The Global Food System Collapse
For the past few years, scientists have been sounding an alarm that governments ignore: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system before 2008. While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse is too scary to even think about. Yet the current rise in food prices is the evidence that the situation is rapidly deteriorating.
Many people assume that the food crisis was caused by a combination of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. While these are important factors, they only make an underlying problem worse. For years, it seemed hunger was heading for extinction. But in 2015, the trend began to turn and hunger has been rising ever since. It happened at a time when global food production was rising steadily, comfortably beating population growth. Incredibly, the number of undernourished people began to rise just as world food prices began to fall.
Only in the past two years have food prices rapidly increased. This rise is now a major cause of inflation in many countries. Food is becoming unaffordable even to many people in rich nations. The impact in poorer countries is much worse. So what has been going on? Well, global food, like global finance, is a complex system that develops spontaneously from billions of interactions. Complex systems have counterintuitive properties. They are resilient under certain conditions. But as stress escalates, these same properties start transmitting shocks through the network. Beyond a certain point, a small disturbance can tip the system over its critical threshold, whereupon it collapses, suddenly and unstoppably.
We now know enough about systems to predict whether they might be resilient or fragile. Scientists represent complex systems as a mesh of nodes and links. The nodes are like knots in an old-fashioned net; the links are the strings connecting them. In the food system, the nodes include the corporations trading grain, seed and farm chemicals, the major exporters and importers and the ports through which food passes. The links are their commercial and institutional relationships. If the nodes behave in a variety of ways, and their links to each other are weak, the system is likely to be resilient. If certain nodes become dominant, start to behave in similar ways and are strongly connected, the system is likely to be fragile. In recent years, just as in finance during the 2000s, key nodes in the food system have swollen, their links have become stronger, business strategies have been unified, and the features that might impede systemic collapse have been stripped away, exposing the system to “globally contagious” shocks.
On one estimate, just four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade. The same corporations have been buying into seed, chemicals, processing, packing, distribution and retail. In the course of 18 years the number of trade connections between the exporters and importers of wheat and rice doubled. At present much of this trade passes through vulnerable choke points, such as Turkish Straits – now obstructed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Suez and Panama canals and the Straits of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb and Malacca. This makes matters even worse as any further obstruction in any of the transit points for grain transport would weaken the food system more.
One of the fastest cultural shifts in human history is the trend leading to “Global Standard Diet”. While our food has become locally more diverse, globally it has become less diverse. Just four crops – wheat, rice, maize and soy – account for almost 60% of the calories grown by farmers. Their production is now concentrated in a handful of nations, including Russia and Ukraine. Around the world, trade barriers have come down and roads and ports upgraded. You might imagine that this smooth system would enhance food security. But it has allowed companies to shed the costs of warehousing and inventories, switching from stocks to flows. Mostly, this just-in-time strategy works. But if deliveries are interrupted or there’s a rapid increase in demand, shelves can suddenly empty.
We urgently need to diversify global food production, both geographically and in terms of crops and farming techniques. We need to break the grip of massive corporations and financial speculators. We need to create backup systems, producing food by entirely different means. We need to introduce spare capacity into a system threatened by its own efficiencies. The consequences of the major crop failure that environmental breakdown could cause defy imagination. The system has to change.