September 30, 2022
ARTICLEThe 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.
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.
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:
Ensure grain access through coordinated and multilateral policies that help to:
Explore flour blends, which can partially offset high wheat flour prices and reduce dependence on imported cereals.
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:
Encourage wheat self-sufficiency. Countries such as Ethiopia and Sudan have real potential to meet their own needs without relying heavily on imports by:
Provide comprehensive technical support to farmers for better returns on tactical investments, such as:
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.
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:
Resolve gender disparities. To minimize the disproportionate effect of food insecurity on women, governments and organizations should:
Invest in agri-food transformation. Meet the extensive knowledge and technology needs across production systems, value chains, and monitoring systems by: