existential threat posed by the climate crisis to our food system mandates a total overhaul of our food system worldwide toward renewable energy, diversified crops, and sustainable agriculture. This must include bringing the corporations that dominate global agriculture, energy, and food distribution into public ownership under democratic workers control.

Capitalism breeds famine and climate catastrophe, as well as imperialism and war. It is prone to shocks and lacks shock resilience. As this crisis wears on and capitalist nations resort even more to the “each nation for themselves” approach, we need to mobilize on the basis of working class internationalism to point the way toward the socialist reconstruction of society. J

Peruvian people protest to demand government support for soup kitchens in Lima.

Ukrainian Armed Forces volunteer walks inside a grain storage damaged during a Russian military strike.

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