Food shock is inevitable due to the Iran war – and it could get bad

0:00K-pop Demon Hunters Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. And participate in McDonald's while supplies last. Even if things sort of ease up now, estimates that I've seen suggest around 5 % to 8 % extra food price inflation this year.

0:37I mean, if that continues over an entire season, then we could be looking at something of the order of the Ukraine shocks. We have seen these sorts of crises in the park contribute to the collapse of states. Things are really going to get quite difficult. You know, it is going to put a fire under us. We're seeing spikes in fuel, fertiliser and pesticide prices. they're going to have a serious knock-on effect on food availability around the world. On this episode of The World, the Universe and Us, we're discussing the food shock that is on the way thanks to the conflict in the Middle East. I'm Rowan Hooper.

1:10I'm joined by reporter Michael LePage, Professor Paul Behrens from Oxford Martin School at University of Oxford. Paul specialises in climate, energy, food systems, and is the author of The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science. Welcome both. Hi. Hi. Now, I should say there is going to be a lot of doom in this podcast. I think it's warranted doom in this case. But we are going to point to solutions and how to protect ourselves in the future. And we'll get on to that in the second half. So just stay with the doom till we get to the second half. Michael, you reported on the approaching food shock.

1:48So let's start with the factors that are converging at the moment to give us this outcome. Yeah, there are a lot of them. So the big picture is that about 15 % of all the fossil fuels we take out of the ground end up going into the food system in some way. They could be transporting it or processing it. And specifically, we're particularly dependent on fossil fuels. Obviously, you need fuel for transport, but we also use fossil fuels to make the fertilizers. We use them to make the pesticides. And so if fossil fuel prices go up, the prices of all those things go up and there are all these connections.

2:20Now, specifically, fertilizers are absolutely essential for feeding the world. So it's been estimated half the people in the world are going to starve if we just stop using fertilizers a day. Stop using artificial fertilizers if we stop all fertilizers. Well, I mean, a lot of even farms that are using manure, that manure might come from animals that have been fed on crops that were grown with industrial fertilizers. Right. So actually, even some organic animals and some products are dependent on artificial fertilizers, even if they're sold as organic. So it goes all the way through. Yeah. And so nitrogen fertilizers, they're made from natural gas.

2:57Basically, you turn natural gas into hydrogen, then you make ammonia from it. And then that's usually turned into urea, which is a sort of a white solid that's easy to transport. Thing is, Qatar makes 15 % of the world's supply of urea. who knew yeah who knew and but also in terms of the proportion of that that's sold on international markets it's 50 so you can see in terms of the price of that um that has a big knock-on effect if there's any disruption to that supply but then it goes beyond that because you know the countries like uh pakistan india bangladesh they make a lot of their own fertilizer but they make it using gas from the gulf so now that gas isn't arriving and we've seen fertilizer plants shut down and the rest of the world so that's a nitrogen fertilizer and then that's um that's only a sort of um a part of it things like phosphate we mine phosphate but in order to turn it into a usable form for plants uh we use sulfuric acid to treat it that comes from the gulf as well so sort of sulfur is used as fertilizer that comes from the gulf as well so that there's just this whole sort of chain of fertilizer it's hugely dependent on on sort of gulf products uh one of the people i was talking to us saying, you know, if this carries on for long enough, we could see fertilizer prices could double and that could lead to something like a 20 or 30 percent increase in food prices.

4:17Wow, that's huge, isn't it? And they're already, I mean, we already all notice how expensive food is at the moment. Another third on top of that is becoming really difficult. And I had no idea that the Gulf states were so central to this fertilizer trade. That's, I mean, that's been something I've only just noticed yeah i mean it's partly due to just the sheer energy inputs that are needed for the fertilizer as well i mean the natural gas as michael was just saying and all the other inputs and so you know we use about one to two percent of the total global energy supply in to make fertilizer alone and then obviously we've got all of these other inputs this diesel that's going into transporting food we've got the packaging that's coming from fossil fuels as well so you know when we look across the food system an awful lot of those inputs are coming in one way or another from this industry or byproducts from this industry.

5:08And they're often in the same places because you want to be close to your supply of those inputs. So you want your fertilizer, plants near your natural gas. And so it's a complicated picture. And I think essentially what's happened with the war now is that you've just broken a lot of these supply chains. And now experts and analysts are trying to peer at these broken pieces on the ground and try and figure out How does this all look? Because, you know, there's also this lag in the system because, you know, a lot of these ships, they take, you know, many days to go around the world. And so when we think about when supplies might actually start drying up physically, let alone what's happening to all the prices and things, you've got to take that into account as well.

5:50And that's why we've already started seeing areas in sort of Southeast Asia that have already started, you know, in trying to preserve their supplies, especially China. China's very worried. And one of the big issues is pesticides. Fertilisers are vital, but pesticides, you know, hugely important today. I mean, they're going to become more important as the world gets warmer and pests spread around. So, you know, we are talking about supply chains. So pesticides are made from fossil fuels, but they depend particularly on a fossil fuel derivative called naphtha. Now, naphtha, a lot of that comes from the Gulf.

6:25Two of the big ports there have just been attacked so it's not clear what's happened but then the other thing there's another big source of naphtha is is russia and it's exported through the ust luger port which i think as we speak is still burning because it's been just been attacked repeatedly by ukraine so now for pesticides we i mean it's definitely gonna be a price impact no one's quite as you say no one's quite sure about how bad it's going to be yet but that's a whole nother sort of set of impacts are gonna we're going to see a whole set of dominoes falling along that chain yeah i mean it's um we often used to talk about the fragility of supply chains and and now we're seeing the chickens come home to roost aren't we because we're seeing multiple that they're getting multiple hits and that's that's why they're fragile because you can't really absorb well we get into trouble when you get the climate crisis you get the war in ukraine and then you get the war in the gulf you're getting multiple issues at once converging.

7:21Yeah, and different countries are exposed in different ways to this because, you know, although we've got this sort of highly sort of efficient, just sort of in time supply chain, some countries have different attitudes to how they really want to deal with that than others. So in the UK, we've got this just in time supply chain. And as far as I can see, you know, our national sort of buffer of food is somewhere between sort of 11 days and three weeks. I mean, maybe even lower than that for fresh food. But if you look at other countries like China, which has had these famines within living memory of some generations, they've got something like nine to 12 months.

8:00We don't quite know exactly. And actually, that storage of that major cereal crop is actually what's sort of pressing the prices to where they could be. Because people are saying, well, maybe there won't be this massive demand from China because they do have these stocks. It's a little bit like what's happening in the petrol and diesel system as well is that you've got the IEA that are releasing some of these strategic reserves. You've got other countries releasing some of these strategic reserves. So it suppresses it a little bit for a short amount of time, but it really depends how long it goes on for how bad it gets.

8:30Just in that, I just sort of was thinking today about, we were talking about the Ukraine war. Putin thought, oh, I'm marching to Ukraine and take it over in three days. How long is this going to drag up for? I mean, that's the crucial thing. How long does it drag up? This could, I mean, And, you know, it could go on months or even years, potentially. That's the worst case scenario, of course. I don't want to suggest, spark any panic buying, but should we start stockpiling food personally at home? Well, I mean, this is advice that's actually given to many European countries. And many European countries have been moving more and more towards that.

9:01Of course, there's the countries which are sort of directly threatened on their borders, like Finland. And so they've been sort of having quite a national programme of actually building up stocks there. It's something like nine months now, I think, something like that. So households are advised to do that. Well, households don't have the nine months. That's sort of a national. But on the household side, they're also advised to have a certain amount of days in storage. And it's the same for advice across all of northern Europe, Germany. Actually, the UK is one of the sort of unique ones. We don't have this sort of official government advice that we should be having sort of three, four, five days of food and water.

9:34But it's sensible. It's sensible. I mean, the other angle on this is, of course, you've got all of these sort of supply chain issues and this geopolitical friction. But you've also got these climate impacts. And, you know, we don't know when and if we might be cut off from supply chains ourselves and supermarkets. And the other big worry is if, you know, we've seen, for instance, in 2010, we had sort of Russia hit really hard by a heat wave that hit wheat badly enough to affect world prices. So if that happens again this summer, we get something like that, another bunch of bread baskets being hit by extreme weather, that could really exacerbate the situation.

10:09Yeah, that's right. We're moving into an El Nino now, which has sort of mixed effects. But basically, you know, Southern Europe probably is going to be hit a little bit harder than Northern Europe. Southern Europe is where we get a lot of our fresh fruit and vegetables from about 25 percent of the UK's imports are from the Mediterranean like that. So, you know, you've got to think about how these sorts of changes and dynamics in the climate is going to affect this. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast.

10:42It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate seat. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. And so while all this is in the background or going on now, we've got things like biofuel production is increasing, which at first glance, you know, that sounds, well, it does sound crazy that we're growing food to turn it into fuel to burn. Do you want to tell us why that's increasing? Well, basically, people have seen it as a way to meet their climate target.

11:22And governments have seen it as a way to meet their climate target. So they've put sort of, you know, are paying out all these subsidies that make it beneficial for farmers to do that, particularly in the U.S. You know, a third of the corn in the U.S. is turned into bioethanol because of those subsidies. That only happens because of the subsidies. Wouldn't happen without a third. A third of the corn? Yeah, a third of the corn. So it's just an incredible amount. And now what's happening now is governments are seeing fuel prices going up. So they're saying, oh, we can keep fuel prices down by increasing the percentage of biofuel.

11:53Now, that might be true, but it's a small effect. But it has a big effect on the food prices. So what they're not thinking about is, you know, in a few months time, if you increase your sort of biofuel production, you put more food into biofuels at the same time the food supply is decreasing worldwide. And in a few months time, you get a big impact on food prices. And we did see that during the 2007-2008 food crisis. I mean, that was also sort of partially driven by this biofuel craze. And it drove the prices up quite high. And, you know, what we really see is then you start seeing these social instabilities across countries, mostly middle and lower income countries.

12:28Of course, that always sort of rebounds across the world. And it doesn't stay in one country. But we saw lots of protests, lots of riots. We have seen these sorts of crises in the park contribute to the collapse of states. Yeah, we haven't pointed out that, I mean, we're all going to pay higher prices in the supermarkets because of this. But of course, it's, you know, the poorest people who are paying a big percentage of their income or spending a big percentage of their income on food. They hit hardest by this because, you know, if you think about we're talking about 30 % increase in food, you think if you're spending half your income on food and it goes up 30%, that's a big chunk of your budget.

13:06Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about instability in developing countries in a minute. it but i just want to look at pragmatically what can we expect what would be pragmatically about the worst case scenario here oh yeah so i mean the worst case scenario i mean even if even if things sort of ease up now estimates that i've seen suggest around five to eight percent extra food price inflation this year so food price increases i mean if that continues over an entire season and then we could be looking at something of the order of the sort of ukraine uh shocks i I mean, it's very hard to know how farmers might respond to this because it's a very dynamic system.

13:45Farmers can decide to apply less fertilizer. And there is some slack there. Farmers in good years tend to apply a little bit too much. And so you can pull that back 10, 20 percent. But we're really talking quite large amounts of fertilizer around the world being interrupted. So it's going to naturally have a really big impact. Farmers can also decide to plant different crops. But we're in a really difficult situation now in the northern hemisphere where farmers are planting at this moment. and so they kind of left it too late to make other choices about what to plant they could plant legumes things like soy which require less nitrogen fertilizers yeah but it's very difficult to make that swap right now yeah i visited a farm where they're doing this intercropping so they grow a legume alongside a wheat or a cereal crop and the idea is as you say the legume helps bleed out some of the nitrogen fertilizer that then becomes available to other crops.

14:38Maybe down the line, that's the sort of thing we should start looking at in a much more larger scale. Absolutely. This is one of the major solutions, I would say. I think the biggest is dietary changes because an awful lot of food is going as feed into animals. It's very inefficient. So it's sort of like a nitrogen multiplier, if you like, because you need more of that nitrogen and that fertilizer to go in. And if you look across any of those inputs, it's a multiplier for that. But that intercropping is really a very good solution. The issue is that we're not really set up for it yet. It's more expensive.

15:12To harvest, yeah. Yeah. But as you say, we've got to become more efficient at it. And we've got to stop wasting or giving it so much to cattle. The immense amount, isn't it? Tell us about the staggering amount of food that we not waste on cattle, but that we do feed to cattle than to make milk and meat. Well, for all livestock, we're feeding around a third. So it depends where you're looking in the world. In Europe, for example, anywhere between 40 % and 60 % of our grains are going towards animal livestock. And that tends to destroy between sort of 80 % and 97 % of the calories that you're actually feeding.

15:49So it's incredibly inefficient. And we could be eating those plants directly, of course. so it's not only that it's also the fact that it's taking up an awful lot of land so about 80 percent of agricultural land around 35 percent of total habitable land around the planet is is being basically used for animal livestock and we simply don't have the land anymore and so some of that land can be used for growing other crops it can be used for nature it can be used for climate resilience. And in our modelling, for example, we find that if people in high-income nations eat a plant-rich diet, a diet that's healthy for us and for the planet, so that's on the order of a beef burger once every two weeks, a chicken breast once a week, that sort of level, still milk every day, then in high-income countries you'd save an area across the world of around the size of the EU and you'd be able to draw down around 14 years of agricultural emissions onto of that land if you're able to save it and return it to nature.

16:48So it's the biggest lever that we have out there. And I just want to come and mention the biodiversity crisis as well, because, you know, land that's used for farming is land that's been taken away from wildlife. And, you know, the cattle in particular are driving the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. We've seen palm oil and, of course, in Indonesia. So this is, it's so important to minimise our use of land. And if we can get back so you know 100 completely 100 agree if we can get some of that back we should be doing that the trouble is you know when you look around globally i mean i think the global picture is actually that as wealth increases people are actually eating more meat not less so we actually we're going backwards rather than than forwards on this yeah and that's something that we really really need to address and think about um very hard because we almost need to do the same things we've done for solar and electric vehicles and sort of leapfrog that process.

17:42And to do that, we really need to have more in shaping the food environment in high income countries so that we do have healthier diets as well at the end of the day, basically. I mean, the Danish example, the plant rich action plan that they have, I think is one of the best examples out there. And what they're trying to do is across the whole supply chain, increase the amount of plants that are available and this has all of these sort of national security issues i mean people don't think about eating more plants as a national security issue but it really is when you look at what's happening to the world and how much resources we put into animal agriculture and so if you look at the danish for example you've got the danish government saying you know we're going to do public procurement of more plants it's going to be organic it's going to be local we're going to give farmers that certainty because the thing is if you think about being a farmer it's really hard to make that plunge into a different production system like into cropping for example and you might lose money over the sort of early years to make more money in the future because you probably will because your inputs will go down and you know and you might get paid for sort of the environmental outcomes but you need that security of demand like you need to be secure that you know that the demand is going to be there in the future and some government's not just going to change its mind that's what the danish are doing and i think it's one of the biggest opportunities that we have so can you spell it out to us what what the national security implications are why we do need to sort of be more maybe self-sufficient in our supply of food yeah so in say for example the UK but I mean you could look at other countries too the UK is particularly exposed we import between sort of 40 to 50 percent of our food depending on the year and how you calculate it what that means is that we are sort of beholden to these just-in-science supply chains that we've been talking about now if you look at what we're able to do in the future really it comes down to how we use our land as we've been discussing and so in the UK if we eat that diet that I mentioned earlier we'd save an area almost the size of Scotland now some of that can go towards growing more crops in reserve you know we can actually have more crops growing on the arable land that's currently growing that feed and having those crops directly for us can be plant-based proteins for example and so that's giving us that buffer it's more spread across the country and you can have more diversity in those crops as well so you've got that sort of natural buffer as well in terms of the biodiversity.

19:57And just want to bring this back to biofuels as well, because, you know, we're talking about what we can do about this crisis. Reducing biofuels would have a lot of benefits. I mean, for starters, in the immediate, you know, right now, if we sort of reduce biofuel use, it would help sort of limit the food price increases. But the other big thing about biofuels, the crazy thing about them is lots of studies show that they don't reduce emissions by much, if at all. So we put putting all this money into them and they're harming the planet and not achieving what we want them to so that they would be huge benefits from sort of cutting biofuels and then we can claw some of that land back so for instance we see people getting upset about solar panels going on farm fields but it's way more efficient to put a solar panel on a farm field and use that to drive a car than it is to grow food on that field and turn it into fuel and drive that car you go 10 times further at least in that car it's a really great point look there's just a fact i want to share with you on Brazil.

20:52So if you clear the Amazon to put your biofuels there, you're going into a carbon debt because you've just torn down that. Now, if you want to pay back that debt with the biofuels, because they don't actually help as much as people think, it takes on the order of centuries to pay that debt back. So even on marginal land, it takes several years to pay that debt back when you change the land use like that. And we are, of course, tearing down the Amazon in huge swathes, maybe not so much for biofuels, but certainly to grow soya to feed to cattle, which we mentioned earlier. All right. So look, we don't like biofuels.

21:27What else should governments be doing now to try to limit or prepare for the shock that's coming? Yeah, I mean, I think you highlighted one of them. I mean, we need to invest in our farming systems, essentially. We need to invest in our farmers. We need to encourage this shift towards more plant-based diets. I mean, in the short term, this is going to be sort of a slow-moving crisis that's going to have to be managed. And so that's going to mean things like, you know, helping the poorest in society with their bills, because we see that even in this, you know, even in sort of richer countries, you do see people struggling.

22:02I mean, we've seen an explosion in food banks over the last sort of 10, 15 years. And so we're going to have to put that support there. I think, you know longer term we're going to need sort of more community-based food resilience so that'd be like food boards especially in this country where you've got local communities that are able to think about and organize their responses to food crises and sort of other crises and environmental crises so you know I think it's going to be sort of a swathe of different things I mean one of the sort of reports from the National Preparedness Commission by Tim Lang talked about a just-in-case society rather than a just-in-time food system, you know.

22:41So we had to think in that framing of just-in-case, always thinking about what the risks are and trying to plan ahead rather than just hoping things will be all right and the market's going to sort it out for us. And then sort of looking at the bigger picture, obviously we've got to break this link between the fossil fuel industry and farming. So, for instance, fertilisers, nitrogen fertilisers. The first industrial nitrogen fertilisers were made using electricity, using hydropower in Norway. we know how to do it it's not rocket science we can we can do this what we need is the sort of will of governments to support it and we also need lots of renewable electricity uh so it can be done of course the problem we have right now all the extra electricity generation we're getting where is it going it's going into data centers for ai now is that really what we need most yeah um well that's another issue but um i mean is there a a kind of silver lining in this in that it's awful that it's caught it's it's been a shock and it's going to be a lot of hardship and maybe catastrophic problems to to make us change but at least it is making us change finally i mean it's a bit like in a broader sense you might sometimes you can't help thinking it's going to take a disaster a global disaster to to really rein in fossil fuel use is this in a mini scale as a sort of version of that?

23:59Yeah, absolutely. I think it is. And to some extent, we saw it during the Russia-Ukraine crisis. So in the Russia-Ukraine crisis, we had this issue with natural gas and LNG prices shot up. Now, you know, those ships went to where people were willing to pay it and away from the areas that couldn't. And so areas like Pakistan started having these energy shortages. What did they do? They went, you know, across the borders and they said, you know, we'll have all of your excess capacity of solar, please, China. and they've had a massive massive build out of solar recently you're seeing the same things happening today with the fertilizer shipments which are being redirected in the ocean to who's going to be paying it the highest amount so you know it is going to put a fire under us yeah and i think countries like india and pakistan where they got fertilizer factories shutting down they're going to be thinking how do we guarantee our supply i mean even in the uk you know if you're relying on fertilizers how do you guarantee that supply well we massively overuse fertilizer and pesticides so i do hope that this we get through this but then we do just look again at everything about food production and it impacts the biodiversity crisis as well like yes and the fertilizers is a great example of that so excess fertilizer some of it gets turned into nitroshoxide which is a highly potent greenhouse gas it goes up into the atmosphere some of it washes off into the rivers and seas and pollutes them so there there are a whole bunch of things we can do that That ranges from using legumes more, as you're saying, that's precision farming.

25:26So we're not putting fertilizers where they're not needed. That's breeding better plants that can take up that fertilizer. Ultimately, the hope is that we can breed plants that, you know, say wheat that takes up nitrogen itself in the same way as legumes do. And that's that'll be the big answer going forward. Yeah. And again, again, you know, that that nitrogen imbalance. I mean, the majority of it is driven by animal agriculture again, you know, because you've also got the manures as well. So you've got all of the fertilisers going into the feed and you've got all the manure as well that's actually adding to that nitrogen burden.

25:54Any final remarks to try to lift us on our way? Well, I think, as you say, this does give us the push that we need to do the things that we've been looking at for a very long time. And when you think about the food system, it's often overlooked, actually, by governments. It tends to sit across so many different multiple domains because we talked about it's a land issue. It's a health issue. It's an energy issue. Of course, it's the food issue. So it tends to be not thought of in a joined up way. And now is the time. I'm afraid, you know, things are really going to get quite difficult. And not just with this crisis in Iran, but also with the climate crisis, the nature crisis.

26:39And we're just going to have to move on these things. And I mean, optimistically, we know that if we do these things, the world could be so much better for it. And so when we look across all of the winds that we're discussing, more green space, cleaner air, cleaner water, more nature. I mean, in our research, we even find that all other things being equal, farmers could make more in this country from this shift. We'd be healthier. We'd save billions for the NHS, for example. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So, you know, antimicrobial resistance, zoonotic diseases, all of that has come down.

27:12So, you know, I mean, maybe it always needed to get to this stage for us to really get pushed to do it. But I hope that this is, you know, one step along the way that we will actually respond. Yeah, I think what we're going to realise is we effectively eat fossil fuels. And that's a very bad idea. And we're going to find out exactly how bad it is. No more coal for me for dinner tonight. We'll leave it there. That's all for this episode of The World, The Universe and Us. I'm Rowan Hooper thanks to Michael LePage Paul Behrens for joining us do follow and subscribe for more content bye for now

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