LONG-READ: FOOD SUPPLY

Intro: Food disruptions from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine show the need for strong local supply chains. Yet the US and others won’t learn

FROM COVID-19 to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine to climate change, it seems all the calamities afflicting the world are converging to make hunger worse. The latest United Nations report on hunger finds the increase in the number of undernourished people globally this year has eliminated any progress over the past decade.

Yet while the world has not seen hunger at these levels for years, scholars have long warned that a catastrophe was looming. The world’s food system is more interconnected and complex than ever, built upon layers of transnational dependencies. It is why a war in Europe can exacerbate a famine in Somalia — a country which imports most of its wheat and saw its supply of bread all but collapse overnight when exports of Ukrainian wheat ceased.

But instead of reducing the fragility of the food system, the latest international efforts led by the United States to end hunger are only exacerbating it — especially for Africa — by globalising the system further. Just this week, US President Joe Biden has promised African leaders gathered in Washington that the United States is “all in” on Africa. But the US needs to make sure that it is “all in” the right way, particularly when it comes to food.

The current crisis began when multiple pandemic-related shocks converged on the system, including lockdowns, a global economic downturn, and illnesses among food system workers, especially factory workers and migrant labourers. Climate change-related weather events, inflation and the Ukraine war have aggravated these stresses, rendering a complex and highly industrialised food system unable to serve the neediest people in the world even as it maintains steady supplies for the Global North.

It is increasingly clear that in moments when the world is under severe stress, globalisation is not a strength but a weakness, not a foundation for the system’s stability but a reason for its fragility. Any calamity anywhere in the world — whether a viral outbreak, drought or conflict — is a shock to the entire system, but one felt most acutely by the most vulnerable people and in the most vulnerable places.

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