The Club of Rome has championed systemic analysis and action since its founding: The Limits to Growth did not predict the crises, but described how they would result if industrialized civilization exceeded planetary boundaries across multiple dimensions simultaneously. What we are witnessing in the food system today is confirmation of that analysis.
In the past five years, the world has lurched from one systemic shock to another. Covid-19 exposed the fragility of global supply chains. The war in Ukraine disrupted the breadbasket of Europe and ripped through agricultural commodity markets, worldwide. A third great shock, the uncertainly over the Straits of Hormuz, has disrupted fossil fuel and fertilizer supplies. Quieter than a pandemic, less dramatic than a war, a global food crisis now gathers force, potentially more consequential than either. Most acute in developing nations, it threatens everyone dependent on the current food system. We believe the time for complacency has irreversibly passed.
Particularly treacherous is the dual character of this crisis: some impacts are immediate and visible, others accumulating beneath the surface will arrive with devastating force. Understanding why requires thinking in systems — something our siloed institutions and policymakers prove dangerously reluctant to do. A recent systems analysis of food security in Europe found that the “risks are increasingly interconnected and systemic, meaning that a shock in one area — such as a drought in a major exporting region or a spike in energy prices — can cascade rapidly across borders, sectors, and stages of supply chains.” A visualization of this scenario is sobering, portraying food riots in cities across Europe.
Modern agriculture, as practiced in most of the world, is energy-intensive and fertilizer dependent. Fossil fuels run machines, heat greenhouses, transport produce across continents and serve as raw materials for agricultural inputs. Synthetic fertilizers, the foundation of industrial yield, are energy-intensive to make. As food prices follow energy prices, costs have surged to the point where farmers across the developing and developed world are buying less fertilizer, or none at all. The harvest of next year is being compromised today, the viability of entire agriculture system being questioned.
Geography adds another layer of risk. The Strait of Hormuz — best known as a choke point for global oil flows — is equally critical for the fertilizer trade, essential for one fifth of the world’s supply. Disruption in that narrow corridor shut off 90% of tanker traffic, imprisoning 35% of oil and 20% of LNG flows globally. This loss reverberated through farms from Sub-Saharan Africa to South Asia to Europe, raising fertilizer prices 20%. The world’s food security is now hostage to a strip of water thirty-three kilometres wide. The chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization warned, “the ongoing disruption to the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor is triggering one of the most severe shocks to global commodity flows in recent years, with significant implications for food security, agricultural production, and global markets.” Strategic food and fuel reserves are holding level, but were drawn down across many countries in the disruptions of the Ukraine war and Covid, and are thinner now than they have been for decades.
The climate crisis worsens everything. The World Meteorological Organization is unambiguous: we are entering an El Niño year of exceptional severity. Droughts, floods, and failed monsoons are unfolding realities not speculative risks. But they threaten agriculture, and regions in diverse ways. Some places may be better off. Many will not. Meanwhile, 15 climate tipping points threaten ecosystem collapse for all within the next decade.
Individually, each of these pressures is serious. Together, they constitute a systemic crisis that cannot be understood, let alone addressed, by looking at any factor in isolation. Belief that commodity markets will signal and elicit necessary changes is misplaced. While major market actors are doing just fine, energy, fertilizer, climate, trade routes, farm economics, and geopolitics are not separate problems with separate solutions, solvable by market economics. They are nodes in a single interconnected system, in which the failure of one amplifies the fragility of all others.
Regenerative agriculture can solve many of these challenges. Many practitioners use no fertilizer, achieving fertility through building healthy spoil. But commodity prices are too low to incentivize most farmers to build agricultural resilience. Farmers who hang on from harvest to harvest struggle to make the investment to restore soil health, diversify crops, or adopt practices that would make their land more resistant to future shocks. The system is locked in a downward spiral of underinvestment precisely when the opposite is needed.
The path forward is not mysterious, but it demands courage and investment. Regionalized, diversified, regenerative agriculture that builds the natural capital of healthy soils, functioning watersheds, biodiversity is not only more sustainable in principle, it is more resilient in practice, and once the initial investments are made, more profitable. Its proponents, however, are often the world’s underprivileged. They need to be heard, taken seriously and supported. Agroecology can buffer against the shocks that energy-dependent monocultures cannot survive. It prizes what the current system systematically undervalues: nutrition, abundance, ecological health, and long-term stability over short-term yield. Implementing it systemically, however, will require challenging the vested agro-industry interests which are now enjoy perverse subsidies globally wiofth more than a million dollars a minute.
This Call to Action is multilevel, multi-locational, targeted and bold. We appeal to legislatures everywhere: municipal, state legislatures and national parliaments and congresses to convene specifically to discuss the looming food crisis. We call on the UN General Assembly to coordinate a systemic response. The actions needed are:
- A commitment to end the wars now driving the crisis. Of the three disruptions: covid, the war against Ukraine and the war in Iran, two are intentional, and worsened by the growing tendency to weaponize food. The world’s largest humanitarian crisis in Sudan, with 14 million now starving, is entirely man-made. Almost 2/3 of the world’s hungry are made so because of conflict. The nations of the world should never tolerate war, but global food security is yet another good reason to work harder for systemic peace. Yes, peace may seem an unrealistic wish, but this is the moment to remind the international community that peace is what the UN was built for. It is not only a humanitarian imperative, but an essential condition if we are to achieve universal food security. As the systems that seek to keep people alive are grossly underfinanced, not ending the conflicts risks crippling our ability to respond to natural disasters, climate catastrophes and global shortages.
- Food systems should favor increased diversity and decentralization of food producers. This relieves dependence on limited supply lines, and increases nutrition. More than 70% of Sub-Saharan African food is delivered by small-scale producers. Greater regional production is achieved by increasing political participation of those who work the land. This means ensuring tenure rights and access to such commons-resources such as water. It means increasing the political involvement, especially of women in developing countries.
- We need also to diversify the sources of our calories. FAO counts 7,000 consumable foods, many of which are calorie rich, but currently more than 50% of human nutrition come from only three cereals: wheat, rice, and corn. If soy is included, those four foods cover 80% of human food calories consumed globally.
- Local trade, especially between countries of Global South will decrease dependency on Northern producers/ world market, lessening the impact of fluctuations in prices, which is what hits people worst. Autarky is a dangerous dream, but strengthening regional and local food production is imperative for food security.
- Transition the food system away from dependence on fossil fuels. Even if no fertilizer is used (and many small-holder farmers cannot afford fertilizer, or energy dependent machines even before the crisis) the disruption of Hormuz hurts the global food system. Renewable energy is now everywhere cheaper than fossil fuels.
- Food production depends on natural capital. Models that treat food production as an extractive process, a form of mining, will come to an end. The food system has to regenerate natural capital, not deplete it
This is not theory, it is practice. But too few listen to people on the ground or use their experience or their indigenous knowledge.
Implementing these solutions is essential if there is to be global food security. They will also help fix the other elements of the interconnected crises: inequality, climate chaos, loss of biodiversity, loss of soils, and water shortages. They address the nutrition crisis, which in rich countries manifests as a problem of obesity, and in poor countries too often as a problem of stunting and wasting. Regenerative food is more nutrient dense.
The choice before us is stark and still available, but narrowing. We can transform food systems now through modest, targeted investments: in agroecological practices, in strategic reserves, in farmer support that makes resilience economically rational. Or we can wait, and be struck by the hammer of our own making — a food crisis that will hit the most vulnerable populations first and hardest, but come for us all. Its consequences will dwarf the costs of prevention.
We raise this alarm to insist on urgency of action to avoid mass starvation and to address root causes of migration. Transforming food systems cannot wait any longer. The window of opportunity is open. It will not remain so indefinitely. Please join us in implementing the changes that will ensure food security for all.
