If you think hunger is only going to happen to brown and black people in the developing world, your privilege is showing. If a 2022 global food crisis does develop, as predicted by worried world governments and the private sector, it will be a wipeout for whoever controls the levers of power in 2022 and 2024. People who are hungry are not happy people.
Fortune Magazine recently published an article on a looming food crisis that has chilled me to the bone. ‘We’re going to have a food crisis,’ stated Yara International’s CEO Svein Tore Holsether to Fortune’s Katherine Dunn at the COP26 global conference on the climate emergency in its final week in Glasgow, Scotland. Yara International is a fertilizer behemoth in Norway.
Svein Tore Holsether is a good guy; his company has donated millions of dollars worth of fertilizer to at-risk farmers. But, the costs have become too high to continue. Ammonia is the critical building block for nitrate fertilizer which releases nitrogen to plant roots. Ammonia produced worldwide is almost entirely used to feed people across the globe. His company has reduced the production of ammonia by 40% due to soaring energy costs. Holsether stated other producers had done the same.
The world is facing the prospect of a dramatic shortfall in food production as rising energy prices cascade through global agriculture, the CEO of Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara International says.
"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest," said Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of the Oslo-based company. "I’m afraid we’re going to have a food crisis."
Speaking to Fortune on the sidelines of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Holsether said that the sharp rise in energy prices this summer and autumn had already resulted in fertilizer prices roughly tripling.
In Europe, the natural-gas benchmark hit an all-time high in September, with the price more than tripling from June to October alone. Yara is a major producer of ammonia, a key ingredient in synthetic fertilizer, which increases crop yields. The process of creating ammonia currently relies on hydropower or natural gas.
"To produce a ton of ammonia last summer was $110," said Holsether. "And now it's $1,000. So it's just incredible."
The delayed effects of the energy crisis on food security could mimic the chip shortage crisis, Holsether said.
"That's all linked to factories being shut down in March, April, and May of last year, and we're reaping the consequences of that now," he said. "But if we get the equivalent to the food system…not having food is not annoying, that's a matter of life or death."
China and now Moscow have both announced quotas on the fertilizers that they export. It is going to get ugly, Javier Bliss of Bloomberg tweeted.
I don’t need to tell anyone that shops for groceries that trouble is coming. Empty shelves and rising prices are alarming. The news about the fertilizer shortage is just one of many crises to our food supply and distribution system. Flooding, drought, and hail storms enhanced by heating the earth, rainfall patterns have shifted to our detriment. Climate change is and always will be a threat multiplier that is no longer occurring linearly. There is also no do-over.
The world is still recovering from the Covid pandemic, which has disrupted the food delivery system over the past couple of years. Even before Covid, there has been chronic hunger due to pests and socioeconomic unrest. White nationalism and the insurrectionist party in the United States do all they can to derail actions that might help ease the suffering. The genuine possibility that democracy falls will be the dagger to the heart of the biosphere. One only needs to look to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, two sociopaths who care only about themselves to realize actual and irreversible harm.
The food crisis is already a reality in China due to climate change, covid, and energy prices. The government warned citizens to stock up on food for the winter, which triggered panic buying along with unrest reminiscent of the early days of the Covid plague. As usual, in China, their problems are not shared with the rest of the world.
Afghanistan plagued with drought may soon join Madagascar as the second climate change famine caused by our greenhouse gases warns the United Nations. They have religious fanatics in charge, so this isn’t going to end well for them.
In a global food emergency who will feed Afghanistan or China for example?
At Cop26, the food crisis was ignored. Fossil fuels were overlooked, and the cryosphere was neglected.
I have no answers. Just be kind to each other.
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme writes on The Great Acceleration.
From 2015.
Today, we (the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Stockholm Resilience Centre) publish a dashboard of 24 indicators which depict the dramatic acceleration in human enterprise and the impacts on the Earth system over the last two centuries. What is apparent is the synchronous acceleration of trends from the 1950s to the present day – over a single human lifetime – with little sign of abatement. These trends are known as the Great Acceleration.
Led by former IGBP Executive Director, Will Steffen, and first published as part of the first IGBP synthesis (Steffen et al., 2004) the 24 graphs – 12 socio-economic and 12 Earth system trends from 1750 to present– are strong evidence that the Earth system has moved to a new state. Some have even proposed Earth has entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. Changes in human production and consumption, indicated by gross domestic product, direct foreign investment, energy consumption and telecommunications, are reflected in changes in the Earth’s natural systems: climate (greenhouse gas levels, global temperature), ocean acidification, terrestrial biosphere degradation and fish capture.
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When Paul Crutzen first proposed the idea of the Anthropocene, he suggested it probably began as the Industrial Revolution kicked off around 1800. He changed his mind recently, saying the 1950s is a more likely candidate. We agree. This analysis offers evidence from an Earth system perspective that the beginning of the Great Acceleration marks the start date of the Anthropocene. Are any of the curves bending towards a more sustainable path? Some trends are beginning to show signs of slowing. The construction of large dams, domesticated land and fish capture are beginning to flatten out. Unfortunately this stabilisation is limited by capacity: we are reaching our limits in the number of large rivers, available land and fish stocks.