The Great Emergency Is Famine: 320 Million People Are at Risk

Mario Platero
Columnist for la Repubblica, Guarantor for the Italian edition of the New York Times, President Gruppo Esponenti Italiani New York, Chairman Palazzo Strozzi Foundation USA

David Beasley is the director of the United Nations World Food Program. The mission: to bring food aid to the most desperate populations in these years of exponential growth of a crisis that began well before Russia's attack on Ukraine. Beasley was Republican governor of South Carolina until 1999. But he is far from the thoughts that characterize Trump's and the new Republicans' detachment in America from international aid or climate issues. He is a pragmatic man, even in dealing with dramatic issues. But when I met him at the Council on Foreign Relations last week, his voice at one point broke down: "A reporter asked me how gratified I was by the children we save with our mission. I replied that at night, in my thoughts, there are not the children we save, but the ones we cannot save. The children who die from lack of resources. The hardest part of my job is knowing that a choice to save someone is also an automatic sentence for someone else. We need greater awareness of the seriousness of the problem, otherwise we will have to face the worst ahead of us".

The worst? A vision of the worst was given to me in 2005 by Jim Wolfensohn, a successful former financier, president of the World Bank at the end of his term. In an interview I asked him what worried him the most looking ahead: "Today in Europe we are worried about migration flows of a few hundred thousand people. But what will happen if there is a great drought? And a real food crisis? What will happen? What will happen if a biblical exodus to Europe of 30 million people in search of salvation were to be set in motion from Africa?". Wolfensohn was prophetic. Beasley's statistics are apocalyptic. Arid in their categorization among the hundreds of millions of hungry people in the world, but very clear in their implications.

Food insecurity increases

Beasley explains that there are 49 million people in the world today facing "acute food insecurity". But the number is going up. Not that the food crisis has exploded today. We have known for years that this is a loose cannon for our consciences - and for the stability of our countries. In 2017, when Beasley agreed to lead the UN agency, based in Rome, there were 80 million people at food risk in the world. Before the pandemic, by 2020 the number had already risen to 135 million. At the end of the pandemic, but before the Russian attack, the statistics had soared to 276 million. Now "the number has risen again, to 323 million people". But the definition that disturbs his sleep is "acute food insecurity": 49 million people are close to starvation. "And this is unacceptable in a world that cumulatively has an estimated $ 432 trillion in wealth."

But the food crisis of our time is at the center of a confluence of factors: the cost of fertilizers has increased by 300% due to a shortage of supply, made worse after Russia's war on Ukraine. Sanctions and increased energy costs do the rest. And the agreement reached at the end of last week that unblocks the export of Ukrainian wheat departing from the Black Sea ports is a glimmer of hope, a small sigh of relief, certainly not the solution to the problem. This year, there have been unprecedented increases in drought and heat waves with consequent images of crops being destroyed: Beasley calculates that one degree more in the Earth's average temperature translates into 15% less corn crops.

There is also another distorting element in the trend in food commodity prices: financial speculation. Rupert Russell, author of the book "War Prices", analyzed a 15-year period and concluded that even in situations where there was no drop in the production chain, there have been significant price increases due to speculative interventions since 2008 and up to the present day, with some regularity. Here, in the most sober way possible, it should be reminded that food is not a joke, because we are not talking about giving up a trip to the seaside by car due to the cost of petrol. The "acute insecurity" in Beasley's definition means that there is nothing left for those 49 million people to do: they are about to die.

Countries at risk

Some big countries at risk have been ahead of the curve. India has put aside 95 million tons of wheat and flour; China has reserves equal to 150% of the national requirement. But remaining in Asia, in Sri Lanka, where a new president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was elected last week, and where there are about 16 million people, the crisis is acute. The country has collapsed on an economic and food-availability level, and powers such as China, which in the past has given subsidized loans, today wants to be repaid, thus worsening the crisis, or asks for a greater political dependence. The new president will work out a plan with the IMF, but the prognosis remains critical. In Africa, out of 1.2 billion people, there are about 80 million people at risk. This means destabilization both internally, with attacks on stable governments, and externally, with the risk of massive exoduses. As Wolfensohn's prophecy suggested.

Alarms are sounding from many quarters. Larry Fink, founder of Blackrock, the largest management fund in the world and one of the most listened to voices on Environment, Social, Governance(ESG), has launched an alarm in the Financial Times in recent weeks: "More than the cost of energy, we should be concerned about the humanitarian and geopolitical consequences of rising cost of food" he said. Janet Yellen, US Treasury Secretary, at a G20 meeting said: "It is a very difficult time for global food security". Bill Gates noted that the war in Ukraine "is raising food prices, leading to malnutrition and instability in low-income countries". A joint effort to coagulate global attention is certainly effective, but incomplete. The big entrepreneurs do not mention the next step: what shall we do?