What next for world after food, climate and pandemic shocks?

Global hunger has been on the rise since 2014. Over the past two years alone, the number of people without regular access to food has more than doubled.

As per UN reports “some 800 million people already go to bed hungry every night”. During the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh last month, some key discussions took place with a great focus on transforming energy and food systems.

In Kenya recently, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates visited Nairobi to discuss health, food security, and gender equality. Kenyans have been mobilising efforts to provide emergency famine relief in certain regions of the country and in neighbouring States.

With climate change, the shocks of the Covid pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine war, the world’s food system has now been hit with a perfect storm. In May 2022, the year-on-year food inflation in Kenya increased to 12.4 per cent.

Food prices are still on a rise in Kenya and across the region and beyond. The prices of wheat and other crops have risen exponentially, and are projected to jump further. Severe drought is exacerbating the situation.

Most countries have yet to recover from the compounding effects of the Covid scourge. Conflicts have aggravated the crisis and we are starting to see the genuine impacts of climate on the food systems.

Climate change and the pandemic have meant that the global supply of wheat, one of the world’s most important carbohydrates has fallen for the first time in four years, and then the Russia-Ukraine war took place. Ukraine’s food exports stopped, trapping around 25 million tons of corn and wheat inside their boundaries.

 This is equivalent to the annual consumption of all of the world’s least-developed economies. In America, rising food and energy costs have helped push inflation to its highest level since 1981. Food prices in Britain are rising at a galloping rate. For a world that remains too dependent on too few countries for its food, less than 10 countries account for almost 90 per cent of exports for key commodities such as wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans, so when there is a shock in any one of these countries, whether it be climate or conflict, consequences are witnessed across the world. Some countries are trying to insulate themselves from these shocks by isolating themselves but that may not be a well-thought-through plan.

Principal causes of food price crisis and food insecurity include both demand-side and supply-side factors. The demand side causes include rapid urbanisation, growth in population, low incomes, and poverty. According to UN reports “The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.9 billion in 2020. The UN projected population to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.6 billion by mid-2030, 9.8 billion by mid-2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100.”

Whilst the rising population is a fact, so is growing hunger. More people are hungry today than ever before. As per the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report “About 4.4 million people are projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity in Kenya during the year 2022 alone.”

What role does the global population have to play in this scenario? Thomas Robert Malthus was the first economist to analyse the problem of population growth. In other words, Malthus was the first economist to study demographic issues.

He propounded the theory of population in his famous book titled An Essay on the Principle of Population in the year 1798. In the 18th Century, he conducted an extensive study on population growth in different countries of Europe. His study showed a rapid increase in the population of these countries.

This became a cause of concern for him. He felt the future of the human race is in great peril and so laid stress on the need to keep the population under strict control. This approach was presented in his book known as the Malthusian theory of population.

According to Malthus, nature is considered to be a miser. This implies that if a man tries to produce more food grains, he would not be accompanied by the sympathy and cooperation of nature, as he uses more and more units of capital and labour on the land, the total production would increase undoubtedly, however, due to the applicability of the law of diminishing returns on land, it would result in diminishing growth of food grains.

Thus as Malthus stated earlier, food supply increases in the arithmetic progression that is 1,2,3,4 and so on. Unchecked population increases much faster than the growth of food supply.

That is, according to Malthus, the population has a universal tendency to increase in a geometrical progression that is 1, 2, 4, 8, and 10, and so on. It implies that the population growth rate is more than the growth rate in the food supply. It is also observed the population tends to double every 25 years.

The above-mentioned two features of the Malthusian theory of population imply that food supply and population growth are affected by some independent variables. Since food supply is influenced by the law of diminishing returns, and the population is affected by human fecundity, this can be considered as one of the independent variables. This entails the initiation of a race between food supply and population growth.

Food suppliers, however, are unable to compete in this race, according to its nature of growth which is arithmetic progression, and thus lag behind the growth rate of the human population. Now, this results in the existence of an imbalance between food supply and population growth. The existence of an imbalance between the supply of food grains, and the growth rate of the population makes it difficult for the state to feed its increasing population at the present level.

The lack of sufficient food leads to growing levels of malnutrition among the human population at a large scale, as well as starvation.

Also, the occurrence of natural calamities, such as drought, epidemics, floods, earthquakes, and war takes a huge toll on human lives.

Malthus calls these natural calamities a positive or natural check on the growth rate of the human population. However, Malthusian's explanations of famine and hunger fall short. Before the pandemic, statistics show that per capita food supply had increased as populations have grown, largely due to increasing yields. Famine deaths had decreased before 2014, which are now on the rise.

The world is currently clamouring to attain potash from the Russia-Ukraine region at a huge economic cost as they are major suppliers of this resource which is important for the production of fertilisers.

With a lack of grain, lack of fertilisers, and climate change, the fear is that future harvests are going to be greatly impacted. The resulting domino effect on the well-being of the global population and global economy will reverberate for times to come.

Ritesh Barot is a business and financial analyst [email protected]