From COVID-19 to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine to climate change, it seems all the calamities afflicting the world are converging to make hunger worse. The latest United Nations report on hunger finds the increase in the number of undernourished people globally this year has eliminated any progress over the past decade.Yet while the world has not seen hunger at these levels for years, scholars have long warned that a catastrophe was looming. The world’s food system is more interconnected and complex than ever, built upon layers of transnational dependencies. It is why a war in Europe can exacerbate a famine in Somalia — a country which imports most of its wheat and saw its supply of bread all but collapse overnight when exports of Ukrainian wheat ceased.But instead of reducing the fragility of the food system, the latest international efforts led by the United States to end hunger are only exacerbating it — especially for Africa — by globalising the system further. Just this week, US President Joe Biden has promised African leaders gathered in Washington that the United States is “all in” on Africa. But the US needs to make sure that it is “all in” the right way, particularly when it comes to food.
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