And it’s worth keeping in mind that 49 million is not the number facing “acute food insecurity,” to use the program’s technical category distinction. That figure is much higher: at least 323 million, which is an increase, according to Beasley, compared to the 276 million before the war, the 135 million before the pandemic and the 80 million when he joined the program in 2017, indicating that the figure quadrupled during that period. Forty-nine million is just the number of people who are most immediately at risk of death.
Before the war, Beasley told me last week from Rome that: “I was already warning the world that 2022 and 2023 would be the two worst years in terms of humanitarian crises since World War II.” And he added: “I’m trying to tell everyone how bad the situation is, how bad it’s going to be. And then next week I have to tell you to forget about that calculation, things are much worse.”
That worsening is a result of the war, but the underlying crisis is larger and more structural: according to calculations by the World Food Program, at least, most of the growth in that category of “acute food insecurity” is the result of worsening conditions before the invasion. That’s mostly because of COVID-19, climate change, and conflict — the “three ‘Cs,'” as Cornell University economist Chris Barrett, who specializes in agriculture and development and is co-editor, calls them. in chief of the specialized magazine Food Policy. The economist states that: “Before, child stunting – the cumulative impact of poor nutrition and health – was essentially everywhere that was poor. Now, it is only in the places that are poor and where there is conflict.”
Climate impacts are also now a continuous affectation. The Economist summarized the state of world agriculture, shortly before the war, in this way:
China, the largest producer of wheat, has declared that, after rains delayed planting last year, this harvest may be the worst in its history. Now, in addition to extreme temperatures in India, the world’s second-largest producer, lack of rain threatens to cripple production in other food-producing countries, from the US wheat belt to the Beauce region in France. The worst drought in forty years is devastating the Horn of Africa region.
The war brought its own aggravating effects: embargoes on Russian exports and a blockade that hampered those from Ukraine, where farmers were also struggling to harvest and plant crops amid the threat of bombing; the increase in fuel costs considerably increased the price of food by making it more expensive to transport it and causing drastic increases in the cost of fertilizers, most of which are produced with gas; and import bans imposed by more than a dozen of countries, concerned about their own food security, which tightened the market even more.
As has happened with the related energy crisis, the Kremlin seems willing to use the emergency as a weapon (in its bulletin, Slow BoringMatt Yglesias I call her recently “Russia’s war against the world’s food supply”). And while world leaders in Davos and elsewhere have pushed to alleviate the problem in part by circumnavigating the Russian blockade, the US State Department has warned “drought-ridden countries in Africa, some of the facing possible famine” who did not buy “stolen wheat,” according to my colleagues Declan Walsh and Valerie Hopkins, for fear that the Kremlin “profits from that looting.” Barrett says that, in short, it is the “perfect storm.”
For his part, Beasley believes 2023 could take an even more dire turn. This year’s price crisis could be followed by a true supply crisis, in which food becomes out of reach for many millions of people, not only because of prices, but also because of current structural conditions (such as not being able to planting next year’s crop in the Ukraine and the drastic increase in the price of fertilizer, which can represent a third or more of the total annual cost to farmers), and the world could experience the unthinkable: a true food shortage.