Trump's war on the global food supply

Just the latest moral and logistical atrocity.

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

Over a month in and we’re still discovering fresh new consequences to Donald Trump’s insane war.

It is as if a grenade was thrown into the heart of the world network and each day we uncover something new, some terrible item of damage that we had not previously anticipated. Even now, as peace talks take place, we are facing a cascading series of second-order effects, terrible global dominoes falling across trading ecosystems and supply chains, hammering rich and poor alike.

Trump did not foresee them or simply did not care about them. His administration is composed of extremely limited men whose minds are too narrowly defined to understand the complexity of how the world works. That is not the case for the rest of us. We have the ability to understand and the duty to care. Yet we rarely do either.

You can tell a lot about a society by its order of priorities. In the West, they are as follows: First and most importantly we care about the price of oil. Then, below that, the price of gas. Then, in a distant third, Iranian lives. Then perhaps Lebanese lives, followed by other commodities like fertiliser, helium and aluminium. And then, right at the bottom of the list, so distant it can barely be seen with the naked eye, lies the impact on food security and the potential for starvation. No-one gives a damn about this, not really. They don’t give a shit. But it is real. And the blame for it can be laid directly with the Trump administration.

The UN Global Report on Food Crises, published this morning, paints a bleak picture. A sharp escalation in the most extreme forms of hunger and malnutrition. Acute food insecurity in places like Afghanistan and Yemen. Outright famine in the Gaza Strip.

The worst conditions are probably in Sudan, due to the ongoing armed conflict. No-one gives a damn about this either. It doesn’t fit neatly into any of the West’s culture war crevices, so there is little moral indignation from left or right. Hardly anyone even seems aware of it happening.

Nearly 25 million people - over half the population - are in Phase Three food insecurity or worse. Phase Three is a crisis state just before a formal emergency, featuring food consumption gaps leading to malnutrition, the deployment of crisis-coping strategies and the need for urgent humanitarian action. Two besieged towns - El Fasher and Kadugli - are in full-blown famine. Twenty areas across Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan are at risk of following them into it.

The Iran war has worsened this situation in two ways. First, by blocking the route by which humanitarian aid reaches target countries. And second by raising the price of fuel, which then raises the price of food.

Before February 28th, humanitarian aid had a direct route from producer to consumer. The UN’s World Food Programme would purchase food on the West Coast of India, near Mumbai. It would then be exported across the Arabian Sea to the Port of Salalah in Oman, a regional hub, before travelling through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This is the chokepoint between Djibouti and Yemen, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz. The shipment then unloaded in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, changed vessels, and set sail for the Port of Sudan. Containers were put on trucks and sent to emergency programmes across the country.

Excuse my childlike MS-Paint style doodles, but the route looks roughly like this. It is fairly direct.

Once the war began, that route became impossible. Technically there shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, it did not actually use the Strait of Hormuz. But shipping lines became very cautious. They were concerned about possible attacks by Houthis in the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This then resulted in closure and the cancellation of the route.

In response, humanitarian food shipments must now sail around the entirety of Africa and into the Mediterranean - a detour the size of a continent. The new itinerary goes from the west coast of India to Port of Salalah, then all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, up to Tangiers in Morocco, then Port Said in Egypt and through the northern entrance of the Suez canal to Jeddah and Port Sudan. This route is 6,000 miles and around four weeks longer.

Similar effects can be found in other crisis zones. Getting food to Afghanistan, for instance, is becoming extremely difficult. One option would be to send it through Karachi. This is now impossible due to hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Another option would be to send it through Iran. That is now impossible because of the war. A third option would be to sail it from a supply hub in Dubai through the Gulf. That is no longer possible because of Iranian retaliation. So instead it must be driven from Dubai into Saudi Arabia and then into central Asia. Officials at the World Food Programme call this the Lapis Lazuli route - following the pathway of the beautiful blue semi-precious stone used in jewelry.

The second impact of the war is through basic price rises - the same dynamic which is hurting everyone else. The difference is that what hurts everyday consumers can devastate those in more precarious circumstances. If the price of oil stays above $100 a barrel through the end of June, it will put around 45 million more people into a state of food insecurity.

This would constitute the third major supply chain crisis in six years, starting in 2020 with covid and then 2022 with the war in Ukraine.

The impact on political stability is likely to be severe. Earlier this week there were massive protests in Kenya around the cost of fuel. Last week there were big protests in Haiti. This is just the beginning.

These events matter on their own terms but they will also have knock-on effects in the West, no matter how firmly we try to close our ears to them.

The primary manner in which this will take place is through immigration waves. Breakdowns in food security lead to the movement of people.

Usually this involves internal displacement, with people moving around within their country, but it also turns 62.6 million people into refugees or asylum seekers, moving from their country to another. For all the nonsense talk from Shabana Mahmood about creating a ‘pull factor’ through Uber trips and GP visits, push factors are far more important. And hunger is one of the greatest push factors around. “Globally,” the Global Report says, “the majority of forcibly displaced people are in food-crisis contexts.”

Not so long ago, we gave a shit about things like this. Back in the noughties, in political circumstances that seem almost utopian now, debt forgiveness campaigns were front page news. Now the rich world has turned its back.

It has done so comprehensively and universally. Every single major donor cut assistance last year. Every single one. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last week showed rich countries cut aid spending by almost 25%, wiping out £129bn in humanitarian funds.

In the US, secretary of state Marco Rubio announced plans to end 82% of all USAID programmes. The UK is behaving with less theatrical malevolence, but the basic policy programme is very similar. In February last year, the UK government announced a reduction of aid spending from 0.5% of gross national income in 2025 to 0.3% in 2027.

This money is being rerouted to defence. That trend is being replicated around the world. We are in an era of guns, not butter. And the first budget governments raid is the one which helps people in other countries.

This is a false economy. Reduced humanitarian spending means programmes are now smaller than they were before, with less capacity and less coverage on the ground. There simply isn’t the infrastructure to scale up in order to provide support. This means food scarcity becomes more severe, which triggers a greater movement of people. Once refugees arrive on our shore, the cost rises starkly. An in-country refugee in the UK costs 74 times more to support than if we took care of them in their country of origin.

These kinds of rational arguments, rooted in enlightened self-interest, no longer have any traction. Modern governments, no matter the colour of their rosette, try to push problems away rather than adopt long-term strategies. It costs them more in the end, but they gamble on it being someone else paying.

These are the natural consequences of US policy. It wants to carve the world into gangster domains, split evenly between Russia, China and itself. The populist demagogues it celebrates - Putin in Moscow, Netenyahu in Jerusalem, Trump in Washington - start conflicts without thinking through their consequences. The conflicts increase hunger and divert spending away from the programmes which would alleviate it. The conditions get worse, leading to refugee waves which are then used as an excuse to elect more populist demagogues. It is a cycle of despair.

These are the results you get from an administration with no interest in fixing things and no mental capacity to fix things even if they had it. They insist the world is simple because they cannot grasp its complexity. Then they interpret the after-effects of their actions as a conspiracy against them. Everything spirals towards chaos and pain because those in a position of authority are unwilling to approach problems with any degree of moral or intellectual seriousness.

The full scale of the Iran disaster is only now becoming clear. Even if it is solved today, it will be months until the pain stops and years before it is fully resolved. As always, the poorest will suffer most of all. If the world made a blind bit of sense, the people responsible would be on trial.

Odds and sods

This week’s newsletter is available as what I laughingly call a podcast up the top of the page, or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week, both on the Starmer-Mandelson scandal. The first was on the Olly Robbins testimony and the second was on the prime minister’s crumbling Cabinet support. If you use either of those links you get three months premium subscription for a single British quid, which really is quite the deal.

A recording of Origin Story Live went out this week, featuring a comprehensive demolition job on Matthew Goodwin and the creation of Origin Story film club, where we highlight the values of the podcast through our favourite movies. Mine was Empire Strikes Back, obviously. Patrons get the full Q&A at the end - which, incidentally, was a delight.

Incredibly, I watched Master and Commander for the first time this week. I remember thinking when it came out: I wouldn’t mind watching that. Then it got filed away in that part of your brain that’s vaguely keeping a list of the movies you plan to watch. I realised recently that I had been doing this with this particular film for nearly a quarter of a century. Incredible stuff.

You probably don’t need telling, but it is very, very good. It’s jingoistic bullshit of course, without the slightest cynicism about its king-and-country attitude, but I have considerably more tolerance for that type of thing than many people I know. And for all its tub-thumping, it doesn’t look away from the reality of those boats - in particular the treatment of men who don’t fit in and the use of children in war.

Honestly the thing that really struck me was just how good an actor Russel Crowe is. I always had a bit of a prejudice against him because of that interview where he loses his tits over how piss-poor his accent is in Robin Hood. But there is much more depth in that performance than you would expect. The gap between the cold hearted film this could have been and the warm hearted film which it in fact is was bridged exclusively by the micro-expressions he makes throughout and the deep internal life they betray.

Right, that’s me for the week. See you next Friday. Fuck off etc etc.