The assumption underlying the global food trade architecture of the past thirty years was that comparative advantage and open markets would ensure adequate food supply for most of the world’s population most of the time. That assumption has been significantly stressed by a sequence of overlapping disruptions — and governments are responding with policies that mark a significant reversal from the liberalization of the 1990s and 2000s.
The Compounding Shocks
The disruption to global wheat and sunflower oil markets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 illustrated how concentrated global supply chains for staple commodities had become. Ukraine and Russia together accounted for roughly a third of global wheat exports and a majority of sunflower oil. The resulting price spike was felt most acutely in import-dependent countries across Africa and the Middle East, where food expenditure represents a substantially larger share of household budgets than in wealthier nations.
That shock came on top of COVID-19’s exposure of logistics fragility and the accelerating impact of climate change on agricultural yields. The 2022 Pakistan floods destroyed roughly a third of the country’s crops. Prolonged drought has reduced harvests across the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and parts of Central Asia in consecutive years.
Policy Responses
Governments across the income spectrum are responding with variations of the same toolkit: domestic production incentives, strategic reserve expansion, and selective trade restrictions designed to prioritize domestic supply.
The European Union has increased investment in agricultural self-sufficiency following the Ukraine disruption, despite tension with its existing environmental commitments. Several Gulf states are leasing agricultural land in Africa and Central Asia to secure supply chains outside the open market. India, historically one of the world’s largest rice exporters, has moved to restrict exports during periods of domestic price pressure.
“Food security has become as much a geopolitical issue as an agricultural one. Governments that treated it primarily as a market management question are revising that position.”
The Development Dimension
The policy responses of wealthier countries create a complex set of consequences for food-insecure developing nations. Domestic production incentives in Europe and the United States can displace agricultural exports from lower-income countries. Export restrictions, when applied by major producers during supply shocks, amplify rather than mitigate price volatility for import-dependent nations.
The governance frameworks that could coordinate global food security responses — the FAO, the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture — are operating in an environment of declining multilateral cooperation that limits their practical authority. The geopolitics of food security is likely to become more rather than less complex over the remainder of the decade.
