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The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.
Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.
While some MPs got it, governments as a whole simply don’t seem to understand what we’re facing. It’s this: the global food system is systemically fragile in the same way that the global financial system was before the 2008 crash.
It’s easy to see potential vulnerabilities, such as a fertiliser supply crunch caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, or harvest failures caused by climate breakdown. But these are not the thing itself. They are disruptions of the kind that might trigger the thing. The thing itself is the entire system sliding off a cliff. The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.
Recent data suggests that every part of this system is now highly concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, which have been consolidating both vertically and horizontally. One recent study found that the US food system has “consolidated nearly twice as much as the overall economic system”. Some of these corporations, diversifying into financial products, now look more like banks than commodity traders, but without the same level of regulation. They might claim that financialisation helps them hedge against risk, but as one paper remarks, “it is nearly impossible to differentiate between hedging and speculating.” We don’t know how exposed to risk they might be, but it doesn’t look great. Partly through their influence, the world has shifted towards a “global standard diet”, supplied by the global standard farm.
These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the use of just-in-time supply chains and the funnelling of much of the world’s trade through a number of chokepoints. Some people have long warned that the strait of Hormuz, alongside the Suez canal, Turkish straits, Panama canal and straits of Malacca, are critical chokepoints, whose obstruction would threaten the flow of food, fertiliser, fuel and other crucial agricultural commodities. A year ago, I listed “military attacks on … straits and canals” as a major interruption risk exacerbated by Donald Trump’s antics. The thought that Houthi rebels in Yemen, backed by the Iranian government, might simultaneously resume their attacks on Red Sea shipping keeps me awake at night.
What all this means is a reduction in the key elements of systemic resilience: diversity, redundancy (a system’s spare capacity), modularity (its degree of compartmentalisation), backup (other ways of providing food), asynchronicity (which prevents shocks suddenly compounding) and circuit breakers (mostly in the form of effective regulation). A loss of any one of these properties should be a flashing red light. But the whole dashboard is now lit up.
When a system has lost its resilience, it’s hard to predict just how and when it could go down. The collapse of one corporation? The simultaneous closure of two or more chokepoints? A major IT outage? A severe climate event coinciding with a geopolitical crisis? The next step could be contagious bankruptcy and cascading failure across sectors. Then … well, it’s beyond imagination. The chain between seller and buyer – as fundamental to our food supply as the production of food itself – could suddenly snap. Shelves would clear as people panic-bought. Crops would rot in fields, silos or ports. Rebooting a system whose financial architecture has imploded might prove impossible on the timescale required to prevent mass starvation. As complex societies, we’re looking at a potential termination event.
We know what needs to happen: break up the big corporations; bring the system under proper regulatory control; diversify our diets and their means of production; reduce our dependence on a handful of major exporting countries; build strategic food reserves, accessible to people everywhere. But there’s a problem, and it’s not just Trump. Almost all governments are beholden to corporate and financial power. The measures required to avoid catastrophe are those they are least prepared to implement. The chances of a global agreement on this global problem are approximately zero.
The best we can hope for is that braver politicians in our own countries seek to insulate us from the worst impacts. A crucial step is to encourage a shift to a plant-based diet. People struggle to see the relevance, but it’s simple. A plant-based diet requires far fewer resources, including just a quarter of the land a standard western diet requires and much less fertiliser and other inputs. Just as we make ourselves more energy-secure by switching from fossil fuels to renewables, we make ourselves more food-secure by switching from animals to plants. Don’t take my word for it: it’s a key message in the national security assessment, which the government sought to withhold from public view – probably because it would upset too many powerful interests.
But policy in the UK is nothing short of moronic. In response to warnings about our food vulnerability, our environment secretary, the former financial lobbyist Emma Reynolds, remarked that she wanted to boost domestic poultry production. Given that this sector largely depends on imported feed (such as soya from Brazil and maize from the US), her plan would make us more vulnerable. But she proposes scarcely anything else: no strategic reserves, no alternative supply chains, no useful defensive measures of any kind.