In short
How the war in/around Iran threatens global food security by disrupting fertilizer supplies and exposing a fragile, highly synchronized “just-in-time” food system; what governments and individuals should do to prepare.
Guest background
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist and campaigner focused on food security and systemic risk.
Key claims
Fertilizer production and exports rely heavily on Gulf nations and shipping through choke points like the Strait of Hormuz; disruption raises fertilizer prices and can prevent planting, especially in Africa and South Asia. The global food system lacks resilience due to consolidation, reduced redundancy, synchronized logistics, and weakened regulation—analogous to the 2008 financial crisis. Food system collapse would be catastrophic; even without collapse, local collapses and hunger will worsen.
Notable examples
Sudan (famine/malnutrition risk from fertilizer shortages); Gaza and Sudan as conflict-driven hunger; UK vulnerability from import-dependent livestock feed (Brazilian soy, North American maize).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Impact of War on Global Food Supplies
0:45 to 2:15
Discussion on how the conflict in Iran affects global food supply dynamics.
“The strait of Hormuz is crucial to the world's steady supply of gas and oil.”
Understanding Food Security
2:15 to 3:42
George Monbiot explains the complexities of food security and its dependence on global trade.
“Today in Focus, how the war in Iran exposed the vulnerability of our food system.”
Vulnerabilities in the Food System
3:42 to 6:12
An in-depth analysis of the vulnerabilities created in the food system by geopolitical tensions and market dynamics.
“And so how exactly is the war in Iran threatening food security?”
Resilience and the Food Supply Chain
6:12 to 9:24
A comparative analysis of the food system's resilience to that of the financial system, focusing on systemic risks.
“In the end, it was the US subprime crisis which caused the very near collapse of the global financial system, requiring a bailout of trillions.”
Potential Consequences of Supply Disruptions
9:24 to 11:30
Exploring the potential impacts of fertilizer supply disruptions on food production in vulnerable regions.
“Well, you can't bail out the food system by issuing future food.”
Long-term Outlook on Food Security
11:30 to 14:04
Discussion on the long-term effects of agricultural dependency on imports and the implications of ongoing conflicts.
“And this is what we've seen now several times over the past few years.”
The Rising Threat of Global Food Insecurity
14:04 to 16:44
Explore the increasing risks of malnutrition and hunger due to geopolitical and climate factors.
“And hunger has been fairly steadily rising now over the past 10 years or so.”
Building Resilience in the Food System
16:44 to 19:46
Learn about strategic measures to make the food system more resilient against crises.
“Or rather, the government refuses to say whether it does it.”
Global Dependency and Food Diversification
19:46 to 22:49
Understand the implications of global dependency on a few food exporters and the need for diversification.
“Coming up, the fixes to food insecurity that can be looked at right now.”
The Balance Between National Production and Global Trade
22:49 to 24:29
Discuss the balance necessary for food security between self-sufficiency and imports.
“Is there as simple as countries becoming more self-sufficient when it comes to food production?”
Show all 11 chapters
Individual Actions Towards Food Security
24:29 to 27:31
Explore what individuals can do to enhance personal and community food security amidst systemic failures.
“In 2023, I gave a presentation to a parliamentary committee spelling all this out and saying this is a huge vulnerability.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Catherine Bott:This is The Guardian.
0:08George Monbiot:Today, what the war on Iran means for the world's supply of food.
0:22George Monbiot:Five weeks into a war that the U.S. promised it would have settled by now. If your children are watching, be warned, the president did not use polite language. And President Trump is rattled. Quote, Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Just watch. The strait of Hormuz is crucial to the world's steady supply of gas and oil. And the Iranians forcing its partial closure has sent financial markets into a tailspin.
1:01George Monbiot:But energy is just one part of this very global story. What about food?
1:09Catherine Bott:So we're looking at roughly 30 % of the nitrate fertiliser, roughly 20 % of the phosphate fertiliser, a lot of the sulphur as well, around 50 % of that.
1:20George Monbiot:The Guardian columnist and campaigner George Monbiot is ringing the alarm bell.
1:26Catherine Bott:So this is a very substantial chunk of the world's fertiliser production and export is coming from the Gulf nations, principally because a lot of that is being produced from natural gas and other hydrocarbon products.
1:41George Monbiot:Modern food production, the crops, the farms, requires an enormous amount of fertiliser. and a good chunk of the world's supply, it comes from the Gulf, shipped out through the Strait of Hormuz.
1:53Catherine Bott:This is the place where we can most cheaply get fertilisers and here are the vast container terminals through which everything is moved. You knock out part of that and the backup systems just aren't there anymore.
2:14George Monbiot:As shockwaves ripple through the global food system, what can governments do to prepare? From The Guardian, I'm Nashi Nekbal. Today in Focus, how the war in Iran exposed the vulnerability of our food system.
2:35George Monbiot:George Monbiot, you're a columnist for The Guardian and you've been paying close attention to one of the biggest impacts of the US-Israel war against Iran. In fact, it is something that you've been writing about and talking about for a very long time. Food security. Can you begin by telling us what does that mean?
2:52Catherine Bott:There are lots of different components to food security and there is what people call the U-boat approach to food security. Oh, food security means national food self-sufficiency, self-reliance. But actually, it is much more complicated than that. If you are totally dependent on the production within your own borders, well, one bad harvest can throw you into insecurity. And so a large part of our national food security, and this applies to many countries around the world, is now highly dependent on global trade. It means that if you have harvest failure in one part of the world, then the gap can be filled by production elsewhere.
3:34Catherine Bott:But beyond a certain point, it can also have an exacerbating impact, where when the global food system itself becomes unstable and insecure, then it can greatly compound insecurities in any one nation.
3:51George Monbiot:And so how exactly is the war in Iran threatening food security?
3:56Catherine Bott:Well, there are immediate threats and there are longer term and much greater threats. And the immediate ones, for instance, is the disruption in fertiliser supplies. And the Gulf region supplies a very large proportion. Already, it's caused a significant rise in the price of fertiliser. This will be especially damaging to farmers in Africa who are highly dependent on fertilizer imports and in South Asia also. And so all of that will have knock-on impacts on the price and the availability of food. It'll make food more expensive. Already speculation, awareness of that future impact is raising the price of food.
4:40Catherine Bott:But the issue goes way, way beyond that. and what we're looking at here is a system which is kind of on a knife edge already. It's been in some respects highly successful. We have over 8 billion people on earth who are largely provided with food. Obviously there's far too much malnutrition and undernourishment worldwide but at the same time we don't have the vast famines that afflicted the world. for instance, in the 1960s and 1970s. And those famines which currently occur, such as in Gaza and in Sudan, are entirely caused by conflict, by genocide, by atrocities, not by an absolute shortage of food.
5:29Catherine Bott:But in order to maintain these incredibly high levels of food production, we need a great deal of inputs, lots of fertilizer, lots of trade around the world. and those are delivered through a system which has been losing some of the absolutely crucial elements of systemic resilience and my concern which I've been voicing for several years now is that the global food system looks rather like the global financial system in the approach to 2008 and as in that case once a system loses its resilience you can't predict what event could cause a tipping point, what event could cause that system to slide off a cliff, to collapse completely.
6:16Catherine Bott:In the end, it was the US subprime crisis which caused the very near collapse of the global financial system, requiring a bailout of trillions. It could be the Iran war which does it for the global food system.
6:42George Monbiot:Can we go back a couple of steps? Because I'm really intrigued by this idea that you say that the food system is already on a knife edge, taking aside the war in Iran. To a lay person, myself, could you explain actually how that works and what the analogy is with the financial market?
6:57Catherine Bott:So there was a lot of mystery about why the global financial system almost collapsed in 2008. and there was a very interesting analysis conducted by Andy Holden who was chief economist at the Bank of England and there was Professor Robert May who's a very well-known ecologist and what they were saying was that you know it wasn't the subprime crisis which was the ultimate distal cause of the near collapse of the financial system it was that that system just like ecosystems when they lose crucial components of resilience had been undermined and undermined over many years and was already prone to collapse and all it needed was a sudden shock to dock it over the edge and systems lose resilience partly when they lose diversity partly when they lose redundancy which is the spare capacity in a system partly when they start to synchronize when every part of the system is doing the same thing at the same time.
7:59Catherine Bott:And that means that a shock caused in one part of the system can quickly proliferate around it. And partly when they lose the backup systems, the other ways of getting from A to B, and partly when they lose what's called their circuit breakers, which in this case, we're talking mostly about regulatory restraints on that system. Now, the really worrying thing is that the global food system has lost large amounts of all those elements of resilience. We see a great loss of diversity in terms of the corporations providing it. And there's been a massive consolidation, corporate consolidation of power.
8:37Catherine Bott:And at the same time, they've all become hyper-efficient. So the redundancy is reduced, the spare capacity is reduced, and they've synchronized. It's all just-in-time delivery. Everything is done through the same systems. It's the same container terminals with the same containers loaded onto the same boats, all incidentally going through the same choke points like the Strait of Hormuz, like the Suez Canal, Panama Canal, Strait of Malacca, Turkish Straits, further vulnerabilities there. Regulation has been stripped away. There's almost no monitoring and enforcement. So the corporations can do pretty well exactly what they want.
9:16Catherine Bott:Because everything has been consolidating around a single model of production, the backup systems have fallen away as well. And every single light on the dashboard is going this great red flashing lights now setting off all the way across it and a systems theorist seeing that situation would say this is a system in dire danger now there is a fundamental difference between the food system and the financial system and this is that the financial system in 2008 could be bailed out at vast expense but you know it was bailed out because you could bail it out by issuing future money. That's what quantitative easing was.
10:01Catherine Bott:Well, you can't bail out the food system by issuing future food.
10:06George Monbiot:Gosh, it is just so stark when you lay it out like that. But George, just how bad do you expect that the impact of this war will be?
10:14Catherine Bott:Even if we're not looking at global food system collapse, already the downstream impacts are going to be very great indeed so if you look at sudan for example where there's already famine and much wider malnourishment as well farmers are desperately going to need fertilizer in order to get the next season's crops produced an interruption in supply which is entirely possible in a country like sudan or a great hike in in the price of that fertilizer could mean that either the crops don't get planted or there is no fertilizer. And given that agriculture has become pretty well dependent on fertilizer, then the impacts within just a few months are going to be extremely severe, very, very worrying and threatening indeed.
11:05Catherine Bott:And when those are compounded by the effective collapse of global aid and the humanitarian programs, which were previously stepping into the breach, well, the consequences don't bear thinking about. And so I guess what I'm talking about is that even if the global food system isn't pushed into collapse, that horror scenario that I've been discussing, the local food system can be. And this is what we've seen now several times over the past few years. COVID and Russia's invasion of Ukraine were two of the things which caused localised collapses in the food system. We're much worse off this time. Or rather people in Sudan and countries like it are much worse off because there's just no game plan for getting out of this situation.
12:01George Monbiot:From what you can assess, which countries are most vulnerable to the impact of this war in terms of food production?
12:09Catherine Bott:There's a particular vulnerability across much of Africa because it's very dependent on fertilizer imports. And it's particularly dependent upon Gulf imports. We see a lot of imports also into India from the Gulf of fertilizer. There's a lot going to Brazil and to North America as well, but they have potentially other sources of supply. I'm especially concerned about Africa because the supply lines from elsewhere have not been established and it's highly import dependent. There are places which will do better than others, but it's for most African countries, it's a very worrying situation indeed.
12:49George Monbiot:George, you've explained how vulnerable food systems across the world can become two global events. You've mentioned COVID and the Ukraine war both having an impact on food security. How does the moment we're in now compare?
13:02Catherine Bott:It's hard to tell because it's very early days in this crazy, senseless attack on Iran. But it really doesn't look good because it's hard to see what the off-ramp is. There aren't even any sustained negotiations as far as we can tell. But what we're not seeing is the kind of agreement that we saw even at the height of Russia's invasion of Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine to allow food and fertilizer to continue to flow. None of that is in the offering. We also see this massive crunch in humanitarian aid. There's far less available than there was either during Covid or during the Russian-Ukraine war.
13:48Catherine Bott:But it's also the case that as time has gone by, and I think this could be a reflection of the declining resilience of the system, we've seen a disastrous reversal in the progress that was being made on malnutrition worldwide. And hunger has been fairly steadily rising now over the past 10 years or so. And we're going to see a significant rise, I'm convinced, as a result of this attack on Iran, plus, of course, all the climate shocks which are coming with ever greater frequency and severity. and you put all of those things together and even before the prospect of the system going down if it does or not we're going to see a great deal more human suffering but if as a result of all the things we've been talking about this loss of systemic resilience we do actually see a collapse of the global food system well it's just unthinkable you can't even go there and i spend my life going there.
14:52Catherine Bott:I spend my life rolling in the excrement of humanity. That's what I do. That's my job. But this is one of those things where imagination fails. The level of famine and death and suffering is not like anything any of us have ever experienced worldwide.
15:20George Monbiot:George, if it's difficult for you to try and imagine the scenario, I mean, as you say, as someone who spends their life doing just that, you can imagine for listeners trying to work out actually, how far away is this? What's it going to look like? I mean, I wonder if, you know, from a UK perspective, you know, dare I even ask, in the more immediate sense, what will the impact of this particular war be? And how prepared are we?
15:46Catherine Bott:We're better off than the majority of countries because we have a strong currency, we have relatively high buying power. But there is really no we in the United Kingdom. There are people who are very well off and very well nourished. But there's already large numbers of people in this country who are poorly nourished who struggle to afford healthy food because healthy food is in almost all cases more expensive than unhealthy food and the impacts on them will be greater they will suffer immediately from food inflation which is already beginning to kick in as a result the government's response has been weak but i'm much more worried to be honest about what happens in this country if the global food system collapses and absolutely nothing is being done to prepare for that.
16:39Catherine Bott:We should be building up our own resilience in our own country. And that means strategic food reserves for a start. Other countries do it. China does it. Norway does it. Switzerland does it, for example. Quite a few others do it.
16:53George Monbiot:The UK doesn't do it.
16:54Catherine Bott:We don't do it at all. Or rather, the government refuses to say whether it does it. And instead, the government is leaving it to this thing we call the market. What the market actually means in this case is a handful of huge and ruthless global multinational corporations. There's no reassurance there whatsoever. You know, we're talking about leaving it to the oligarchs. That's basically it. The purpose of governments is to govern. We need to see governments stepping in and saying, right, here is the strategic threat we face.
17:24George Monbiot:But George, what would it look like for a government to properly strategise and to build up food reserves? Like literally, what would it look like? And is there anything that individuals can do to insulate some of the shock that you have predicted is coming?
17:38Catherine Bott:So a few things the government can do straight away is one, to actually create warehouses full of food, so that if the worst comes to the worst, at least we have some breathing space, we have a few weeks where the government can make sure the population is fed, while whatever happens feed through the system. Number two, another way of preparing and making us more resilient is by pressing for a change in diet. One of the things which makes us particularly vulnerable is our very livestock dependent diet. So there's this crazy government rhetoric in this country saying, oh, we need to increase our domestic poultry production, because that'll enhance our food security.
Read the full transcript
18:20Catherine Bott:Hang on a moment. There isn't any such thing. The poultry, the chickens that we produce in the UK are wholly dependent on Brazilian soy and North American maize. Livestock is an incredibly inefficient way of feeding people. It means that an awful lot more food must be channeled through the system in order for us to receive nourishment because a lot of that food is lost when it's fed to an animal before that animal is fed to us. And it puts the system on even more of a knife edge. We would ensure that we were much less dependent on imports if we switched towards a plant-based diet. And at the moment, there's absolutely nothing coming from government to encourage us to do that.
19:02Catherine Bott:There should be public information campaigns, there should be advertising, we could even contemplate a meat tax, for example, to encourage that shift. And we should be seeing much more emphasis on growing pulses with breeding programs for pulses, which are well suited to our climate but also a total backup system which operates some completely different principles which is another really key element of resilience so for instance producing microbial protein by what's called precision fermentation multiplying up microbes which themselves are a very rich potential protein source i mean wait so a lab produced protein are you talking
19:40George Monbiot:so something beyond like those weird meat burgers that you can get like what are you talking about
19:45Catherine Bott:exactly i'm talking about it as a raw protein source you know so there's some bacteria which are about 60 to 70 percent protein incredibly high protein levels you can turn it into almost anything i was the first person outside the laboratory on earth to eat a pancake made from bacterial protein a small flip for man it's a lot a lot to get your head around isn't it yes
20:09George Monbiot:Time plus science equals me eating a protein pancake.
20:19George Monbiot:Coming up, the fixes to food insecurity that can be looked at right now.
20:37George Monbiot:George, what needs to happen to make the food system more resilient?
20:41Catherine Bott:Well, most countries in the world are going to be, to some extent, dependent on imports. It's hard to avoid that. It's simply a case of mathematics that in many places now, the local population is too great to be supplied by the immediate hinterland. And so what we've seen has been a great concentration into what are called super exporters and super importers. And so we have countries like the United States, Canada, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, which have become super exporters of grain. and then we see, for instance, the whole of North Africa, much of the Middle East, to give a couple of examples, becoming super importers of grain because they don't have the fertile land, the rainfall, the conditions required to supply their populations with grain.
21:32Catherine Bott:Now, to the greatest extent possible, we need to see a diversification of those export sources. If we are highly reliant on just a small handful of exporters around the world, you need to lose only one of those exporters or need to lose only one of the routes through which those exports come. And suddenly you are looking at a lot of people thrown into food insecurity almost overnight. We also need to diversify the food itself. Around 60 % of our calories are supplied by just four crops, wheat, rice, maize and soy. We need to break up the big corporations so that we are not highly dependent also on a few corporations.
22:16Catherine Bott:You can see these vulnerabilities stacking up, can't you? And antitrust laws should be strong. Intellectual property rights should be weak. So we should not allow them to gather up all this intellectual property and say this is ours and ours alone and no one else has got access to this huge amount of food technology and food itself because we own it and no one else can. In other words, breaking up this global monoculture of food production and food delivery, which makes us so vulnerable.
22:49George Monbiot:Is there as simple as countries becoming more self-sufficient when it comes to food production? I mean, could the UK, for instance, encourage more people to eat more seasonally, to eat what can be grown in the UK?
23:01Catherine Bott:Well, the first thing to say is that food nationalism is not the same as food security. One of the reasons why there have been far fewer people dying in famines and there's far less malnutrition is that we do have a global trade system and, for that matter, a global aid system, which brings in food from elsewhere if there's been a local harvest failure. If you become, like North Korea, for instance, totally dependent on your own production and you don't import from elsewhere, you are far more vulnerable to famine. There's a balance to be struck, and at the moment we're not striking that balance.
23:40Catherine Bott:But yes, we should be producing more of our own food. We should be producing a diet that is better suited to our climate.
23:49George Monbiot:What do you think it would take for the UK government if they're not already paying attention to the situation, for them to recognise that this is an absolute priority and that the system that they operate within must change?
24:03Catherine Bott:Well, it's a good question. And to be honest, I don't know what it takes, because some of us have been banging our heads against this wall for a long time and saying, just look at what the signals are showing us if this goes down it's then too late you know if you haven't made any preparations and the global food system collapses well really you're stuck with it you know you're not going to climb back up that cliff you've just fallen off so the time to act is now while we still can but the incredible inaction it's been intensely frustrating to me In 2023, I gave a presentation to a parliamentary committee spelling all this out and saying this is a huge vulnerability.
24:44Catherine Bott:And they wrote a fairly good report coming out of that where they did pick up some of these points. There's absolutely no impact on government policy whatsoever. It's really disturbing. You've got the scientists saying something, you've got the experts saying something, and no one's listening to them. Isn't that how these catastrophe films begin?
25:12George Monbiot:George, I don't want to leave listeners on a complete downer. But, you know, like all the big things that people worry about, you know, the climate, justice, you know, a lot of these decisions feel like they're left to governments and you often feel so powerless in that system. However, as individuals, having listened to this episode, what can you go away and do today to make yourself a bit more food secure?
25:36Catherine Bott:Well, I have to confess I have been stockpiling food. I started doing so a few months ago when I realised just what a threat Trump posed to the global system. In fact, I talked about the potential closure of straits and canals as being one of the things that Trump was likely to cause and how that affected our food security. And so I went out and bought myself a sack of rice, a couple of sacks of flour, some slabs of tinned tomatoes, vegetable oil, a load of pulses, lots of chickpeas and several other pulses and dried fruit. It's not really an answer. It's an answer for a few people. Those who have got some space to store something, those who can afford to buy that.
26:21Catherine Bott:It's not an answer. It's an answer for my family. And we've probably got two, possibly three months of food stored. But that doesn't solve the national crisis. One thing we could do is get together as communities and set up community food reserves. But it's a very difficult thing. I mean, that's a big logistical exercise. These things are much better done by governments.
26:45George Monbiot:Particularly when you've got food banks on the one hand.
26:47Catherine Bott:Yeah.
26:48George Monbiot:And then having a community reserve on the other. I mean, it sort of just feels incongruous.
26:52Catherine Bott:Well, exactly. Exactly. and we need intervention we need governments to step in and govern but of course you know the great tragedy of our time is we've had 45 years of neoliberalism telling us governments shouldn't govern they should leave it all to this thing called the market which is just economic power so leave it to the rich people leave it to the corporations they'll sort it out no it's not in their interest they're not the people who sort things out it's governments that sort things out and we need government to step in and individual efforts i mean i just feel selfish by having my own food stockpile you know and can say well i'm all right i mean it doesn't make me feel any better because everybody else isn't and you know yeah it does make sense it does make sense if you can to be stockpiling now it's quite a pro-social thing to do in a weird way because if you're hoarding before the crisis hits, then you won't be panic buying during the crisis and you won't be contributing to the acuteness of that crisis.
27:53Catherine Bott:But it's no answer. It really isn't. We just need government to step in.
27:59George Monbiot:God, one can hope for that, can't they? George, thank you so much for your time.
28:03Catherine Bott:Thanks very much. My pleasure.
28:07George Monbiot:That was George Monbiot. My thanks to him. You can read Read all of George's columns and follow his work at theguardian.com. And that's it for today. This episode was presented by me, Noshin Iqbal. It was produced by Natalie Khotena, Tom Glasser and George Francis Lee. Sound design is by Rudy Zagadlo. The executive producer was Elizabeth Kassin. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest.
28:35George Monbiot:This is The Guardian.
28:41Thank you.
