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Rocket in a cornfield near Kyiv: »Food insecurity is a main consequence of wars«
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Maxym Marusenko / NurPhoto / Getty Images
Looking back, this 2021 research report reads like a grim prophecy.
"Conflicts have direct negative effects on food systems," it says.
»In most armed conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, warring factions have used food as a weapon and deliberately destroyed food systems, so persistent food insecurity is a major consequence of wars.«
The report comes from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
The connection between war and hunger is so close that experts who usually deal with global military spending have long been interested in agriculture.
It is clear that Russia is targeting and destroying fields and granaries in Ukraine.
In addition, it is already too late for normal spring sowing in Ukraine.
"We have very fertile soil, but also a climate that sets the rules," Oleg Ustenko, economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote in a guest article for the "Financial Times" at the beginning of March.
The world is not prepared for this instability
The hunger that Russia is deliberately unleashing will not only affect the people of Ukraine.
"The Russian Federation and Ukraine are among the most important producers of agricultural goods in the world," said a warning letter from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at the end of March.
Taken together, the two countries exported about half of all sunflower oil produced globally and 14 percent of all wheat before the war.
In addition, there are 19 percent of barley and four percent of maize production.
In addition, Russia is one of the world's largest exporters of nitrate fertilizers.
Prices are rising, and growing wheat and other regions is becoming more expensive everywhere.
Many countries are already experiencing food shortages due to acute climate-related droughts, other armed conflicts and the Covid pandemic.
In some places, such as Yemen, there have long been famines.
"Many of the hardest-hit states are also dependent on Russia and Ukraine for their food supplies," recently wrote conflict researcher Caroline Delgado, one of the authors of the report cited above.
These include, for example, Syria, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.
And also countries like Lebanon and Egypt, where there are no current acts of war, but very many young people.
So there's a lot of protest potential.
Famine threatened in Somalia before the Russian attack, but now it's almost guaranteed.
The world is unprepared for the instability that is hitting it in many places at the same time.
The catastrophic heat wave in India with temperatures reaching 50 degrees is on top of everything else.
The harvests will also be smaller there, and prices are already rising sharply.
A global step backwards that we ourselves do not perceive
There have already been mass protests in several countries over soaring food and fuel prices, but this may only be the beginning.
As a reminder, the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the »Arab Spring« of 2011 were all the result, not least, of acute food shortages.
When people suddenly don't have enough to eat, they get angry.
more on the subject
Dispute over agricultural policy: war economy instead of climate protectionBy Nils Klawitter and Maria Marquart
This announced global catastrophe is particularly oppressive, because mankind has actually been on a better path before.
Up until 2014, the number of people affected by malnutrition worldwide was falling year after year, despite a growing world population.
Since then, however, it has increased again.
According to the FAO, between 720 and 811 million people were already affected by hunger in 2020, which means that they often did not know where the next meal would come from, sometimes had to go whole days without eating and are considered »malnourished«.
In 2014 there were around 200 million fewer hungry people than in 2020 – still more than 600 million, but significantly fewer than now.
A global regression is underway, but we here in the industrialized world are not witnessing it ourselves.
Wars for agricultural resources?
In 2021 and 2022, the numbers are likely to increase further as the pandemic, climate crisis and war are now working together in catastrophic ways.
Raj Patel teaches at the University of Austin in Texas.
The nutrition expert and activist has just said in an interview worth reading that he expects increasing conflicts both within the affected countries and between states: »People will not necessarily cross borders and steal sacks full of grain, wheat sheaves or nuts, rather there will be fights over the Seeing resources that make industrial agriculture possible in the first place.« So wars over water, seeds, fertilizer or even land.
The "International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems" (Ipes Food), a kind of donation-financed, internationally staffed scientific World Food Council, of which Patel is also a member, points to the role of food speculation in the looming global crisis: "Excessive speculation with food" must curbed, the transparency of the markets increased.
The business of global grain traders is booming
In fact, a huge part of the world's food problems are a direct result of global trading systems - and the activities of companies that trade in wheat, corn and other foods.
"When Russian shells fell on the wheat terminals at the Port of Mariupol on March 25, Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge's stock prices soared to all-time highs," wrote nutritionist Patel in a must-read, angry op-ed for The Boston Review, "and if if they were public, the same thing would have happened to Dreyfus and Cargill.”
In fact, the steady rise in the stock prices of the first two agribusinesses began on February 24 – the day of the Russian invasion.
Since then, both companies have gained more than a quarter in stock market value.
When things get tight for the world's hungry, business is really good for the global grain traders.
The food expert council Ipes Food therefore recommends direct support for affected countries suffering from acute food shortages, “also through debt relief”, as a quick intervention.
Food production must be more diverse, trade flows must be restructured.
And vulnerable nations should stockpile grain and contingency plans.
Grain is like oil or steel: the same everywhere
There is a reason why wheat from the Ukraine - from a retailer's point of view!
– can easily be replaced with wheat from Canada, but for a lot more money: the same thing is grown everywhere anyway.
This is extremely practical for the intermediaries.
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In many African countries, for example, wheat was neither native nor a normal part of the local diet before colonization.
The colonial masters brought the white bread with them.
The global homogenization of the food supply is convenient for anyone who wants to trade food the same way they trade oil or steel.
In times of global crises, it proves to be a step in the wrong direction – a problem that experts have been warning about for a long time.
The peer-reviewed »Global Hunger Index 2021«, for which Welthungerhilfe is responsible, states: »Governments and donors must strengthen climate-resilient and diversified cultivation methods and local markets«.
Local jobs could also be created in this way.
Mushroom protein instead of beef
Another important, even indispensable step in a world with less or, at some point, completely without hunger, would be a rethink here in the industrialized nations.
For example, because with our excessive meat consumption we literally ensure that others have less to eat when in doubt: animal feed is grown in many places around the world to feed cattle, which in turn not only consume vast amounts of water, but also in their digestive tracts produce the greenhouse gas methane.
Meat has the advantage of being very rich in protein, but also the disadvantage that the mass production of meat by the species Homo sapiens contributes massively to destroying the biosphere.
We also waste valuable acreage for animal feed.
You could feed many more people with the same arable land if you grew human food there.
The next big problem: For all the land it takes for all the fodder, forests are still being cut down, in the Amazon region for example.
And cutting down forests creates even more CO₂.
Then, of course, no more CO₂ is bound by the trees that have disappeared.
As a result, the rainforest is already tipping over.
In April 2022, a new all-time deforestation record was just set.
A hopeful study at the end
A research team led by Forian Humpenöder from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has shown in a paper that has just been published in »Nature« that things could be done differently: If you replaced just 20 percent of our per capita beef consumption with a protein-rich, mushroom-based food, you could reduce deforestation caused by meat production by half and reduce global methane emissions by 11 percent.
Fifty percent less deforestation for a fifth less steaks and burgers!
Replacing even 50 percent of beef protein with the mushroom-based alternative could cut deforestation by 80 percent.
Humpenöder told Nature that this is not a panacea for climate change, but it would be useful: after all, it would not only reduce methane and CO₂ emissions and deforestation, but also, albeit to a lesser extent, fertilizer consumption, nitrous oxide emissions and water consumption .
Lots of steps in the right direction.
And we need as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible.
Defeating hunger and stopping the climate crisis go well together - it just doesn't go well with some of the currently very lucrative business models.
