- 18 hours ago
Climate change and conflict are testing the global food supply. Insecure access to food drives up inequality and has historically been behind episodes of upheaval. So what changes are needed to stabilize food supplies?
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00:01Heat waves and wildfires are ravaging Europe.
00:05Crops raised, prices rising, inequality widening.
00:09How much can we handle?
00:10And what happens when the world's fastest warming continent gets even hotter?
00:14Well, doom.
00:16Tim Benton is a food security expert.
00:19No, the challenge is that almost everything that we can do
00:24to make our food system more resilient will cost.
00:28But he argues that politics gets in the way.
00:31Budgets are limited.
00:32Election cycles are short.
00:34What we're kind of tending to do is to try and put sticking plasters onto everything
00:38rather than do the large-scale fundamental changes
00:41until they become absolutely necessary.
00:44And at some point in the future, it will become absolutely necessary
00:46and we will have to change the way that we farm in Europe and across the world.
00:51But we're not yet at that point.
00:53We're just sort of hoping it will go away or hoping 2026 won't be repeated.
00:58But it will be repeated and it will be repeated increasingly frequently as the years go on.
01:03I don't know how many more heatwaves I can handle.
01:06Western Europe had the hottest June on record.
01:09A severe heatwave sizzled southern parts spreading east, continuing into July.
01:14Drought decimated the continent's prime agricultural zones.
01:17Harvests were down by about 9 million tonnes compared to growers' forecasts
01:22before the big heat hit.
01:24It's estimated to have cost the continent's grain farmers 2 billion euros in lost revenue,
01:30according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a think tank.
01:34That doesn't include wider costs of the heatwave, like lost vegetable crops and livestock.
01:39There is a silver lining, but it's not all that reassuring.
01:43European harvests have not been very good at all right across Europe.
01:49But some harvests in other parts of the world have been better than expected.
01:52Canada, India, Turkey for wheat, for example.
01:56So in a stable world, that food would be kind of shuffled around
02:02so that the people who want it and are willing to pay for it get it.
02:06But we don't live in a stable world anymore.
02:09And so there is a risk on relying on greater imports into Europe.
02:14There is a risk that it will become quite pricey.
02:17And if it does become quite pricey, we will, on average, be able to afford it across Europe
02:23because we're quite rich.
02:24But it will price other importing nations out of the market.
02:29And those are particularly in the developing world who are much more reliant for absolute food security,
02:35actually getting hold of any food on the international market, working very well.
02:39So our food security in Europe, more people will be challenged when it comes to filling their shopping basket.
02:47That is kind of almost inevitable over the next year or so.
02:50I asked him which hotspots in Europe concern him most.
02:53Of course, the South, France, which is increasingly Mediterranean these days.
03:00And, you know, that whole kind of desertification possibility of the Mediterranean moving northwards.
03:06But from a kind of global interconnectedness perspective, every country is vulnerable for the reasons that I've been outlining.
03:14Because, you know, even if you produce a lot of food, you're still reliant on ingredients and packaging and nitrogen
03:22coming from other places.
03:24And that's all disruptible, whether by climate itself or climate interacting with geopolitical needs and strategies.
03:342026 has been a wake-up call across Europe.
03:402027 on a global basis is going to be hotter, you know, 1.76 degrees above baseline,
03:47when we're still supposed to be, according to the Paris Agreement, striving for under 1.5 degrees.
03:53Quite how the El Nino will work out and what its impacts will be, no one really knows.
04:02We've only got historical examples, and this is going to be probably the biggest El Nino in history.
04:08But do we ever learn from history?
04:10Well, Professor Benton says there are enough very recent historical examples that show how environmental crises in any one place
04:18in the world
04:18can trigger major economic and political discord almost everywhere else.
04:23Well, if you look back at the last 20-odd years of history, the big issues around food price inflation,
04:32cost of living crises, and pushing people into food insecurity within Europe particularly,
04:39come from 2007-8, which was a big drought in Australia, 2010-11, which was an extreme heatwave in Ukraine
04:47and Western Russia,
04:49come from COVID, which may or may not have a biological origin caused by biodiversity disruption and land use change,
05:00and came from the blockade of Odessa and the invasion of Ukraine, and from the closure of the Straits of
05:06Hormuz.
05:07And all of these things are both climate-related and geopolitically related,
05:12and it's the interaction between the two that becomes most difficult.
05:18And at the moment, we've obviously had an unprecedented period of heat across Europe,
05:23but we're also moving into the strongest ever, El Nino, which tends to act by rewiring global agriculture,
05:33plus adding heat into the atmosphere.
05:35So next year is forecast now to be 1.76 degrees higher than the pre-industrial baseline,
05:41so 1.76 degrees of climate change.
05:43That in itself will be disruptive and letting home what happens with the Iran war,
05:49the Ukraine war, and any other points of geopolitical tension around the world, looking ahead.
05:58El Nino, on top of all the rest, is going to continue to drive food prices up and availability down.
06:04Tim says we're caught in a vicious spiral.
06:07The way out? We'll talk about solutions soon.
06:10First, more about what happens when you couple climate change with divisive geopolitics.
06:16Climate acts as a kind of amplifier on top of the underlying geopolitical international affairs situation,
06:23and it's, you know, quite frightening what is happening in the world at the moment from a climate perspective,
06:28and you layer that on top of an unstable world with Trumpian trade wars
06:32and all of the other things that are going on, shooting wars in Europe, shooting wars in the Middle East,
06:36then you have quite a kind of volatility in being able to guarantee our supply when we need it.
06:43For me, you know, whatever's happened that's driven our food price spikes over the last 20 years
06:48has normally been something less than 1% of global production, agricultural production.
06:56And I can easily imagine situations where the combined global effects of,
07:05if you just look at the Northern Hemisphere this year, we've had extreme heat in Europe,
07:09but we've had extreme wet in other places that actually nowhere has good weather and therefore good yields.
07:16And what would happen if we lost 5% or 10% of global agricultural production instead of 1%
07:23of global agricultural production?
07:25And as I keep saying, in a calm and stable world, we would just move the food around and make
07:31sure that there was enough aid and food aid
07:34to reduce the inevitable distributional consequences.
07:40But we're not in a calm and stable world, and if there are countries that are really threatened because of
07:46a food crisis within their countries,
07:49the world we're living in is that they will use economic and shooting wars to potentially get their food supplies
07:58and ensure their own food security.
08:01And so we could be in a world where looking ahead, these sorts of conflicts just get worse because strong
08:10countries are using their muscles to grab food,
08:13leaving the poor countries to scrabble around and get what they can.
08:17And so you could be in a situation that a worst case scenario was some sort of large scale conflict
08:24over a small pot of food and therefore, you know, quite painful for everybody.
08:31But could it really come to civil war in, say, the United States, a scenario many analysts have been discussing,
08:37according to Tim, or another French revolution here in Europe?
08:41Well, one of the contributory causes of the French Revolution was the food price inflation caused by bad weather at
08:48the time and then pricing people out of being able to afford themselves.
08:52And of course, food is a very, very potent reason for driving civil unrest and getting people out on the
09:01streets.
09:01And so if the proportion of people in any country that really struggle to feed themselves increases, then obviously that's
09:09going to be, you know, the potential for a spark.
09:12And if you look back in the 2007, 8, 10, 11 food price spikes, food price inflation was a major
09:19determinant around the world of civil unrest and riots and all the rest of that.
09:23So looking ahead, if we don't deal with this, then it's kind of inevitable that inequality will continue to grow
09:31and people will get disaffected.
09:34But to the extent that war breaks out?
09:37Yes, I think so.
09:38You can see some of the tensions in many countries around the world where the polarisation of politics is such
09:45that there is a very big proportion of disaffected people.
09:48And so you lay out on top of that, not being able to have access to food in an affordable
09:54way, then you do have the kind of the boiling cauldron of, you know, simmering disaffection that can lead to
10:02these sorts of things happening.
10:03So how long does that cauldron have to simmer away before it starts boiling and suddenly boils over?
10:10So if we have a bad year next year and the Iran war is escalating and the Ukraine war is
10:16escalating and something else happens, then we could be in for a very sticky year from a food price perspective
10:23and availability perspective.
10:24And then in the decades ahead, you know, it's always difficult because weather is a kind of ultimately a random
10:31process driven by a set of rules.
10:33We might not have another year like 2026 for 10 years, 20 years, but it will come and we're going
10:40to have more bad years.
10:41Other places are going to have more bad years as well.
10:44And how that all sums up together really depends on whether or not we go back to a more stable
10:51cooperative world or whether what's been happening in the last five to 10 years just accelerates away and the geopolitical
10:59tensions and the contestation and the conflict that we are living through get worse.
11:03What about the large scale stuff that's absolutely necessary to make a change?
11:08It's perfectly possible to imagine a world which could be food secure with a different sort of farming.
11:16To build resilience in agriculture, you kind of need diversity.
11:19You need to grow different things in different ways.
11:23Probably integrate livestock into arable and horticultural landscapes so that you're not reliant on imported fertilizer and all the rest
11:32of that.
11:33And all of that will come with a cost in terms of yields and it will come with a cost
11:41in terms of the cost of food in supermarkets or markets or whatever.
11:45The other issue is that because we are globally embedded, it's not necessarily our food security is not necessarily about
11:52our own agriculture.
11:54It's about whether or not we can get the ingredients that we need for our food.
11:57So how do you build a resilient global trading system?
12:03That is the challenge in a world of contestation and conflict and economic power projection.
12:09And, you know, it would essentially mean not necessarily a deglobalization, but a reglobalization that you're preferentially trading with allies,
12:21not foes.
12:21And that comes with the cost, that you're building up food stocks in your home or your locality or your
12:30country or your region, that you're diversifying your trade routes so that you don't put all your eggs in one
12:38basket and rely on goods from a country that might in turn be hit by climate change in a given
12:44year and so on.
12:45So building a resilient food system is not just about agriculture, it's about reshaping the global economy and therefore reshaping
12:54geopolitics.
12:55And that's why it's such a big ask in a way, because the world in which we're living is not
13:01about nations cooperating with nations anymore.
13:04It's about nations projecting their power to get what they want and therefore saying, let's have a nice, cool, calm,
13:13collected, cooperative world seems a bit implausible given the current politics that are driving us.
13:20A sobering reality check.
13:22But it's amazing how history repeats itself, how we learn so little and how it all comes back to politics
13:29at the end of the day.
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