The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) recently published a special report warning that rising food prices will persist alongside global geopolitical instability. They call for nations to build “resilient self-reliance” across global food and agriculture systems to ensure greater food security and economic sovereignty.
In an increasingly interconnected global market, food commodities are exposed to supply chain volatility risk caused by geopolitical instability, the report says. Retaliatory tariffs, military conflict, and the recent reduction in foreign food aid packages have exacerbated economic issues facing farmers today. The report notes that attacks in the Gulf region threaten global food security due to volatile energy markets: “Over one-third of global urea and sulfur exports—key ingredients for nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, respectively—pass through the Strait of Hormuz.” Such disruptions “will likely have global consequences due to rising oil prices that could spill over into food and fertilizer prices,” the report asserts.
“The impact of high energy prices will likely drive up the cost of food more than fertilizer alone because our food systems are so fossil fuel-dependent,” says Jennifer Clapp, a member of the IPES-Food panel and lead author of the special report. In places like the United States, these additional costs come as farmers are projected to experience an approximate 2.6 percent loss in real income (inflation-adjusted dollars) relative to last year.
The report discusses the efficacy of supply management policies—market intervention strategies including quotas and importation limits—in high-income nations like Canada. “The food system has become so volatile, and we are so vulnerable to food price inflation that we feel like we need to do something,” says Clapp. In Canada, for example, public management of dairy products helps to insulate local farmers from global market volatility by allowing them to sell their commodities at profit-generating prices.
But rising food insecurity rates in Canada indicate that diversifying the range of supply-managed commodities can help improve local resilience. Clapp, who serves as a Professor and Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, Canada, tells Food Tank that “as one in four [Canadians] face food insecurity, diversification is a really important policy for us to ensure access to more fresh fruits and vegetables.”
The report highlights public food stockholding programs as pragmatic policy options for nations at risk of food insecurity. By pooling agronomic resources from primarily small producers, West African nations are able to collaboratively store food to quickly disseminate based on the needs of municipalities within the region.
To decouple local food production systems from global markets, nations must reconcile the demand of consumers with systemic policy transitions. “Thinking about diversity of diets is important because it can change those demand patterns. If people were eating more beans, tofu [etc.], there’s a way in which we can envision dietary change helping to facilitate more diverse production systems,” Clapp tells Food Tank.
For example, U.S. livestock production depends on corn and soybeans as inputs, two crops that currently serve as the largest users of nitrogen fertilizers and herbicides. Because of this structural reliance, Clapp argues that a diverse, plant-based diet puts eaters “already way ahead” in terms of both ecological impact and resilience to energy shocks.
This need for resilient self-reliance is even more urgent in the global South. As the special report notes, “The impacts of rising food prices are highly uneven. Net food-importing countries in the Global South have been hit the hardest, with inflation peaks reaching up to 30 percent in May 2023.”
While these nations have a massive opportunity to insulate themselves from global market turmoil by pioneering localized, self-reliant food strategies, doing so effectively requires international debt relief. Ultimately, as the report emphasizes, “the most vulnerable countries have the most to lose from the way the current system is organized, they also have the most to gain from leading the transition towards self-reliance and protection from dependency.”
Central to this transition is a food sovereignty approach that prioritizes equity, diversity, and local agency. By using market management tools to protect smallholders, nations can transition away from cash-crop dependence and cultivate traditional crops. The report highlights that these mechanisms “act as stabilizing buffers, support smaller-scale and more diverse producers, and improve access to food for marginalized and vulnerable people,” building deep ecological and economic resilience against future global shocks.
Meanwhile, recent U.S. dietary guidelines recommend increased protein intake for healthy adults, which many interpret as a push for greater meat and animal product consumption. This focus on animal protein runs counter to calls for the diverse, plant-based systems needed to build global food resilience.
While geopolitics remain complicated and uncertain, structural shifts in consumption patterns could redefine agricultural dependency. As Clapp emphasizes to Food Tank, modifying these foundational demand patterns is essential: “If it’s going to be protein, it needs to be more plant-based protein.”
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Photo courtesy of Jim Niakaris, Unsplash
