🚫🌾 The coming global food crisis — Financial Times

Hunger and even famine are foreseeable consequences of the war on Iran. Now the world must act to shield the poorest from effects that will continue long after the fighting stops

Few 20th-century transformations did more to remake the world than the “Green Revolution”. From the 1950s onwards, new high-yielding crop varieties, synthetic fertilisers, chemical pesticides and large-scale irrigation drove a sharp increase in the output of staple crops such as wheat and rice. In its more celebratory accounts, this transformation pushed back famine and helped support rapid population growth across much of Asia and Latin America. India, one of the key centres of the Green Revolution, more than doubled wheat production between the mid-1960s and early 1970s.

As numerous critics have noted, the Green Revolution also came with enormous ecological and social costs. But one of its less discussed consequences was the link it established between food production and the fossil fuel industry across every stage of farming. Higher yields depended on a vast expansion of mechanisation, pumped irrigation and, above all, synthetic fertiliser use.

Before the mid-20th century, farmers across the global south relied on organic inputs such as manure and compost to maintain soil nutrients. The new high-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution, by contrast, could only deliver their promised output through large and repeated applications of industrial fertilisers, especially nitrogen-based products such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Since many of these fertilisers are derived from natural gas, the Green Revolution meant that the world’s food production became ever more closely tied to a constantly increasing supply of hydrocarbon inputs.

Doubts have long been expressed about the sustainability of this fossil fuel-based food system. But as oil and gas prices have risen steeply amid the US-Israeli war on Iran and a significant part of the global fertiliser trade has been brought to a standstill, its potential vulnerabilities have been made clear. After only seven weeks, food shortages and even famine are now looking more likely for millions of people across vulnerable countries in Africa and Asia.

🔗 https://archive.ph/q3A7E