New Options for Averting a Global Food Emergency

September 30, 2022

ARTICLE

Background

The food price spike of 2005-2008 sparked civil unrest in dozens of countries, including across the Middle East, where the Arab Spring soon followed. While the circumstances today differ, food prices are once again spiking. Russia and Ukraine together account for 28 percent of the world’s wheat exports, so high prices are linked to an actual supply disruption in a staple grain. More than 2.5 billion people worldwide consume wheat-based products, so the effects of these disruptions could mean significant hunger and possibly civil unrest. Potential hunger hotspots include nations already in crisis, like Yemen, Sudan, and Ethiopia, but also places like Egypt, which is highly dependent on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine.

Policy Options

The world is mobilizing emergency food aid to ensure the survival of the most vulnerable populations. Given the possibility of a prolonged global crisis, improved global food production is also urgent. According to a new CIMMYT paper in the July 19, 2022 issue of Nature Food, governments, international organizations, and humanitarian groups need strategies to mitigate the immediate crisis, stabilize production in the mid-term, and build resilience in the long-term to climate change and food shocks.

Mitigate the immediate crisis.

The first priority, according to the authors, is to address today’s growing food emergency through immediate steps to increase food production, such as:

Intensify existing wheat production through improvements in the distribution, productivity, and management of land, seeds, and plants. In many cases, these improvements can be made within a single planting season. Governments and organizations should consider:

Temporary, targeted subsidies for inputs, machinery, and services in low-productivity areas.
Direct economic incentives in high-productivity areas.
Soil fertility management practices that decrease total demand for fertilizer.

Ensure grain access through coordinated and multilateral policies that help to:

Conserve or prioritize grain stocks for human consumption.
Avoid further trade restrictions and promote transparency about productivity and exports.
Support minimum and stable prices for wheat and other grains.

Explore flour blends, which can partially offset high wheat flour prices and reduce dependence on imported cereals.

Partially substitute lower-cost, nutrient-rich or drought-tolerant cereals such as legumes, cassava, sorghum, and millet for wheat.
Test consumer acceptance and product quality.

Stabilize the Wheat Supply.

In the medium term, the authors emphasized the need to increase the local, regional, and global resilience of the wheat supply. Strategies include:

Expand production in areas that are agro-ecologically suitable and have existing infrastructure, value chains, and farmer support mechanisms. This can be facilitated by:

Strategic and tactical planning with multi-sector stakeholders in specific agri-food systems.
Using knowledge and innovation mechanisms tailored for rural agricultural systems.

Encourage wheat self-sufficiency. Countries such as Ethiopia and Sudan have real potential to meet their own needs without relying heavily on imports by:

Shifting policies to encourage public and private investments, including price supports for agricultural inputs and outputs.
Expanding use of improved varieties and practices through better seed systems and agricultural services, such as credit, logistics, education, and communications.
Targeting interventions based on better data and analysis of smallholder vulnerability.

Provide comprehensive technical support to farmers for better returns on tactical investments, such as:

Mechanization and grain storage.
Crop management, such as sowing seeds in rows or integration with legume crops and livestock systems.
More targeted use of fertilizer or improved pest control.
Highly productive, disease-resistant wheat varieties.

Improve monitoring. There is an opportunity today to use new technologies, such as satellites, remote sensing, and machine learning to give farmers unprecedented visibility and foresight, enabling better interventions in everything from pest and disease management to productivity improvements.

Promote Resilience.

The current situation will not be the last food shock in the 21st century; indeed, climate change all but guarantees a rising frequency of challenging conditions. To avoid lurching from crisis to crisis, with enormous human suffering and economic losses, governments, organizations, and farmers must adopt long-term measures to encourage resilience.

Enhance agroecosystem diversity. To protect agricultural productivity, governments, organizations, and farmers must avoid agricultural expansion that further degrades biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and other ecosystem services by:

Analyzing and navigating tradeoffs among sufficient wheat production, climate change mitigation, more resilient agroecosystems, and sustainable management of biodiversity and natural resources.
Investing in conservation-based agricultural technologies.

Resolve gender disparities. To minimize the disproportionate effect of food insecurity on women, governments and organizations should:

Adopt gender-responsive design and monitoring of solutions to ensure that food price spikes and policy and programmatic responses do not negatively affect women.
Address women’s barriers to entry into growing wheat markets.

Invest in agri-food transformation. Meet the extensive knowledge and technology needs across production systems, value chains, and monitoring systems by:

Investing in climate-resilient crop varieties and low-carbon mechanization and farm management as well as the science of effective policy interventions.
Focusing on pre- and post-harvest loss reduction while improving food system efficiency and resilience.