Our plates are likely one of the first places where the chaos of the trade wars will be apparent. On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the devastating impacts of climate change, food price inflation is already high and will only be compounded by ongoing trade tensions.
The full impacts of the trade war are only just beginning to hit our food bills. For now, pre-emptive purchasing and global market uncertainty are covering up how severe the impacts could be. Yet recent United States trade deals with Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and the European Union are deeply lopsided, granting U.S. goods tariff-free access while goods from those countries face tariffs of 15-20 percent.
The trade wars are poised to slow global growth, erode food security, and force the most vulnerable to bear the brunt of the costs. What we are witnessing is not a temporary market fluctuation, but the unmaking of the global food order as we know it. And the takeaway is clear: cooperative self-reliance and more localized, territorial food systems must become central to how we respond. Resilience can no longer be outsourced.
Repeated crises in recent years have illustrated that food systems are already fragile. Excessive reliance on highly concentrated international markets for basic foodstuffs puts many countries at heightened risk, especially when the U.S., one of the world’s dominant food trading countries, is highly unpredictable. Add to that the recent cuts to international food assistance, and the poorest countries are now facing an even more daunting situation.
How should countries navigate this new geopolitics of food?
Trump is pressuring countries to strike individual trade deals with the U.S. as a first response. This approach is a minefield. It undercuts countries’ ability to negotiate collectively, which is the point of multilateral institutions and agreements: to get all players to the table to ensure that the rules are fair and that countries have representation.
Even as they work to strike “deals,” many countries around the world are taking matters into their own hands. Countries as diverse as Canada, China, and Ethiopia are already seeking to bolster domestic food production, invest in their own farmers, stockpile food, and support the development of shorter supply chains to minimize their exposure to global shocks. Japan, for example, is encouraging its farmers to grow more rice, and has a strategic rice reserve that can be released when there are shortages. In the face of a whopping 50 percent tariff placed on its exports to the US, India reupped its Swadeshi strategy of self-reliance.
These countries already know what a recent study outlined: no country but one–Guyana–produces enough food to meet its own needs.
But pursuing food isolationism carries its own risks, especially because of climate change, where one extreme weather event can wipe out entire crops. That’s why some countries are also seeking different trade partners to avoid reliance on the U.S. as a buyer or a seller. For example, Latin America has become China’s international supplier of choice for soy and maize, although some have raised concerns about the potential for deforestation as production ramps up to meet the new demand.
Instead of these uncoordinated responses, countries can instead pursue a joint strategy of cooperative self-reliance to boost food system resilience. Although the term may sound contradictory, this approach calls for countries to boost their own food production in a sustainable and equitable way, while also cooperating with like-minded partners for trade, knowledge sharing, and assistance.
The idea isn’t about isolationism or food nationalism, nor is it about unquestioned belief in international food markets. Although it will no doubt look different for each country depending on their specific circumstances, it is a pathway rooted in solidarity and sovereignty.
In practical terms, cooperative self-reliance is about boosting public investment and encouraging innovation from the grassroots to build sustainable, local and national food economies that are resilient to global market disruptions and the ravages of climate change.
Cooperative self-reliance is also about diversifying trade relationships and focusing on exchange with countries that share similar values and commitments to strengthening food system resilience. These alliances could establish predictable and rule-bound trade between its members and support each other in adopting more sustainable food production and exchange models, such as agroecology and more localized, territorial markets.
Food systems are too important to leave to the whims of one country, let alone one person. We must view the upheaval in food systems sparked by ongoing trade wars as an opening to finally break from the turmoil and power plays of food system dependence–and build resilience from the ground up. Trump’s trade chaos is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
It is time for countries that care about sustainable and resilient food systems to recognize that there is little to lose, and much to gain, from a cooperative approach to self-reliance.
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Photo courtesy of Sreehari Devadas, Unsplash
