I’ve been thinking that when the food shortage headlines move off the (proverbial at this point) business pages and on to the (equally proverbial) front page, the situation may be coming to a head. Well, here is an Associated Press article on the subject (link is to the Philadelphia Inquirer but you can probably find the article elsewhere).

The Treasury Department announced that several global development banks are “working swiftly to bring to bear their financing, policy engagement, technical assistance” to prevent starvation prompted by the war, rising food costs and climate damage to crops.

Tens of billions will be spent on supporting farmers, addressing the fertilizer supply crisis, and developing land for food production, among other issues. The Asian Development Bank will contribute funds to feeding Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and the African Development Bank will use $1.5 billion to assist 20 million African farmers, according to Treasury…

As part of the effort to address the crisis, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will convene meetings in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. over the next two days focusing on food insecurity.

Philadelphia Inquirer

So the issue has not just moved from the business pages to news pages, it has moved from the Treasury Department to the State Department. You could say this situation has developed among a perfect storm of pandemic, climate change-driven droughts and storms, and now an unexpected war. But we live in a world where apparently supply was tight enough that the food system was not ready to absorb these shocks. Now the question becomes are we approaching physical/environmental limits for how much food the world can support, or can we boost production by opening up more land and dumping more fertilizer on it? And even if the latter is true, what is the lag time to make that happen compared to the time scale of the current crisis? And even if we solve these short term issues, are we preparing for the risks in the future? Is the current situation truly something so extreme we could not reasonably have prepared for it, or is it a magnitude of risk we should be expecting in an compromised biosphere and we need to be preparing for next time?