Without adequate food, there is only hunger, chaos, and violence. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows this better than anyone else and has armed himself with weapons. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has deliberately disrupted the country’s wheat supply, causing a global food crisis. Ukraine is the sixth-largest wheat country in the world, and – by closing Ukrainian ports, clearing railways, stealing grain, and killing farmers – Putin has taken about 20 million tons of wheat into the market. Global grain production is 850 million tons, which is not enough to cause worldwide hunger. But it is enough to make the price of wheat jump more than 60 percent already this year. In the U.S., where the average American spends less than 10 percent of their income on food, this will not be the case. But for people in the developing world, many of whom spend 40 percent or more of their income on food, this could mean the difference between food and hunger. High food prices have already devastated impoverished nations, depressing 20 million people in famine-stricken sub-Saharan Africa alone and stirring up riots in Sri Lanka.

This problem, however, is to be solved in some way, provided it is not caused by a real shortage of food in the world. Even though Ukrainian wheat is not on the market, there is still plenty of whole-grain cereals. The story is about how much it costs and how it is shared. And Putin is not the only one who makes use of this. Commodities make money through unusual price changes, exporters make money for people who want grain, and fertilizer producers make money for farmers who wish to increase their yields. Proto-fascist politicians are happy to exploit rising food prices as evidence of democratic failure.

After the food crisis, however, a catastrophic catastrophe strikes. “The Ukrainian war has shown how fragile the food system is,” said Thomas Jonas, CEO, and founder of Nature’s Fund, which uses a mold to replace meat and milk. Simply put, the way we grow and distribute food is deeply entrenched. More than 40 percent of American plant food is wasted, most are left to rot, and the rest are taken out by small consumers who decide they do not like the sauce in their pasta. Here in the U.S., we use hundreds of millions of corn and soybeans to make gasoline for cars and gas trucks. We slaughter animals on farms in impersonal factories and breeding grounds. Fertilizer flows into rivers and lakes with nutrients, bursting with algae and “dead bodies” of water. In the western United States, groundwater is extracted to irrigate crops that need more water, such as rice and almonds. In northern India, one of the world’s most prosperous food-producing countries, groundwater is released so quickly that water is about three feet [3 m] a year.

And now it’s going to get worse. For one thing, the world’s population is expected to grow from 7.9 billion today to about 10 billion by the end of this century. To meet the expected demand for food only within a century, global agricultural production will need to increase by more than 50 percent. How will that work? The World Resources Institute carefully monitored the situation. It is estimated that it would require at least 1.5 billion hectares of forests, plains, and wetlands to create new agricultural land, almost twice the size of India.

Meanwhile, food production is already declining due to rising temperatures and extreme weather. A recent study by the University of Columbia found that crop production today was 21 percent lower than it would have been without climate change. Another study at Nature Food suggests that a dramatic decline in primary crops such as corn and rice – which, along with wheat, has contributed half the world’s calories to yields – could begin by 2040. Like Donald Ort, professor of biology. The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, recently quoted me as, “The biggest change in the world that threatens food security at high temperatures.”

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Alice Jane
Alice is the Chief Editor with relevant experience of three years, Alice has founded Galaxy Reporters. She has a keen interest in the field of science. She is the pillar behind the in-depth coverages of Science news. She has written several papers and high-level documentation.

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