With several wars going on around the world and energy supplies becoming increasingly uncertain, I recently found myself thinking about food.

The connection seemed obvious.

Modern agriculture needs energy. Fertilizer requires energy to produce. Machinery needs fuel. Food needs processing, refrigeration and transportation.

War disrupts all of those things.

So I started with a rather worrying assumption:

If wars and energy shortages continue, won’t a food crisis eventually follow? And if food becomes scarce enough, won’t countries eventually start fighting over resources simply to survive?

It sounded plausible.

But the more I investigated it, the more I realized I was putting several different problems together.

Are We Actually Running Out of Food?

This was the first thing I needed to understand.

And surprisingly, the answer is currently no.

The world still produces enormous quantities of food. Global cereal supplies remain relatively strong, and reserves provide an important buffer when individual harvests fail.

At the same time, hundreds of millions of people experience acute food insecurity.

Initially, those two facts seemed contradictory to me.

How can we have plenty of food and a food crisis at the same time?

Because having enough food in the world isn’t the same as everyone having access to enough food.

A field can produce wheat.

The wheat can reach a port.

The ship can carry it somewhere else.

The supermarket can have bread on its shelves.

And someone can still be hungry because they cannot afford to buy it.

That changed how I understood a food crisis.

Food Doesn’t Have to Disappear

I had imagined a future food crisis mainly as a shortage.

Failed harvests.

Empty warehouses.

Empty supermarket shelves.

But there are many ways for food security to fail.

Food can exist but become too expensive.

It can be produced but unable to reach people because roads or ports have been destroyed.

Farmers can have land but be unable to afford fertilizer or fuel.

A country can have money but suddenly lose access to one of its major suppliers.

People trapped in a war zone can be surrounded by food elsewhere in the world and still be unable to obtain it.

A food crisis therefore isn’t necessarily a lack of food.

Sometimes it is a failure of access.

And war is particularly good at creating those failures.

A War Thousands of Kilometers Away Can Affect Dinner

The war in Ukraine made this easier for me to understand.

Russia and Ukraine are major agricultural exporters.

When ports, shipping routes and infrastructure are disrupted, the consequences don’t remain inside those countries.

Buyers elsewhere have to find alternatives.

Transportation and insurance become more expensive.

Prices change.

Countries heavily dependent on those supplies become vulnerable.

No wheat field has to be destroyed in the country eventually paying more for bread.

The disruption travels through the connections between countries.

The same is true of energy.

Natural gas is important for producing nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers use fuel. Trucks move food. Refrigeration requires electricity. Processing requires energy.

What looks like a loaf of bread on a supermarket shelf actually depends on an enormous invisible system.

Energy becomes fertilizer.
Fertilizer helps grow wheat.
Fuel harvests and transports it.
Energy mills and bakes it.
Transport brings it to us.

A disruption somewhere along that chain can eventually appear in the price we pay for food.

But That Doesn’t Mean a Global Food Crisis Is Inevitable

This was where my original assumption began falling apart.

I had been looking only at the vulnerabilities.

I hadn’t been looking at the ways the food system responds.

If one country has a bad harvest, another may have a good one.

If one supplier becomes unavailable, importers look elsewhere.

If wheat becomes expensive, people can substitute other foods.

Governments can release reserves.

Farmers respond to higher prices by producing more.

Trade routes change.

Markets adapt.

The global food system has already absorbed an extraordinary series of shocks during this decade.

A pandemic.

War in Ukraine.

Energy-price shocks.

Fertilizer disruptions.

Inflation.

Extreme weather.

Shipping disruptions.

And yet the world continued producing and distributing enormous amounts of food.

That doesn’t mean everyone was protected.

Clearly they weren’t.

But it does mean the system is considerably more resilient than my original assumption gave it credit for.

Interdependence Is Both a Weakness and a Strength

I used to look at dependence on food imports mostly as a vulnerability.

And it can be.

If a country obtains most of an essential food from one supplier through one shipping route, a disruption can become serious very quickly.

But international trade also provides alternatives.

Imagine a country trying to produce everything it needs domestically.

That might sound secure.

Until drought destroys its harvest.

Or flooding.

Or crop disease.

Or war.

Suddenly its independence has become its vulnerability.

A country connected to many different producers may actually have more options.

So perhaps the problem isn’t dependence itself.

The problem is concentrated dependence.

That distinction kept appearing throughout my investigation.

A resilient food system doesn’t necessarily isolate itself.

It diversifies.

Resilience Means Having Another Option

This gradually changed how I thought about food security.

A resilient system isn’t one where nothing ever goes wrong.

Something eventually will.

Resilience means that when something fails, there is another option.

One harvest fails.

Another region produces food.

One supplier disappears.

Another supplier exists.

One shipping route closes.

Another route is available.

Production temporarily falls.

Stored reserves buy time.

One food becomes expensive.

Another can substitute for it.

What sometimes looks inefficient during normal times—extra suppliers, stored grain, spare capacity—can suddenly become invaluable during a crisis.

Perhaps redundancy isn’t waste.

Sometimes it is insurance.

But Resilience Isn’t Distributed Equally

This may have been the most important thing I discovered.

Imagine food prices rise by 20 percent.

For someone who spends a small part of their income on food, that is unpleasant.

They might change brands, eat out less or reduce another expense.

For someone already spending most of their income on food, there may be nowhere else to cut.

The same price increase becomes a completely different crisis.

Meals become smaller.

Savings disappear.

Assets are sold.

Debt increases.

Children may leave school.

Seeds intended for the next harvest may be eaten.

People can eventually be forced to sacrifice tomorrow simply to survive today.

So the global food system can remain resilient while individual people are anything but resilient.

The supermarket remains stocked.

The system appears to be working.

But somebody can no longer afford what is inside.

That made me realize how misleading it can be to ask only whether the world has enough food.

The better question is:

Enough for whom?

And This Brings Me Back to War

My original thought was straightforward:

war → energy crisis → food crisis → more war

I no longer think the relationship works that neatly.

Food scarcity doesn’t automatically cause war.

Countries and people respond to scarcity in many ways.

They trade.

Substitute.

Ration.

Innovate.

Cooperate.

Provide assistance.

Increase production.

Release reserves.

But food insecurity can make an already fragile society more fragile.

If people are poor, governments are weak, food prices are rising, unemployment is high and political tensions already exist, another shock can make those existing problems much harder to contain.

Food insecurity may not create the conflict.

It can remove some of the buffers that were preventing conflict from becoming worse.

And then the relationship can run in both directions.

War makes people hungry.

Hunger deepens instability.

Instability makes conflict harder to resolve.

Conflict makes producing and distributing food even more difficult.

It isn’t a chain.

It’s a feedback loop.

So Are We Heading Toward a Global Food Crisis?

After investigating my original assumption, I don’t think I can honestly say that we are.

There are serious reasons for concern.

Wars can disrupt agricultural production and trade.

Energy costs affect fertilizer and transportation.

Extreme weather can damage harvests.

Poorer countries and households can be extremely vulnerable to price increases.

And several of these shocks can happen at the same time.

But that is very different from saying humanity is inevitably approaching a global shortage of food followed by wars for survival.

The world has considerable productive capacity.

It has reserves.

It has international trade.

It has alternative suppliers.

And human beings are remarkably good at adapting when circumstances change.

The real vulnerability seems to lie elsewhere.

Not everyone has the same number of alternatives when something goes wrong.

A wealthy country can buy food somewhere else.

A poor country may not be able to.

A wealthy household can absorb higher prices.

A poor household may not be able to.

The food can still exist.

The crisis begins when access to it doesn’t.

That is something I hadn’t understood when I started asking this question.

I was worried that the world might eventually run out of food.

Now I think the more important question is whether we have built a food system resilient enough that people can continue accessing food when parts of that system inevitably fail.

And that leaves me with another question:

How fragile is our food system really?