When a farmer in Kenya plants maize, their harvest depends on nitrogen fertilizer produced in Russia, seeds developed in Germany, and diesel refined from Saudi oil. When you buy bread at your local shop, you're purchasing the end product of a supply chain stretching across dozens of countries. Food feels local, but it hasn't been for decades.

This is why hunger crises rarely start with bad weather. They start with broken supply chains, volatile markets, and geopolitical tensions thousands of miles from the fields themselves. Understanding food security means understanding that the farm is just one node in an incredibly complex global network.

Most people think of farming as seeds, soil, and sun. But modern agriculture runs on industrial inputs that come from surprisingly few places. About 70% of the world's potash—a crucial fertilizer ingredient—comes from just four countries. Nitrogen fertilizer production depends on natural gas, concentrating manufacturing in energy-rich regions. The seeds themselves often trace back to a handful of multinational corporations.

This concentration creates fragility. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, fertilizer prices spiked globally because Russia and Belarus together supply roughly 40% of the world's potash exports. Farmers in Brazil, India, and sub-Saharan Africa suddenly faced impossible choices: pay three times more for fertilizer, use less and accept smaller harvests, or skip planting altogether.

The same pattern holds for seeds, pesticides, and farming equipment. Each input has its own geography of production, its own vulnerabilities to political disruption and natural disaster. A drought in one country, a factory fire in another, a trade dispute in a third—any of these can ripple through the system and ultimately affect what food is available and affordable on the other side of the planet.

Takeaway

Food production depends on a hidden web of industrial inputs, and the places that grow food are often different from the places that supply the ingredients to grow it.

Wheat grown in Ukraine travels through Black Sea ports, through the Bosphorus Strait, onto ships crossing the Mediterranean, eventually reaching bakeries in Egypt and Ethiopia. Every step of this journey represents a potential failure point. A blocked strait, a port closure, a shortage of shipping containers—any disruption ripples forward into empty shelves and rising prices.

The world's food trade concentrates through a few critical chokepoints. The Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, and the Turkish Straits handle enormous volumes of agricultural commodities. When the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal for six days in 2021, it delayed an estimated $9 billion worth of goods daily, including substantial food shipments.

Storage infrastructure matters too. Grain silos, refrigerated warehouses, and processing facilities must function continuously. Many food-importing nations lack adequate storage capacity, meaning they depend on just-in-time deliveries. When those deliveries falter, there's no buffer. The food system operates with remarkable efficiency in normal times, but efficiency often comes at the cost of resilience.

Takeaway

The global food system optimizes for efficiency over resilience, which works brilliantly until something breaks—and something always eventually breaks.

Food prices aren't just determined by harvests. They're shaped by currency fluctuations, commodity speculation, export bans, and financial instruments that most farmers never see. When the US dollar strengthens, food becomes more expensive for countries with weaker currencies—even if nothing changed about actual supply and demand.

Commodity markets allow investors to bet on future food prices, which can amplify price swings beyond what fundamentals would suggest. During the 2007-2008 food crisis, speculation in grain futures contributed to price spikes that pushed an estimated 100 million additional people into poverty. The food existed; it had simply become unaffordable.

Export restrictions compound these problems. When prices rise, food-exporting countries often ban exports to protect their own populations. This seems rational individually but proves devastating collectively. During the 2008 crisis, over 30 countries restricted food exports, removing supply from global markets precisely when it was needed most. Each country's self-protection deepened the crisis for everyone else.

Takeaway

Hunger is often less about how much food exists and more about who can afford it and whether markets allow it to reach them.

Food security is a systems problem, not a farming problem. The vulnerabilities run through fertilizer factories, shipping lanes, and trading floors as much as through fields and orchards. Understanding this doesn't make the challenge simpler, but it does make it clearer.

When the next food crisis arrives—and there will be another—look beyond the harvest reports. The real story will likely involve inputs that couldn't be sourced, shipments that couldn't move, or prices that couldn't be paid. That's where the leverage points are, and that's where solutions must eventually reach.