However, rising prices and increasingly insecure supply chains are posing a risk to people in Russia and around the world. In a recent interview, Svein Tore Holsether, the chief executive of one of the largest global fertilizer producers, Yara International, warned that rising gas prices could create a worldwide food crisis. Production of fertilizers, which farmers use to boost yields of their crops, requires large volumes of hydrocarbons as a raw material. Shortages could lead to slimmer harvests and costs could be passed on to consumers.
“It’s impacting food prices all over the world and it hits the wallets of many people,” Holsether warned. “But for some people, especially in the developing world, this is not only a question about the wallet, but it’s a question of life or death.”
This is not the first alarming forecast for the situation on the world food market. Last year, in the midst of the global lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, UN World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley cautioned that famines of “biblical proportion” could be looming, and told the Security Council to “act fast”.
But just how likely are these apocalyptic scenarios?
The second item among the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are the world’s shared plan to end extreme poverty, reduce inequality, and protect the planet by 2030, announces that policymakers must act to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.”
Hunger is already a major global problem that has been greatly exacerbated by the pandemic. If in 2014, a year before the SDGs were adopted by 193 countries, the number of undernourished people in the world was estimated by the UN as 607 million, now it is over 800 million. There are 2.37 billion people who are unable to eat a healthy balanced diet on a regular basis, while 22% of children under the age of five are stunted as a result of the problems with nutrition.
One might ask, if the matter is so dire, why is this problem ranked second rather than first on the SDGs list? The answer is obvious: hunger is caused not by an imbalance between the amount of agricultural products and the world’s population; it has a social nature. People go hungry not because the shelves in their shops are empty, but because they have no money to buy food.
Contrary to popular misconception, this problem concerns not only the poorest countries or regions that do not produce food and are completely dependent on agriculture imports. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March last year, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wrote a desperate appeal in the media, warning that “more than 400,000 children and 1.5 million adults in London lived in food insecurity before this crisis, and many rely on food banks every day.” According to UNICEF, in Ukraine, which is one of the biggest agricultural exporters in the world, 9.8 million people – virtually a quarter of the country’s population – suffer from malnutrition.