Block a port in one country and food supply dwindles in another. But who bears the brunt of the crisis, and what can be done about it?

Famine is not a word United Nations officials use lightly. But as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stokes a full-blown global food security crisis, humanitarian workers are sounding the alarm.

Some 49 million people in 43 countries were “just one step away from famine”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in May.

And a failure to open key Ukrainian ports that have been blocked because of the war would lead to “famine and destabilisation and mass migration”, said David Beasley, head of the UN’s World Food Programme. “Tens of millions of people are staring into an abyss.”

Historians credit rapid increases in the cost of staples such as bread with triggering, or at least contributing to, many popular revolts. But why has war in Ukraine caused such a serious food emergency? And could food shortages spark conflict in other parts of the world?

What gets out of Ukraine is being rerouted from ports around Odessa to others including this one, Constanta, in Romania.Credit:Getty Images

Why has war in Ukraine had such a big effect on the global food system?

Russia and Ukraine provide nearly an eighth of all the calories traded worldwide, according to the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute. In 2021, produce from Ukraine fed about 400 million people. Russia was the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and Ukraine the fifth-biggest. Some 50 countries depend on Russia, Ukraine or both for more than 30 per cent of their wheat imports, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates. Ukraine supplies half the world’s sunflower seed oil. Russia is the world’s biggest exporter of fertiliser.

Fighting in Ukraine has trashed farming and stopped grain from leaving storage facilities while warehouses storing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain have been destroyed. And the Black Sea ports through which most Ukrainian grain is exported have been blocked. While Russia’s food exports continue, their production and transport has been interrupted by international sanctions imposed following the invasion.

The knock-on effects are global. Farming is heavily dependent on fuel, for instance, which has skyrocketed in price in the conflict’s wake. Fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides have shot up in cost.

Food supply disruptions have caused international alarm, says University of NSW food security expert Dr Monika Barthwal-Datta. “A number of countries have introduced export restrictions that have further reduced supply for international trade, and put upward pressure on global prices,” she says.

By chance, poor weather conditions in some parts of the world have prevented farmers from ramping up production in response to the crisis. In May, the world’s second-biggest wheat producer, India, banned wheat exports after unseasonable heat affected grain production, sending local prices soaring.

“We’re already seeing riots and protesting taking place as we speak.”

Climate change is playing a part. An acute shortage of food in Madagascar in mid-2021 caused by prolonged drought was dubbed the world’s “first climate change famine”. “This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change,” Beasley said, “but now, they’re the ones paying the highest price.”

Barthwal-Datta also notes the impacts of climate change – heatwaves, cyclones, floods – are experienced unevenly. “Unfortunately, those who are the most poor and marginalised, and least equipped in terms of resources to deal with these changes, will be the ones most adversely affected by the consequences of climate change.”

Meanwhile, the current global food price spiral threatens to spill over into political unrest. A 2011 academic study found the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2008 and again in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring uprisings coincided with large peaks in global food prices.

Beasley has warned the UN Security Council of widespread destabilisation. “In 2007 and 2008, we all witnessed what happened when pricing gets out of control,” he said. “There were over 40 nations with political unrest, riots and protests. We’re already seeing riots and protesting taking place as we speak.”

Which countries are worst affected?

Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen are the worst “hunger hotpots” identified in a report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Programme in June. Food security in all six is classified as “catastrophic”.

Somalia, which is grappling with an historic fourth consecutive failed rainy season, relies on Ukraine and Russia for about 90 per cent of its wheat imports. More than 7 million people, almost half the country’s population, now face crisis-level food insecurity or worse.

The report identified 10 more nations with “deteriorating critical conditions”, mostly in western and central Africa. Sri Lanka, where rising food and energy prices have triggered a financial crisis, and Ukraine itself were in June added to the growing list of hunger hotspots.

Dane Moores, policy manager at aid agency World Vision Australia, says a food crisis years in the making has reached a tipping point. He warns the situation means aid agencies will have to “stop feeding the hungry, so they can concentrate on the starving”.

When not even “crisis” is as bad as it gets: How the international scale for food security problems works

A scale to rate regional food security problems called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is widely accepted by the international community.

• The first phase is “minimal” and is colour-coded pale green on maps produced by the IPC. Vulnerable households are still able to meet essential food and non-food needs without resorting to “atypical and unsustainable strategies” such as selling basic assets.
• At phase two – titled “stressed” and coded yellow – families are receiving only minimal nutrition requirements and are unable to afford basic non-food expenditures without “engaging in stress-coping strategies”.
• In phase three – “crisis”, coded orange – an elevated share of the population is acutely malnourished because households are experiencing “food consumption gaps” or are meeting only basic food needs by selling assets essential to their livelihoods.
• Phase four is deemed an “emergency” and is red. Widespread food scarcity results in high rates of acute malnutrition and excess deaths, or families are able to ward off starvation only by resorting to “extreme measures”. In this phase, urgent action is needed to save lives and livelihoods. The six worst affected nations identified by this month’s UN “hunger hotspots” report now have large populations at phase four.
• To reach phase five – famine – three horrific benchmarks are required: first, one in every five households must have “an extreme lack of food and other basic needs”; second, more than 30 per cent of children must be suffering from acute malnutrition; and third, at least two out of every 10,000 people must be dying each day from starvation. In the IPC system, famine is colour-coded brown.

People displaced due to the drought stand around in a camp on the outskirts of Dollow, Jubaland, in Somalia hoping for aid and assistance.Credit:Getty Images

What does a famine look like?

Since the mid-1970s, parts of Africa have been hardest hit by food emergencies. In 1984, footage of famine in Ethiopia shocked the world and seeded a new style of celebrity activism with the Band Aid hit single Do They Know It’s Christmas? and the 1985 Live Aid concerts.

I saw the dreadful consequences of famine first-hand while reporting at the Dadaab refugee camp near the Somalia-Kenya border in 2011. The desolate camp was swamped by tens of thousands of Somalis who had left their homes in search of food. The camp was growing so quickly that relief organisations struggled to cope; death was everywhere.

One of the many desperate people I encountered was a young mother, Ladhan Waraq, who had lost her eight-year-old daughter, Malyun, on the day I met her. “She had been sick for a long time,” Waraq told me after returning from the grave, a fresh mound of red dirt covered with thorn bushes in a makeshift cemetery nearby.

Another of her daughters, five-month-old Sahlan Mohamad, was also stricken by malnutrition. An aid worker with me called an ambulance and the mother and daughter were taken to a stabilisation ward in one of the camp’s hospitals, overflowing with malnourished children.

Ladhan Waraq with her daughter Sahlan Mohammed on the outskirts of Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, near the Somalian border, in 2011.Credit:Jacky Ghossein

Muhammad Abduli, the grim-faced community leader who introduced me to Waraq, told me at least 40 children from his small community had been buried in a makeshift camp cemetery in the previous two months.

“This graveyard has filled up, and we are starting a new one,” he said.

The UN later estimated the 2011 Somalia famine killed almost 260,000 people, half of them under the age of five.

“Many people don’t realise how bad it has to get for famine to be declared,” says Moores. “It’s not just large proportions of people going hungry, it’s actually large proportions of people literally dying from starvation. It is that ultimate, extreme deprivation of food.”

So far this century, two famines have been declared: Somalia in 2011 and South Sudan in 2017.

Delivering assistance during food emergencies can be difficult and dangerous – they often affect remote areas – and in conflict zones, relief supplies can be commandeered by local combatants or stolen by criminals. Humanitarian workers are vulnerable to attack. Some 484 aid workers were victims of violence in 2020, with 117 of them killed, says the annual Aid Worker Security Report by London-based research group Humanitarian Outcomes. Most of the victims were local people working for humanitarian organisations.

People wait for food aid in Yemen during a truce in fighting in April.Credit:Getty Images

Why are some countries more prone to famine?

Famine is perhaps the ultimate in social and economic collapse – a community has lost the capacity to feed itself. But mass starvation doesn’t happen overnight. The causes are invariably complex.

Each nation now identified as being on the brink of famine has long-running and deeply entrenched food security challenges. The effects of war in Ukraine and the disruptions of COVID-19 have pushed them to the brink.

In modern-day food emergencies, armed conflict and endemic poverty are almost always contributing factors. Natural disasters, especially drought, sometimes precipitate a crisis. Poor governance normally plays a role as well.

“Climate just tends to push an already corrupt, teetering system over the edge.”

David Dorward, an Africa specialist at La Trobe University, says food emergencies are too often blamed on short-term climatic conditions such as a bad growing season or drought, when there are typically deeper political dimensions. “Climate just tends to push an already corrupt, teetering system over the edge,” he says.

A 2017 report by the aid agency Oxfam said “at its core, famine is a human-made catastrophe, often driven by conflict. It is brought about by the colossal failure of governments and the international community to organise and act quickly.”

But, as the current emergency precipitated by the Ukraine conflict shows, global factors are also at play. A report released in May by the Brussels-based International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems said “rigidities, weaknesses and flaws” in global food systems were amplifying the effects of the Ukraine conflict. It concluded too many poor countries had become overly dependent on food imports, especially in Africa. The panel also warned that speculation by those who buy and sell food commodity contracts with the aim of making a profit had worsened the crisis.

“These price shocks are clearly being exacerbated by a number of dysfunctions in global grain markets, including commodity speculation,” the report says.

The panel calls for food production and trading systems to be diversified and measures to crack down on excessive speculation in food markets.

People receive relief supplies from aid agencies in Khost province, east Afghanistan, last November, ahead of winter. Credit:Getty Images

How can food emergencies be prevented?

Just as food emergencies have many causes, there are many ways to combat them. Because armed conflict is so often associated with famine, one preventative measure is to reduce the likelihood of fighting by strengthening local governance and implementing peace-building programs that improve social cohesion.

When shocks to a region’s food supply are large enough to trigger a crisis, early intervention is crucial.

Another way is to strengthen local farming systems in vulnerable regions. Developing country governments and foreign aid donors devote considerable resources to this goal. “We can support smallholder farmers to plant more drought-resistant crops and diversify their food sources,” says Moores. “We can also support poor communities to build their livelihoods and increase income which, in turn, increases their ability to afford food.”

And when shocks to a region’s food supply are large enough to trigger a crisis, early intervention is crucial. The United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs is mandated to co-ordinate the efforts of aid agencies when there is extreme need. The humanitarian operations of the UN and the many non-government relief organisations rely on the financial support of donor nations and the public.

How could Australia help?

When this century’s worst food emergency so far hit Somalia in 2011, Australia was among the world’s top five country donors in absolute terms and relative to gross domestic product. Most of Australia’s emergency relief contribution was channelled through UN agencies, including the World Food Programme. “At that time, Australia really showed moral leadership and was a global leader in the fight against famine, even though Somalia was very far from our shores,” says Moores.

“Australia has the ‘best-in-class’ expertise in agricultural research and … improving the resilience of farmers.”

Australia’s strong tradition of agricultural research in a range of climate zones, including dry-land farming, means we have valuable expertise to share with nations well beyond the immediate region. “Australia has the best-in-class expertise in agricultural research and strengthening food systems and improving the resilience of farms and farmers,” says Moores.

But overseas aid spending was cut back in the past decade and became more narrowly targeted at our immediate region, especially the Pacific. Moores says Australia was “asleep at the wheel” during the current global food security crunch. “We’ve been warning about this hunger crisis for over a year now and advocating for Australia to step up,” he says. “What’s needed is a rapid emergency response in the short term to prevent famine, but then a longer-term effort to address the underlying drivers of food insecurity. There is no place for famine in the 21st century.”

With so many people now going hungry, aid agencies are calling on the Albanese government to increase funding to tackle global food security challenges in the next federal budget.

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