In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, warning that unchecked population growth put unsustainable pressure on food supplies, and that poverty, starvation and other miseries would follow. There were less than 1 billion people in the world then.
With the world’s population surging past 8 billion, few theories can have been proven so comprehensively wrong. But what Malthus represented over 200 years ago is an unstaunched anxiety over poverty – in particular, food security. Many would also blame unchecked population growth for some of our more recently recognised scourges, such as climate change, environmental degradation and pandemics.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently delivered its report, “The Impact of Disasters on Agricultural and Food Security”, and some very Malthusian thoughts must have been front of mind: it calculates the world has lost US$3.8 trillion of crops and livestock over the past three decades – that’s US$123 billion a year.
The largest losses were in cereals (about 69 million tonnes a year), fruit and vegetables (40 million tonnes), sugar (40 million tonnes), and meat, dairy products and eggs (16 million tonnes). About half of these losses were incurred in Asia.
While floods as well as heat and other malign weather accounted for many of these losses, disasters linked to climate change, pandemics and, most pernicious of all, armed conflict, have played a massive role.
The FAO estimates that 2.4 billion people faced food insecurity last year, nearly half (1.1 billion) of them in Asia. And the food losses over the past three decades, it says, are equivalent to the daily dietary requirements of 400 million men, or 500 million women.
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World Food Day: Why over 800 million people go hungry each day despite adequate global supply
World Food Day: Why over 800 million people go hungry each day despite adequate global supply
“Disasters are producing unprecedented levels of damage and loss in agriculture around the world,” the FAO report says – rising from around 100 events a year in the 1970s to around 400 a year in the past 20 years. “Risk is omnipresent, and it is growing at a rate that is outstripping our efforts to reduce it.”
For example, China has in the past four years suffered 218 outbreaks of African swine fever, forcing farmers to cull 1.2 million pigs, with losses amounting to US$111 billion. Last year, 18 weather-related disasters in the United States cost US$165 billion in economic losses, including crop damage.
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‘Our crops have drowned’: Floods submerge hundreds of villages in Pakistan’s Punjab province
‘Our crops have drowned’: Floods submerge hundreds of villages in Pakistan’s Punjab province
But armed conflict seems to generate the deepest and most protracted food insecurity. The FAO says the number of military conflicts is at their highest since the second world war – over 50 a year since 2015.
According to the “2023 Global Report on Food Crises” by the Food Security Information Network, “The war in Ukraine still causes uncertainty in global food markets. War in the Sudan continues to devastate the country and drive high levels of displacement regionally. Protracted insecurity and conflict continue to drive acute food insecurity across many food-crisis countries.”
The World Food Programme, which is providing emergency food to over 800,000 people in the Gaza Strip, agrees: “Conflict is still the biggest driver of hunger, with 70 per cent of the world’s hungry people living in areas afflicted by war and violence.”
An Israeli soldier extinguishes a fire started by a kite attached to a burning cloth launched by Palestinians from Gaza on June 1, 2018. Israeli border towns are coping with incendiary kites and balloons that have devastated their farmlands. Photo: AP
War is deeply damaging to food output and security, not just because of the disruption to farming, lost livelihoods and poverty caused. It is also because of the collapse in civic stability, governance and supply chains, the seeding of minefields and the millions forced into migration, doomed to become refugees, dependent on international aid.
Almost all of the world’s most severe food insecurity crises are the products of or worsened by war, whether in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan, Somalia, Syria or Yemen. That Ukraine, a critically important food exporter, is home to one of the world’s most terrible current conflicts, has created food insecurity challenges worldwide.
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Malnourished three-month-old twins in Yemen among victims of ‘world’s worst famine in decades’
Malnourished three-month-old twins in Yemen among victims of ‘world’s worst famine in decades’
The past month’s Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip has spotlighted all the worst facets of global food insecurity arising from conflict – a tiny community of around 2 million has been trapped in poverty and endemic food insecurity for seven decades, with no seeming end either to conflict or a deep dependency on aid.
As conflict has surged since Hamas took control of the government in Gaza in 2007, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has had to ask for more donations to fund an increasing budget – last year it was seeking was US$1.6 billion. In Gaza, 63 per cent of the population depend on aid agencies (not just for food, but drinkable water, medical supplies and basic fuel), 81.5 per cent live in poverty and over 46 per cent have no work.
And in the past month, aid providers have looked on helplessly as Israeli bombs bludgeon Gaza back towards the Stone Age, in all probability destroying decades of investment in schools, homes, hospitals, power grids and desalination plants.
Just as Malthus was, the UNRWA is rightly concerned about food security. But until the causes of armed conflict are resolved, food insecurity will continue to haunt millions.
David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades
