Covid, Conflict And Climate Are Fueling A Global Food Crisis – Leaders Must Act Fast

Healthcare Covid, Conflict And Climate Are Fueling A Global Food Crisis – Leaders Must Act Fast Gayle E. Smith Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. CEO of the ONE Campaign New! Follow this author to improve your content experience.

Got it! Jun 21, 2022, 06:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The coronavirus pandemic, war in Ukraine, runaway inflation and climate change are fueling a global food security crisis. The numbers tell an alarming story. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and World Food Programme estimate that 49 million people are facing starvation.

The Consumer Price Index is recording the greatest increase in U. S. food prices since 1979; the cost of sunflower and palm oil has doubled ; and wheat and maize cost twice as much as they did a few months ago.

Against this backdrop, the World Bank projects that global supplies of wheat will decline in 2022-23, and in the United States, winter wheat production is down by 8 percent . And to top it off, over 20 million tons of grain are trapped in Ukraine’s silos. “If you think we’ve got hell on earth now, you just get ready,” the executive director of the World Food Programme David Beasley warned recently.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be the match that lit the fire, but this crisis has been smoldering for some time. The pandemic continues to upend production and supply chains and constrain the flow of goods. Climate change has disrupted planting and harvesting — the people of the Horn of Africa, for example, are struggling through the most severe cycle of drought in 70 years .

Chronic conflict and economic hardship have forced 100 million people to flee their homes . And growth in the global agricultural sector has slowed over the last decade. So, what are we looking at now? First, 49 million people are on the brink of starvation.

This is not something that might happen, this is on track to happen absent immediate assistance. Practitioners measure the spectrum from generalized hunger to famine using what’s called the Integrated Phase Classification, and these 49 million people are gradually moving from Category 4, or emergency status, to the ultimate category – famine. MORE FOR YOU CDC: Salmonella Outbreak Has Left 279 Ill, 26 Hospitalized In 29 States Canadians End Up In ICU After Attending ‘Covid Party’ White House Mandates Pfizer Vaccines for Millions of Citizens .

. . Before the FDA Clinical or Safety Reviews Have Been Made Public Second, markets already disrupted by the pandemic are being further destabilized.

Every country in the world imports food — 15% of the U. S. food supply .

Most of the world’s countries also export food products or inputs. Already shocked by the pandemic and now increases in fuel costs, the network of shipping lanes, roads and railways that underpins the global food system is being further constrained by the short-term but ill-advised measures that countries often adopt to protect their own food supplies. Export restrictions imposed by 27 countries since late February mean that 17% of the total calories normally traded on the global market have been taken off the market.

And then there are the ripple effects from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has triggered shortages and price hikes, but is also creating uncertainty about the availability of 30% of the world’s wheat supplied by Ukraine and Russia . Third, the projections of current and future production are trending down, including in the United States. And fertilizer — agriculture’s force multiplier — is suddenly in short supply and more costly in part because a significant share of critical inputs come from what is now a war zone in Europe.

Finally, the agricultural sector is not sufficiently resilient. It can’t withstand multiple shocks, nor can agriculture grow at a pace commensurate to global needs. It’s vulnerable to additional external shocks in the coming months and years triggered by conflicts, trade wars and climate change.

A global spike in world food prices in 2007-08 spurred decisive action, particularly from what was then the Group of 8 industrialized nations, that signals what can be done in response to today’s worse crisis. Donor countries then boosted aid to the agricultural sector, created the Agriculture Marketing Information System to track commodity prices and launched a financing facility at the World Bank to leverage multilateral and private capital investments. The U.

S. Agency for International Development under the Obama administration launched Feed the Future, an initiative that has unlocked more than $4 billion in agricultural financing​ and was codified into law in 2016 with bipartisan support through the Global Food Security Act . It also led to the creation of an alliance of private sector companies ready to invest in agriculture and to scaling innovations, including the delivery of micro-nutrients through ready-to-use therapeutic foods.

The Treasury Department took the lead, with other countries, to create and capitalize the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) at the World Bank which, despite it having a terrible acronym, continues to provide multilateral and private capital to low-income countries. In 10 days, the G7 will convene at its annual summit , this time in Germany, where one of the many issues on the agenda will be a discussion of the Global Alliance for Food Security that was launched by the G7 and the World Bank last month. Hopefully, those deliberations will include agreement on tangible actions.

G7 leaders could, for example, call for and financially support full funding for the World Food Programme and for the deployment of micro-nutrients at scale. They could take a lesson from a less-than-successful response to the global pandemic and call for cooperation and coordination to prevent the spread of export restrictions and to ensure that low- and lower-middle income countries are not squeezed out of the fertilizer and fertilizer inputs markets, as they were with vaccines. The leaders could decide to act now to reallocate the Special Drawing Rights received through the August 2021 IMF general allocation and on climate change financing, speeding the delivery of capital needed for food imports and the necessary investments to reduce the vulnerability of the agricultural sectors in poor countries.

They could also mobilize the capital to forestall a global catastrophe, including by injecting new resources into GAFSP, taking decisions on the reform of the multilateral development banks, optimizing the balance sheet of the World Bank and mobilizing their development finance institutions to put that capital behind a long-term agricultural investment strategy. This latest world crisis is not one that will pass quickly. It has been years in the making.

But it’s one we can get ahead of – if we start now. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn . Gayle E.

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