Kimberly Virguez and her husband in Peru have skipped meals to ensure their twin boys can eat. Anelisa Langeni and her sister in South Africa both lost their jobs, leaving them unsure where their next meals will come from, especially because they also lost their father, whose pension was helping them survive. In India, even middle-class families are lining up for food as jobs disappear, savings dwindle, and food prices rise.

“I can’t sleep at night. I’m so tired of worrying about arranging the next meal,” said Chanchal Devi in New Delhi. She and her husband — once both wage earners with some savings before losing work during the COVID-19 lockdowns — now must borrow money to buy food for themselves and their three children and often go to bed hungry.

Food insecurity, which the United Nations defines as the lack of regular access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal development and a healthy lifestyle, is on the rise worldwide.

This lack of access to food can be either severe or acute, according to the U.N. In 2020, for example, 928 million people — 12 percent of the world’s population — were “severely” food insecure, meaning they may have gone without food for a day or more. That figure was up by 148 million over 2019, according to a report released in July by five U.N. agencies.

Another 155 million people were in a crisis situation in terms of their access to food, experiencing acute food insecurity, which can include malnutrition, starvation or famine.

“The number of people facing acute food insecurity and requiring urgent food, nutrition and livelihood assistance is on the rise,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in the 2021 Global Report on Food Crises, compiled by 16 international organizations. “Conflict is the main reason,” he said, “combined with climate disruption and economic shocks, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Issuing a “wake up call” at a U.N. Food Systems Pre-Summit in late July, David Beasley, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme, said, “There are 2,755 billionaires who [had] an average net worth increase last year of $5.2 billion. And shame on planet Earth that we have a single child going to bed hungry.”

While COVID-19 has exacerbated world hunger, experts in food security acknowledge that, even before the pandemic struck, the world was not on track to eliminate hunger by 2030 — one of the 17 major “sustainable development” goals established by the United Nations in 2015. Debates, often divisive, flare up over issues such as whether smallholder farms or large agribusinesses are better positioned to supply the world’s nutritional needs going forward. But with overall food demand projected to increase by more than 50 percent by 2050 in a more climate-stressed world, all stakeholders will likely be needed to solve the problem.

Equity is part of the equation, too. Unemployment and rising food prices can be much more devastating in developing countries than in higher-income nations. “While most middle-class families in the United States spend around 10 percent of their income on food, that number is closer to 50 percent in many low-income countries,” said Chase Sova, a senior associate with the Global Food Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Women, children, displaced people, informal workers and disadvantaged groups are bearing the brunt of this food crisis,” said Emily Farr, an emergency food security adviser with Oxfam, a nongovernmental organization focused on global poverty.

Technically speaking, malnutrition is defined as being undernourished, which includes people not getting enough calories for minimum energy requirements, including children whose growth may be stunted due to nutrient deficiencies. Ironically, it can also include those who are overweight or obese. As high-sugar, high-fat Western diets spread globally, obesity is increasing, as are diet-related conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. Almost 40 percent of adults worldwide were overweight in 2016, according to the most recent data from the World Health Organization.

In countries hit hard by the pandemic — such as Brazil — millions of people are vulnerable to food insecurity, which often has meant eating cheaper, less healthy options. Those who are moderately food insecure, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), may not have regular access to safe and nutritious food.

Another irony is that the world already produces plenty of food to feed its people. “The current food system (including production, transport, processing, packaging, storage, retail and consumption, loss and waste) feeds the great majority of world population and supports the livelihoods of over 1 billion people,” according to a recent U.N. report, “Since 1961, food supply per capita has increased more than 30 percent.” Even during the pandemic, experts say, food production has been resilient, including record grain harvests in 2020, despite temporary shortages that arose early on due to localized supply chain bottlenecks and panic buying.

“People thought there would be shortages and new food price spikes and volatility [during the pandemic], but it didn’t happen because there were plenty of stocks of the basic staple crops,” says Robert Vos, director of markets, trade and institutions at the International Food Policy Research Institute, an agricultural research center.

Even so, hunger has been on the rise since 2015, he says, “due to conflict, compounded by weather shocks and climate change and economic crises that have [caused] the number of hungry people in severe food crisis situations to go up.”

“The number of climate change-related disasters, like extreme heat, droughts and floods, has doubled since the early 1990s,” said a video feature on food security from the Thompson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the Reuters news agency. That will cause fewer harvests, more unpredictable plant diseases and the declining nutritional value of crops, it predicted. And the problems are interrelated: According to the video, agriculture generates about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and uses about 70 percent of the world’s fresh water.

Other studies have found that agriculture, particularly as practiced by large industrial farming operations, can degrade soils and cause deforestation, biodiversity loss and pollution from chemical runoff. While some critics of agribusiness say the solution is to rely more on local, small farming operations, others say industrial agriculture must be part of the solution.

“U.S. farmers and ranchers have long been at the forefront of climate-smart farming,” including efforts to protect soil and water, produce clean and renewable energy, capture carbon emissions and improve sustainability, Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which represents U.S. farms of all sizes, told a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing in June 2020.

Experts also debate the benefits of producing food domestically instead of relying on globalized systems. The latter entails more risk because of longer supply chains, but consumers’ food choices would be less diverse without global trade.Some Western governments provide subsidies to support farmers in general and to encourage them to adopt environmentally sustainable practices. But critics of subsidies say they are no longer needed and are inequitable. “Price distortions negatively impact very small-scale producers in low-income countries,” says Eric Munoz, a senior policy adviser for agriculture at Oxfam.

Misperceptions exist too about the global food system. About 80 percent of food consumed in any country is already produced domestically, says Vos. Insisting on more domestic production “would make local food more expensive [because] everything you produce may not be efficiently produced at home,” he says, “and it may also not be possible to produce all foods year round.” The United States, for example, typically imports about two-thirds of its fresh fruit.

But, as COVID-19 has demonstrated, the global food supply chain is vulnerable to disruption. Sidhartha Bhandari, director of food and agribusiness at Publicis Sapient, a digital consulting company in Massachusetts, wrote: “Our global food supply chain design is predicated on the assumption that commodities can flow freely globally. This allows products to be sourced, produced and distributed at low cost anywhere in the world.” But situations such as the pandemic, he continued, highlight “the vulnerability in this model and the need for redesigning the food supply chain.”

Some call for more regional agricultural trading hubs, which can shorten supply chains, provide more accountability, produce less waste, respect local ecological conditions and connect farmers to more local markets, says Amanda Starbuck, senior food researcher and policy analyst at the advocacy group Food & Water Watch.

Amanda Little, a professor of journalism at Vanderbilt University and author of the book The Fate of Food, said, “Farmers, scientists, activists and engineers the world over are radically rethinking food production.” A range of global innovations are already underway, she said, such as improved seeds, alternative foods that put less pressure on the environment, using digital sensors for precision crop management and building indoor, vertical farms in urban environments.

“There is no one size that fits all,” U.N. Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed told the July U.N. Food Systems Pre-Summit. “We must work country by country, region by region, community by community, to ensure the diversity of needs are addressed to support each reality.” She added that changes in food systems are required “so that we feed the world, without starving the planet of its future.” Significant efforts are also underway that aim to improve erosion control and cropland management, develop drought-resistant crops, diversify the food system and produce less animal-sourced foods, which contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions.

As farmers, consumers and policymakers debate how to meet the growing demand for food in the coming decades, here are some of the questions they are discussing:

Should agricultural subsidies be eliminated?

Most countries provide some level of subsidies to their farmers, and these measures stir heated debates. Agricultural subsidies come in a variety of forms, such as crop insurance, conservation incentives and direct farm income support payments. They also support activities ranging from early-stage research to price supports, which ensure that the price of a good is above market levels.

Other forms of agricultural subsidies include import quotas, which limit how much of a specific commodity can brought into a country, or export subsidies that help farmers sell their crops abroad.

Governments in 54 countries provided $720 billion annually for agricultural support from 2018 to 2020, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based institution that provides economic research and analysis for its 38 member countries. The report said such subsidies have declined in developed countries overall in the past two decades — from 18 percent of gross farm receipts to 11 percent — but they have increased in emerging economies.

Advocates of subsidies say farming would not be profitable without them. Some farmers’ groups say subsidies are necessary because agriculture is a risky business. “Government at large has a stake and an interest in making sure people are fed and that farmers don’t go out of business because of bad weather events and the impact that could have on food security for everyone,” says Veronica Nigh, an American Farm Bureau Federation economist.

Farm subsidies are popular in developed countries largely because farmers in those nations have strong political lobbies. The European Union, for instance, provided nearly 60 billion euros (about $70 billion) in support for EU farmers in 2019. Such contributions improve agricultural productivity, help farmers make a living, ensure affordable food across the region and boost rural economies, the EU says in its Common Agriculture Policy.

In the United States, 76 percent of the money in the five-year farm bill passed in 2018 goes to nutrition programs, and the remainder is nearly evenly split among farm programs for crop insurance, commodity support and conservation. However, other support for farmers, such as disaster assistance funds, are not included in the measure. Since 2018, the U.S. government has provided an additional $60.4 billion to farmers for economic disruptions caused by trade wars and COVID-19, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The United States is hardly alone in promoting farm subsidies. More than 15 countries provide more farm support relative to GDP than the United States. These include China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Korea, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey.

Many countries — both developing and wealthy nations — prefer to promote self-sufficiency in staple food supplies by maintaining trade barriers for certain lower-priced commodities produced abroad, wrote Robert Paarlberg, a former political science professor at Wellesley College and author of several books on food policy.

“Even when their own people are not well fed, and even when the prices on the world market may be lower than the domestic price, governments in many developing countries have traditionally preferred not to import staple foods,” he wrote.

Critics of agricultural subsidies say they limit innovation and are unfair to producers in low-income countries and that taxpayers in wealthy countries should not prop up certain industries over others. Income support payments, for example, unfairly give advantages to recipients over competitors who do not receive such payments, they say, and can create surpluses that distort markets.

Government subsidies “reward the status quo and discourage farmers from innovating and diversifying land use” because the “agricultural structure is organized around four commodity crops — wheat, maize, rice and soybeans, for food and animal feed,” according to Asaf Tzachor, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

“Most support is either ineffective in improving the performance of food systems, or even harmful,” said Marion Jansen, the OECD director for trade and agriculture. Moreover, the OECD said, “Market price support — and the associated use of border measures — harms food security at the global level by impeding the efficient allocation of resources, undermining the role of trade in moving food from surplus to deficit regions and contributing to increased price volatility in international food markets.”

“Countries are realizing that subsidies don’t just create imbalances in global trade and challenges, they also create externalities. For instance, if you provide subsidies on fertilizers, then you degrade soil quality,” says Pradeep Prabhala, a partner in the agriculture practice for McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm.

Oxfam’s Munoz says the organization does not oppose domestic support for agriculture. But, he says, when small-scale producers “don’t have the same subsidies and safety nets, how do we ensure that they don’t suffer poverty and hunger?” There is a long history of subsidies, he says, so “it’s a spigot that is hard to turn off.”

“Governments are obliged to support their farmers for various reasons, so eliminating subsidies becomes a huge political problem,” says Madhur Gautam, a lead economist on agricultural global practice at the World Bank.

Is greater reliance on small farms realistic?

Some sustainable food advocates want to return to a traditional mode of agriculture in which small, and sometimes organic, farms produce healthier food in more environmentally friendly ways. More than 800 international and nongovernmental organizations, for example, have called for agroecology, organic and regenerative agriculture to top the agenda of the U.N. Food Systems Summit scheduled for this fall. Those practices include using sustainable farming techniques that work with nature instead of relying on chemical inputs and fertilizers.

“Today’s dominant agri-food systems … are providing neither food security nor adequate nutrition for all. Moving us dangerously beyond the ‘Planetary Boundaries’ within which humanity can continue to safely operate, these food systems are undermining the very foundation they rely on by destroying soil fertility and biodiversity, over-exploiting water resources [and] polluting the soil, air, and water …” according to the groups’ “Call to Action.”

When critics say organic approaches cannot feed the world, some advocates say this may not be the right framework. “Rather, we need to ask: why isn’t the industrial model of agriculture working? What food systems can provide sufficient and nutritious food for all while minimizing environmental impacts and enabling producers to make a fair living?” asked Peggy Miars, the president of IFOAM-Organics International, an umbrella organization for the organic movement.The latest “World of Organic Agriculture” report for 2020 claimed that organic producers, agricultural land and sales are all expanding, although the organic share of agricultural land worldwide is still only 1.5 percent.

Of course, in many developing countries, small farms are vital, although they do not necessarily use organic methods. “A large body of empirical research argues that smallholders are still key to global food security and nutrition,” said researchers with the European Commission in a book, The Role of Smallholder Farms in Food and Nutrition Security. “They provide livelihoods for more than 2 billion people and produce about 80 percent of the food in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.” Small farms also produce main staple foods, such as rice, and export commodity crops such as cocoa, coffee and tea.

Today, about 84 percent of the world’s 608 million farms are small (about 5 acres), but they operate in a system many see as inequitable. For example, small farms produce around 36 percent of the world’s food on about 12 percent of all agricultural land. In contrast, the largest 1 percent of farms worldwide (those larger than about 123 acres) use more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland, according to a 2019 study by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

“We need a system that accommodates both large and small farms,” says Munoz, at Oxfam. But, he adds, “we also need to ensure that we don’t have the same inequalities that we have now,” such as a greater percentage of land under fewer hands and profits going to the top 1 percent.

Smallholder agriculture has inefficiencies and costs caused by fragmentation, but it also has a lot of people depending on it for livelihoods, says Prabhala, of McKinsey’s agriculture practice. At the same time, he says, industrialized agriculture can lower production costs and improve productivity, but “that can come at a big societal cost and can have unintended consequences.”

Skeptics say returning to small farms and adopting sustainable practices will not produce enough affordable food, especially for growing urban populations.

“Low-yield organic agriculture raises food prices for consumers, particularly harming poor families and countries,” wrote Paul Driessen, a senior policy adviser with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that advocates for free-market solutions to environmental issues. European Union-style sustainability initiatives, he said, which aim to move toward more organic farming, have “little basis in science, practical experience or real-world impacts.”

“As the global population grows from 7 billion in 2010 to a projected 9.8 billion in 2050, and incomes grow across the developing world, overall food demand is projected to increase by more than 50 percent,” said a report from the World Resources Institute, a research organization based in Washington. Food production would need to increase without expanding the amount of land used for agriculture, it said. The U.N. largely echoes these conclusions, as do many civil society organizations.

Ted Nordhaus and Dan Blaustein-Rejto, senior staffers at the Breakthrough Institute environmental research center, wrote that “in a modern industrialized society, most people will live in cities and suburbs and will not work in agriculture. As a result, most food will need to be produced by large farms, with little labor, far away from the people who will consume it.” As a result, they argue, today’s food system must be “large-scale, intensive, technological, and industrialized.” The 2020 Global Agricultural Productivity Report — produced by Virginia Tech in collaboration with several large agribusiness companies — said that farm production “needs to increase by an average of 1.73 percent each year to sustainably meet consumer needs in 2050, but the world is not keeping pace with this target.” To meet that goal, the report said, farmers must use “improved technologies and practices, such as advanced seed varieties, precision mechanization [and] efficient nutrient and water management techniques.”

Food policy expert Paarlberg said that while local, community-supported agricultural models “will continue to produce high-quality local food in season for a small segment of the market, consumers who want year-round variety and time-saving convenience will continue finding most of their food elsewhere.”

Should U.S. food assistance programs be cut back?

U.S. news coverage in 2020 profiled long lines of people and cars waiting to pick up boxes at food banks, but those lines have largely disappeared.

“The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture stepped up in a big way in terms of ensuring safety, giving guidance, procuring produce and protein and delivering that to food banks [so], eventually, things stabilized,” says Prabhala of McKinsey.

But some advocacy groups point out that more than 40 million Americans are still food-insecure, about 5 million more than in 2019. The hunger relief organization Feeding America projects that nearly 1 in 8 Americans will be food-insecure this year.

Due to the pandemic, “people who have never been on food assistance and never waited in line were suddenly thrown into having to seek out aid, and they still are,” says Danielle Nierenberg, president of Food Tank, a group that conducts research on food security. “You have many whose jobs haven’t come back or they are still deep in debt. People are really dependent on both private institutions providing food aid as well as the federal programs. We need a deeper safety net.”

Diane Schanzenbach, director of Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, said last year that increasing federal food assistance benefits was important to economic recovery. Referring to the Great Recession of 2007-09, she said that period showed “big holes in the safety net when we are experiencing economic downturns, so we do also need to be thinking about other ways to boost cash resources to low-income families.” She has since advocated for more robust government support for food assistance.

The U.S. Agriculture Department administers about 15 nutrition assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which serves low-income women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, and the National School Lunch Program, which provides free or low-cost meals for low-income students.Some congressional Democrats seeking expanded benefits have pointed to the decline in the number of Americans struggling with hunger as proof that direct cash payments have been working as intended. Some Republicans, on the other hand, have derided it as the “biggest expansion of welfare in a generation.”

“Federal nutrition programs, especially SNAP, are a first line of defense against food insecurity,” says Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a think tank that does social and economic policy research. “Food banks are also critical because SNAP benefits are not adequate for many households and many households who struggle with food insecurity do not qualify for SNAP.”

And while food banks have a role in supporting households during the economic recovery, she says, they are not a long-term solution for food insecurity because they do not address the root causes of hunger — poverty.

Low-income families spend more than 35 percent of their income on food, compared to the average American family, which spends less than 9 percent, according to Vincent Smith, a senior fellow at the free-market American Enterprise Institute.

Waxman also says policymakers must address “structural factors that disadvantage communities of color” in accessing healthy food. While hunger affects every racial group, food security advocates cite racial disparities in access to nutritious food — an issue that has gotten increased attention in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, one in five Black Americans may experience food insecurity in 2021, compared to one in nine white Americans, according to Feeding America. However, more than twice as many white Americans received SNAP benefits in 2018 as Black Americans, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, according to U.S. Census Bureau. Poverty crosses racial lines, however, and nearly 50 percent of SNAP recipients nationwide had incomes below the poverty level in 2018, according to the Census.

“To more effectively promote healthier diets and racial equity, we need to transform the federal nutrition safety net to not only focus on food security, but also on nutrition security — the idea that all people at all times have access to nutritious foods and beverages that meet their dietary needs for an active and healthy life,” says Brooke Hardison, the communications director at the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service.

Critics of the U.S. welfare system — such as Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation — support feeding America’s hungry but say food security advocates make nebulous claims.

“Intermittent temporary food shortages do occur among lower-income adults,” Rector says, but “90 percent face food insecurity without hunger.” The bigger problem, since the early 1980s, he says, is overconsumption and the rise in obesity, which increasingly has affected the poor. “More money spent on food does not mean better quality,” he says.

He says federal food assistance programs provide incentives for states to increase the number of recipients in order to obtain more funding and do not count all of a recipient’s forms of financial support when determining eligibility. And some of the money goes to adults who are capable of working but work little or not at all, he says.

As the American economy has reopened following COVID-19 lockdowns, many employers have struggled to find enough workers. Many Republicans have blamed what they say are overly generous pandemic relief payments, which have been provided not only via unemployment benefits, but also through three rounds of federal stimulus payments passed by Congress since the pandemic began.

Such spending programs “have very little to do with the pandemic,” Angela Rachidi, a Rowe Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told a Senate committee in March. “Instead, they expand federal government spending in ways that are excessive and undermine the successful anti-poverty policies of the past quarter century by weakening the connection between the safety net and employment.” Employment offers the best path out of poverty, she said.

While income thresholds exist for those receiving federal food assistance, and SNAP has work requirements too, critics claim there are loopholes. Moreover, those requirements were suspended during pandemic-related shutdowns.

Since the economy has improved, Republican lawmakers in several states — such as Arizona, Missouri, Montana and Ohio — have proposed tightening eligibility requirements for food assistance by requiring more reporting on income, assets and child support.

Critics of such actions say they would cut off benefits to people who may still need food assistance.

Hunger Goes Global

Famines have a long history, including one that brought down Egypt’s civilization in 2180 BC. Subsequent famines destroyed civilizations, such as the Maya and the Anasazi in the Americas. Others would kill millions, such as the Great Famine in Europe in the early 1300s, caused by severe weather (mostly flooding) that led to a significant decline in agricultural yields.

According to the online scientific publication, Our World in Data, famine took around 86 million lives during the 20th century, including the massive starvation caused by the ill-conceived economic policies of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in China — one of the largest known famines in history.

In the late 1700s, English economist Thomas Malthus had asserted that human population growth would outstrip the Earth’s ability to produce enough food. Around 200 years later, Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book The Population Bomb also predicted worldwide famine due to overpopulation.

Neither theory came true. Global population has grown considerably, but so has agricultural output due, in part, to increased global trade and better crop yields.

Food scarcity has affected different countries and regions, but the Great Depression, which began in the United States in 1929, made hunger on a global scale a more tangible reality. By the early 1930s the economic crisis had spread across the globe and put about one quarter of the labor force in the industrialized countries out of work.

U.S. farmers were producing enough food in the 1930s, but prices were so low it cost them more to ship their products to market than they could recoup from their sales. Farmers destroyed crops, even as millions of Americans went hungry. The federal government ultimately intervened to purchase surplus wheat and delivered it to hunger relief programs. The effort eventually became a temporary food stamp program in 1939.

The hunger and poverty experienced during World War II — especially in Europe — led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to convene an international Conference on Food and Agriculture in 1943. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was created in 1945, charged with improving nutrition, food production and conditions for rural populations worldwide.

The Marshall Plan, launched in 1948 by the United States, would supply over $12 billion in food and agricultural commodities to a war-ravaged Europe. It also provided a guaranteed export market for U.S. farmers and, ultimately, became a big business. The United States would continue to send agricultural surpluses abroad, often on lenient loan terms, in part to open new markets and as a mainstay of its foreign policy.

Meeting humanitarian needs took precedence at the international level. In 1961, the World Food Programme was established under the auspices of the FAO to focus on saving the lives of vulnerable populations in emergency situations, such as refugees or those in war zones.

In the late 1950s, and largely in response to widespread hunger and malnutrition, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations funded research to improve staple food crop breeds used in developing countries. These investments led to dramatic yield increases: Between 1960 and 2000 wheat yields rose 208 percent, rice 109 percent and corn 157 percent, according to the FAO.

This “Green Revolution” became a game changer for agriculture and was directly linked to substantial decreases in poverty and lower food prices.

Critics would later argue that wealthier farms were the primary beneficiaries of the Green Revolution and that it caused extensive environmental damage. Roger Thurow, a senior fellow for global food and agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, says it included “more uses of fertilizer, more intense use of water and monocropping, and a global diet … [with] a heavy concentration on a small number of plants and animal species.”

The funding for such agricultural improvements changed over time. While public sector research and development started the Green Revolution, most research on plant species is now advanced by private biotechnology firms in industrialized countries.

Meanwhile, in the United States, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a new food stamp program permanent in 1964 as part of his War on Poverty. The program, which initially required the purchase of coupons, grew from about half a million participants in 1965 to 10 million by 1971. Decades later, the program would become SNAP, the largest such program administered by the Agriculture Department.

In the early 1970s, adverse weather conditions in several parts of the world, chronic shortages and a decline in food aid led to another world food crisis. World cereal reserves reached a 22-year low. The quadrupling of oil prices in 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, also fueled higher food prices that lasted for several years.

Global food shortages prompted the creation in 1974 of the U.N.’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, which aimed to finance agricultural development projects, primarily for food production in developing countries. While official development assistance for food and agriculture was strong in the 1970’s, it has declined since then. About 20 percent went to this sector in the 1970s, says Thurow. By the beginning of the 21st century that figure had fallen to 3 to 4 percent, he says.

New Food Policies

Food was used as political weapon in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter cut grain exports to the Soviet Union in retaliation for its invasion of Afghanistan. Other countries provided grain to the Soviets, and Carter’s action devastated American farmers.

“Many farmers think the 1980 Soviet grain embargo contributed to the worst farm crisis since the Great Depression,” said Duane Hund, a farmer from Kansas.

Crises in food and farm sectors led to a rethinking of how people were getting access to food. In 1981, an influential book by Indian economist Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines, showed how food security and poverty were intimately linked. Sen argued that past famines were not due to a lack of food but to poor people’s lack of access to it. Even when starvation is caused by food shortages, said Sen, a person’s “immediate reason for starvation will be the decline in” his or her ability to exchange assets for resources.

“The concept of food security [moved] out from a purely agricultural sector concern into the broader arena of poverty and development problems,” said D. John Shaw, author of World Food Security: A History since 1945.

Critics also argued that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment loans to developing countries in the 1980s, which prescribed privatizing economies and liberalizing trade, dismantled social safety-net programs in those countries.

Flora Sonkin, a policy research officer at the Society for International Development, wrote that market-led reforms and financial sector deregulation gave private companies access to large-scale land deals in developing countries. This led, she said, to a loss of livelihoods in farm communities and the more risky “financialization” of food and agriculture, meaning that financial actors — such as private equity funds — were more involved in the food system.

Structural adjustment policies were credited with integrating economies into a global marketplace, improving competitiveness and reducing budget deficits, but were criticized for their top-down approaches and limited impact on economic development. International financial institutions subsequently introduced new policies that had more country-driven approaches to debt relief.

The 1980s privatization push also affected low-income Americans. Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis, said that since then, “eligibility has been tightened and benefits sharply reduced” for various U.S. welfare programs, including food aid.

In the late 1980s, biotech companies began experimenting with genetically modifying varieties of crops, known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While humans have altered crops through breeding for some 10,000 years, the GMO technique permanently changes a species’ genetics to make it more disease-resistant or to enhance desirable traits, such as shelf life. The FLAVR SAVR tomato, which had been modified to improve flavor and stay ripe longer, became the first GMO food crop approved by the Agriculture Department in 1992.

Groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest say the scientific community has largely endorsed the safety of GMO crops and that farmers in developing countries have benefitted from using these technologies to protect crops. Interviewing farmers in Kenya, The Fate of Food author Little says a growing number of African scientists and politicians believe using GMOs is a matter of survival and can help African countries become agriculturally self-sufficient.Since the 1990s, genetic engineering has been used extensively on commodity crops such as corn and cotton, but GMOs have been controversial.

However, some environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, say GMOs “promote an industrial and chemical-intensive model of farming that is harmful to people, the environment and wildlife.” But Mark Lynas, visiting fellow at the Cornell Alliance for Science at Cornell University, says GMO usage has led to a 40 percent reduction in insecticide spraying worldwide.

In the 1990s, environmentalists and some consumer groups called for either banning or regulating and labeling GMO products. In Europe, where consumers have been wary of technologies that permanently alter plant species’ genetic lines, 16 European Union (EU) countries have banned GMOs, several others have partial bans, and GMOs must be labeled as such throughout the EU.

Price Shocks

Several international conferences devoted to hunger and food security took place in the 1990s, including the U.N.’s World Food Summit in 1996, which declared a goal of “reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level [around 800 million at that time] no later than 2015.” That goal was largely reiterated at the U.N.’s Millennium Summit in 2000.

Ironically, the 1990s also witnessed a rapid acceleration of the “supermarket revolution” in developing countries, where large grocery stores began reaching a mass market. Urbanization, rising incomes and foreign direct investment all contributed to this trend, which lowered prices for consumers and increased food diversity, but also threatened traditional retailers and small farmers.

Low food prices would not last, however. They surged from 2005-2008 due to “a combination of rising energy prices; growing demand for biofuels; the U.S. dollar depreciation; and various trade shocks related to export restrictions, panic purchases and unfavorable weather,” according to Derek D. Headey and Shenggen Fan, senior staffers at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Food scarcity ensued. “There was rioting in dozens of countries around the world based on food shortages,” says Thurow, of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Global stockpiles of major grains and cereals started decreasing for the first time in decades.”

Then, during the Great Recession of 2007-09, many countries adopted export restrictions to ensure food was available locally, but these approaches often backfired. “As countries closed their borders and restricted their markets, the price of food went skyrocketing,” says John Grayzel, a retired rural development and agriculture expert with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In 2010, President Barak Obama launched the Feed the Future initiative, a whole-of-government approach that invested in food security and agricultural development in 19 countries.The price shocks of this period, however, also led to more international cooperation. The Group of 20 (G-20), an international forum of the world’s major economies, launched the Agriculture Market Information System in 2011, which boosted information exchange and transparency regarding global food markets.

The U.N. launched the International Year of Family Farming in 2014 to call attention to the role of family farmers in reducing hunger and poverty. That same year, world hunger hit an all-time low after a decade of steady decline. A spokesperson at the World Food Programme USA says this progress was due to less conflict in the world, economic prosperity, a focus on childhood malnutrition and increased development aid from major donors.

The next year, the international community declared a key U.N. Sustainable Development Goal of achieving zero hunger by 2030. Policymakers were optimistic that, with the right mix of public and private investment — especially in rural agriculture — this goal could be reached.

The U.S. Congress passed the Global Food Security Act in 2016, which set out strategic goals related to food security in foreign assistance programs. This bipartisan measure also reflected growing support for women farmers and small-scale producers, especially to help them access markets.

Hunger had begun to rise again after 2015, due to recessions in several economies, conflicts, population displacements and climate change. Conflict and civil insecurity were the major driver of food crises in 21 countries in 2018, according to the U.N.’s 2019 The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, known as SOFI.

Meanwhile, investments in agriculture did not keep up with the rising demand. Aid for agriculture represented only about 5 percent of bilateral and multilateral development assistance between 2002 and 2018, according to the World Food Policy Center at Duke University. In contrast, aid for health care and humanitarian needs made up about 10 percent to 15 percent of such assistance.

Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global economic crisis and increased food insecurity worldwide. Nearly one in three people did not have access to adequate food in 2020, according to the U.N.’s 2021 SOFI report. “The most destructive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security and nutrition emanate from the unprecedented reach and scale of the economic downturns caused by the pandemic containment measures,” the report said.

While COVID-19 deaths received substantial media attention in 2020, deaths from starvation, which were far higher, were less publicized.

“Three million people died from COVID last year [in 2020], and 9 million died from starvation,” said the World Food Programme’s Beasley. The pandemic got more media attention because “it came knocking on the door of those with wealth and those in power.”

Global Supplies

While parts of the United States and Europe are reopening after COVID-19 surges, the developing world is in increasingly worse straits, due to a lack of vaccines and the poverty and hunger caused by decimated livelihoods. Humanitarian agencies are struggling to fill food gaps, especially where government safety nets are poor to nonexistent, but waves of virus outbreaks — such as the new, more contagious Delta variant — and associated lockdowns are taking their toll.

In many poorer countries, where people rely heavily on financial help from relatives, friends and neighbors, that informal safety net is fraying, hunger is growing, and protests are erupting over high food prices.

Viewed from a global perspective, however, food supply chains — considered an essential service throughout the pandemic — have been robust. “Many innovations and new technologies have spread rapidly, including an unprecedented expansion of digitization to maintain food supply chains during the periods of lockdown and constrained transportation and distribution systems,” said the 2021 SOFI report.

But challenges remain. Exporters and importers are struggling to obtain sufficient containers and trailers to get products to market, according to Keith Daniels, a partner with Carl Marks Advisors, a financial and operational services business. Staples are in short supply in some places, and ports are severely congested due to sporadic closures due to disease spikes.

While food and agricultural exports grew by nearly $52 billion in 2020, concerns are rising about the quantity and quality of diets in vulnerable countries due to rising prices, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Global food prices were nearly 40 percent higher this May than the year before, the highest in more than a decade, especially for commonly traded commodities such as vegetable oils, sugars and cereals, according to the FAO. Investors are debating whether the rise in commodity prices is a temporary shock or sign of persistent inflation.

Whether temporary or long-lasting, food price inflation “is making things worse for millions, especially in low- and middle-income countries, as it adds to the loss in purchasing power from lost incomes, further curtailing access to food,” the World Bank’s Gautam says. The high prices affect both importing and exporting countries, he says, as well as consumers, “as the costs ripple through various value chains to retail food prices.”

Food prices will eventually start to settle down, predicted Maximo Torero, the FAO’s chief economist and assistant director general for economic and social development. The bigger problem will be food access and equity, he said, given that “many have moved into poverty overnight … because they have depleted their working capital.”

Obesity is another problem, he added, because a lack of resources pushes many to cheaper diets.

Meeting U.S. Needs

By late August, about 60 percent of Americans had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine, but the rapid spread of the Delta variant remains a wild card regarding its impact on lives and livelihoods. The United States is still better positioned than many low-income countries, where only 1.6 percent of the population has received any vaccines and government support for food assistance or unemployment benefits may be minimal to nonexistent.

“Countries that fared best are countries that had good social safety net systems,” says Caitlin Welsh, director of the Global Food Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In the United States, she says, “we were lucky enough to have a strong social safety net system in place and a strong enough economy to fund it.”

In addition, the money has been flowing. An Agriculture Department spokesperson confirms that almost $86 billion was added to food and nutrition programs in fiscal 2020 and 2021 for COVID-19 response. These amounts are in addition to $244 billion in regular appropriations for fiscal years 2020 and 2021, combined. President Biden’s proposed American Families Plan would provide an additional $45 billion to expand a healthy school meals program, among other goals.

Meanwhile, food prices in the United States are rising along with other consumer prices, which have hit their highest level in 13 years due to increased product costs, supply chain snags, higher overseas transportation costs and an ongoing labor shortage. Droughts in places such as Argentina, Brazil and California also add to rising costs. These appropriations are likely to get a closer look. At the beginning of the pandemic, everything was based on projections, says Joshua Sewell, a senior policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent budget watchdog. Now, “we are seeing that losses in income are not as high as anticipated and the need is not necessarily as great.” While some areas may need more assistance, he says, “at some point, you do need to start deciding if you want to maintain increased benefits. If so, how are you going to pay for it?”

Innovations

The pandemic has spurred innovations in food distribution, as government, businesses and communities strive to find new ways to distribute food to people in need, said Corinna Hawkes, a professor of food policy at City University of London. In a book about the pandemic and food security, she describes online platforms to help supply meet demand in China, e-enterprises in India, online auction platforms to enable electronic bidding for fish in Oman, community kitchens in South Africa and “agri-ambulances” that transport vegetables from farm to market in Nepal.

“COVID-19 has provided a real-life innovation lab, a testing ground for big ideas,” she said.

In the United States, business models with a lot of flexibility — such as finding creative ways to sell last-minute surpluses — have done very well, says Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFed, an organization focused on reducing food waste. In addition, she says, new apps that allow restaurants and grocery stores to hold flash sales, often for imperfect foods, are “working well and sweeping across Europe and the U.S.”

Other innovations were emerging even before the pandemic struck, such as indoor vertical farms, in which crops are grown on stacked platforms. The United States has the most, but the trend is expanding in China, Germany, Japan, Kuwait and Singapore. The Sustainable City in Dubai features residential clusters with urban farms that contain greenhouse biodomes, hydroponic and aquaponic systems. These are self-sustaining ecosystems in which plants are grown without soils, and fish and plants are raised in a system in which the fish provide waste products that fertilize the plants.

Efforts also are underway to reduce inefficiencies in food chains, such as creating alternatives for animal-based foods. Author and food policy expert Paarlberg wrote in Resetting the Table that “83 percent of the Earth’s agricultural land is now being used to feed animals, even though they provide only 18 percent of total food calories.”In her book The Fate of Food, Little reviews precision-farming tools being used to produce more food with fewer chemicals by using soil sensors and drones, cameras, smart data and robots. She features entrepreneurs who are growing more climate-resilient and edible plants such as moringa and kernza, which are ancient “superfoods.” In addition, the U.S. military is experimenting with 3-D printed food, which allows more nutrients, vitamins and calories to be provided in smaller packages.

If plant-based proteins replaced even half of current pork and beef consumption, it would provide considerable benefits to the environment, human health and animal welfare, he said.

A Third Way?

The U.N. Food Systems Summit in New York scheduled for this fall will focus on promoting nature-positive production, healthy diets and resilient food systems but will also likely address more urgent needs caused by the pandemic.

“Without strong social protection measures, economic stimulus and global collaboration and trade, the public health impact of food insecurity may, in the end, be far greater than the actual disease [COVID-19] itself,” said Martin Cole, the chair of the U.N.’s High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition.

Meanwhile, the FAO and the World Food Programme warn of higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hotspots, driven by conflict, climate extremes and economic shocks associated with the pandemic.

“If we talk about severe food crises in affected countries, that will have to be addressed in connecting the dots between humanitarian support — for those who don’t have enough food — and development support, e.g., helping to rebuild food systems and supply chains,” says Vos, of the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Longer term, experts say climate will have complex and variable effects on agriculture, depending on geography: Some parts of the world may benefit from a warming climate, while others will experience supply chain disruptions, market volatility and price hikes.

Declining water tables associated with global warming are another significant concern, both in the United States and globally. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the ongoing extreme drought in the Western states may continue to cause major crop and pasture losses. In developing countries, drought can cause famine, migration and conflict. Either way, in a system of global interconnections, what affects one country affects all, experts say.

“Ensuring food security and healthy diets for a growing global population will remain a challenge,” as demand for agricultural commodities grows at 1.2 percent per year over the next decade, predicted a joint report by the OECD and the FAO. About 87 percent of increases in production will come from higher yields, it said, and “trade will continue to be crucial for global food security, nutrition, farm incomes and tackling rural poverty.”

Urbanization will lead to a higher consumption of processed and convenience foods, a trend exacerbated by pandemic-related income losses, the report forecasted. Changing consumer preferences may shift to higher-value foods such as fruits and vegetables, the report said, but this trend is more likely in high-income countries.

Inequities in access to healthy food is expected to get increasing attention, with input from a growing food justice movement.

Future needs will most likely be concentrated in cities. “More people are moving to cities to find work, but they go there poor. You have the same levels of malnutrition … in urban [versus rural] areas, but this is ignored,” says Welsh, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Rapid urbanization worldwide is “placing tremendous pressure on ever longer food supply chains to deliver nutritious foods safely and sustainably to ever more congested metropolitan areas,” said the U.N.’s recent State of Food Security and Nutrition report. As a result, more regional approaches may gain currency.

As for innovation, “the next era of food sustainability will be influenced by breakthroughs in global technology such as fifth generation telecommunications, robotics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology,” according to Gordon M. Goldstein, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“If machines can get smarter, and you can bring some of those principles of agroecology and sustainable agriculture to large-scale food production, then you can do affordable foods that are much better for people and the environment,” said Little.

“Our challenge is to borrow from the wisdom of the ages and from our most advanced technologies to forge a kind of ‘third way’ to food production,” she said.