Global famine looms

Bakeries in Tunisia are closing for days because they don’t have enough supplies to make bread, a staple of the Tunisian diet. In Peru and Sri Lanka, there are protests over food and fuel shortages. These are early red flags of what could soon be a global food tragedy that leaves tens of millions without enough to eat this year. Food costs have soared to the highest levels on record since the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization began keeping track in 1990.

“This is a lot worse than what we saw in 2008 or 2011,” warned Arif Husain, chief economist of the U.N. World Food Program. His organization says 44 million people in 38 countries are “teetering on the edge of famine,” and 276 million are food insecure, double the number of people from the year before the pandemic began.

Whether this precarious situation turns into a true global famine depends largely on what the United States, European Union, China and other large and wealthy nations do now. The United States must lead by example.

Food supplies are running low because of Russia’s unjustified war in Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine are large exporters of wheat, corn, sunflower seeds and fertilizer, among other food products. Many of their exports went to parts of Africa and the Middle East, and there simply aren’t a lot of other extra food supplies to make up for the losses. It takes months to ramp up crop production elsewhere in the world.

It doesn’t help that China is hoarding key food products, stockpiling corn and wheat to safeguard its own population.

Food prices were high even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as demand surged coming out of the pandemic. Prices have only become more exorbitant now that there’s less supply. People in developing countries don’t have enough money to pay the high costs, and their governments are struggling to come up with the funds to help. Many poorer nations spent heavily before and during the pandemic and already have massive debt loads. It’s a textbook perfect-storm scenario.

In the short term, richer countries need to stop hoarding and provide more money to aid developing nations and organizations such as the World Food Program.

U.S. leaders, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have spoken powerfully in recent days about the need to step up with more aid. Congress must back that up. Sadly, President Biden made things worse with his recent push to have more ethanol in gasoline this summer. That takes even more crops out of the global food supply. The World Resources Institute estimates that if the United States and Europe reduced grain used for ethanol by half, it “would compensate for all the lost exports of Ukrainian wheat, corn, barely and rye.”

The United States and other major world powers have the ability to prevent a global famine. This is as urgent and morally necessary as sending tanks to Ukraine.