Food Systems and Conflict

The relationship between war and food has been one of the central dynamics of human conflict since organised states first went to war with each other. Armies have always needed to eat, and the populations behind them have always needed to produce. The deliberate disruption of enemy food production, the siege as a military strategy, the blockade as an instrument of coercion, the destruction of irrigation systems and storage facilities as a method of long-term population subjugation: these are not innovations of modern warfare. They are as old as warfare itself. What is new in the twenty-first century is the degree to which the globalisation of food supply chains has transformed local agricultural disruption into a mechanism of global price transmission, creating cascading effects that reach populations thousands of kilometres from any front line and impose humanitarian costs on countries with no connection to the conflict that caused them.

The war in Ukraine provided the most consequential demonstration of war's capacity to disrupt global food systems since the Second World War. Ukraine and Russia together account for approximately 28 per cent of global wheat exports, 15 per cent of global corn exports and more than 50 per cent of global sunflower oil exports. Ukraine alone was, before February 2022, one of the five largest grain exporters in the world and a critical supplier to food-importing countries across North Africa, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. The combination of Russian forces occupying significant portions of Ukraine's most productive agricultural land and the blockade of Black Sea ports through which Ukraine exports its grain produced an immediate and severe global supply shock whose price effects were transmitted to food markets worldwide within weeks of the invasion.

Global wheat prices rose by approximately 60 per cent in the weeks following the February 2022 invasion before partially stabilising. Sunflower oil prices doubled. Countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Libya and Yemen, all already experiencing severe economic stress, faced immediate food security emergencies as prices for staple foods surged beyond the reach of significant portions of their populations. The World Food Programme assessed that the Ukraine conflict was a primary driver of acute food insecurity across 45 countries simultaneously. Lebanon, which sourced approximately 60 per cent of its wheat imports from Ukraine and Russia, faced a food crisis layered on top of an existing economic collapse. Egypt, the world's largest wheat importer, was forced to accelerate emergency purchases from alternative suppliers at elevated prices, imposing fiscal costs that strained already constrained public finances.

Conflict affects agricultural production through mechanisms that operate at multiple timescales simultaneously, creating compounding damage that extends well beyond the duration of active fighting. In the immediate term, farmland becomes inaccessible due to insecurity, unexploded ordnance and the physical destruction of field boundaries and drainage infrastructure. Labour shortages emerge as agricultural workers are displaced by violence, mobilised into military service or simply too afraid to tend fields located in contested areas. Inputs including seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and fuel for agricultural machinery become scarce as supply chains serving conflict-affected areas collapse or are disrupted. Even when fields can technically be farmed, uncertainty about whether the harvest will be accessible discourages investment in planting, creating output reductions in future seasons that are not immediately visible in the immediate conflict statistics.

Ukraine's agricultural sector has experienced all of these mechanisms simultaneously across four years of conflict. By 2024, approximately 22 per cent of Ukraine's pre-war agricultural land was either directly occupied by Russian forces, considered too dangerous to farm due to proximity to the front line, or contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance requiring clearance before safe cultivation. Ukrainian agricultural exports, while sustained at significant levels through the Black Sea Grain Initiative and subsequent alternative routing through Danube ports and overland routes, were operating at substantially reduced volumes relative to pre-war capacity. The long-term agricultural restoration of occupied and contaminated land, even after any eventual settlement of the conflict, will require years of systematic demining and infrastructure reconstruction whose cost the World Bank estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.

The food security consequences of the Ukraine war were significantly amplified by a dimension of the conflict that received considerably less public attention than the grain blockade: the simultaneous disruption of global fertiliser supply. Modern industrial agriculture depends on fertilisers, particularly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium compounds, at a level that makes high-yield crop production structurally impossible without them. Russia is the world's largest exporter of nitrogen fertilisers and a major exporter of phosphate and potash. Belarus, closely allied with Russia and subject to its own Western sanctions regime, is the second-largest global exporter of potash. Together, Russia and Belarus account for approximately 40 per cent of global potash exports and roughly 20 per cent of global nitrogen fertiliser supply.

The combination of Western sanctions on Russia and Belarus, retaliatory Russian export restrictions, and the disruption of transport routes through Black Sea and Baltic Sea shipping created a global fertiliser supply shock in 2022 whose effects on agricultural output in the 2022 to 2023 growing seasons were significant and unevenly distributed. Farmers in high-income countries with established alternative supply relationships and sufficient capital to absorb price increases reduced fertiliser application rates but maintained reasonable yields. Farmers in low-income and middle-income countries, particularly across sub-Saharan Africa where many smallholder farmers were already operating at minimal input levels, reduced application rates to a degree that materially affected output in subsequent seasons, compounding the grain price shock with a production shock whose effects persisted through 2024.

While modern international humanitarian law prohibits the deliberate use of food as a weapon against civilian populations, the strategic effects of food system disruption are sufficiently powerful to create incentives for belligerents to target agricultural infrastructure even when doing so falls within the grey zone between permissible military targeting and prohibited collective punishment. Agricultural storage facilities, irrigation infrastructure, food processing plants and the transport networks that connect them to markets are rarely treated as clearly protected civilian objects in the practice of contemporary warfare, despite their fundamental importance to civilian food security. The distinction between a grain silo used to feed civilian populations and one used to supply military forces is not always apparent from the air, and the incentive to resolve the ambiguity in favour of destruction is powerful when the strategic objective is to constrain the adversary's economic capacity.

Russia's targeting of Ukrainian agricultural infrastructure throughout the conflict has included documented strikes on grain storage facilities, agricultural equipment depots and port infrastructure. Ukraine's ability to export grain through alternative channels, including Danube River ports and overland routes through Poland and Romania, has prevented a complete collapse of its agricultural export capacity, but at significant logistical cost and with substantially reduced throughput relative to Black Sea routes. The deliberate targeting of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023, which destroyed a critical irrigation reservoir serving approximately 500,000 hectares of agricultural land in southern Ukraine, represents the most consequential single act of agricultural infrastructure destruction in the conflict. Its long-term effects on agricultural productivity in the affected region will persist for years beyond any eventual settlement.

The food security consequences of the Ukraine conflict fell with particular severity on countries and populations that had no connection to the conflict, no ability to influence its outcome and no fiscal capacity to absorb the price shocks it generated. This is the defining characteristic of how modern conflict disrupts food systems in a globalised economy: the costs are not borne primarily by the belligerents but are distributed across the global trading system in ways that fall most heavily on those least equipped to manage them. Low-income food-importing countries, the majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, were exposed to the full force of global grain price increases without the subsidy capacity, strategic reserve depth or alternative supply relationships that higher-income importers could deploy to buffer the shock.

Egypt spent approximately $5 billion in additional import costs during 2022 to secure its wheat supply at elevated prices, an amount that represented a significant additional strain on a fiscal position already constrained by rising debt service costs and declining tourism revenues. Lebanon, whose economic and political collapse since 2019 had already destroyed the institutional capacity to manage supply disruptions, experienced acute shortages of subsidised bread as the combination of global price increases and local currency collapse made imports financially impossible through normal commercial channels. Sub-Saharan African countries facing the highest food insecurity rates, including Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan and the DRC, saw conflict-related food insecurity compounded by global price transmission effects that reduced the purchasing power of whatever humanitarian food assistance they were receiving. The World Food Programme's operational budget requirements increased by approximately 40 per cent in 2022 partly as a result of higher food commodity prices, requiring it to make difficult choices between increasing the value of food assistance per beneficiary and expanding coverage to newly food-insecure populations.

The food security consequences of conflict do not operate in isolation from the other major structural pressure on global food systems: climate change. The regions most exposed to conflict-related food insecurity are, in most cases, also the regions most exposed to climate-related agricultural stress. Sub-Saharan Africa, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East all face simultaneous pressures from irregular rainfall, prolonged drought, rising temperatures and extreme weather events that reduce agricultural yields and increase production volatility. When conflict disrupts agricultural systems in these regions, it does so against a background of climate stress that has already reduced the resilience of farming communities and depleted the buffer stocks and financial reserves that might otherwise absorb a supply shock.

The interaction between climate and conflict creates compounding fragility that is qualitatively different from either pressure in isolation. A drought reduces agricultural output and increases food prices. A conflict disrupts the supply chains through which food is distributed, destroys the infrastructure through which farmers access inputs, and displaces the agricultural labour force. The combination produces food security emergencies whose severity exceeds what either factor would generate independently, and whose resolution requires addressing both simultaneously, a coordination challenge that humanitarian and development institutions are not well structured to manage. Sudan provides the clearest current example: a conflict that has displaced more than 8 million people, including a significant proportion of the country's agricultural workforce, is unfolding against a background of climate-related rainfall variability and a structural dependence on rain-fed agriculture that leaves farming communities with minimal capacity to absorb either shock individually, let alone both simultaneously.