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Graphic Truth: Food insecurity spikes
Hunger and poverty are on the rise in both the United States and Canada, with food insecurity levels spiking dramatically in 2023 as COVID-19 assistance programs expired. That’s been compounded by rising food costs that have left millions struggling to put food on the table.
Canada witnessed a surge in food insecurity, jumping nearly 5 percentage points to 22.9% of the population living in food-insecure households between 2022 and 2023, according to the University of Toronto. According to the 2023 Hunger Count by Food Banks Canada, food banks recorded a record 1.9 million visits, representing a 32% increase compared to the previous year. Parents constituted the largest segment of food bank users, highlighting the acute challenges faced by families. Provincially, Newfoundland and Labrador experienced the highest rate of food insecurity, with 23% of households affected in 2022, followed closely by New Brunswick and Alberta both at 22%.
In the United States, 13.5% of households — approximately 18 million — faced food insecurity at some point during the year, marking a slight rise from 12.8% in 2022, according to a report by USDA. Among the states, Arkansas reported the highest prevalence of food insecurity, with 18.9% of households affected between 2021 and 2023.
The Real Campaign Hunger Games
In the madness that is the US presidential race, there’s been a lot of rancid talk about immigrants and food. The relentless Trump-Vance disinformation about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, which I wrote about last week, has now led to bomb threats, online hatred, and more negative attention than finding a finger in a box of french fries.
But something is missing. No one is talking about the obvious underlying issue here: hunger.
The thought occurred to me this week when I met chef Greg Silverman, CEO and executive director of New York based nonprofit West Side Campaign Against Hunger, or WSCAH, which has been giving out high-quality meals to low-income New Yorkers for more than 40 years.
Tall, bearded, and enveloped en papillote-style in a loosely tailored suit, Chef Greg has the natural charisma of a great restaurateur, but also the happily harried air of a dad raising two young kids while working his ass off on a passion project. He is both.
He is also something of an oddity in the world of chefs. Silverman studied politics and anthropology at Ithaca College in western New York, and did a stint in the Peace Corps after that. Drawn to the food scene, he opened three successful restaurants in Ithaca. But he soon realized that the people who really needed good meals were not the ones who could afford to come to a restaurant. That’s when he found his mission: get good food to people who need it most.
He got a Master’s degree in food policy in London, returned to the US as an activist working to end child hunger, and after a stint running Michelle Obama’s Chefs Move to Schools initiative, Silverman was tapped to lead WSCAH.
Founded in the basement of a church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1979, WSCAH’s mission is to provide New Yorkers of all income levels with high-quality fresh food. When the organization first started it served about 900 people. Today it gives out some 5 million pounds of food annually to more than 25,000 families. And 50% of it is fresh, not canned!
I met Greg this week at a small gathering in New York where he was talking about WSCAH’s work. Having only moved here within the last few years, I had a general sense that food insecurity plagues America’s largest city, as it does my native stomping grounds of Ottawa and Toronto. But I didn’t realize just how severe the crisis was right now.
“The situation in NYC continues to get worse and worse,” Greg told me. “The pandemic was our greatest number of customers ever but the post pandemic has blown that away. With stagnating city and state dollars, ending of pandemic era supports like child tax credits and reduction of the SNAP allotments for seniors, it’s a horrifically perfect storm.” SNAP stands for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what many used to call “food stamps.”
Silverman told me that rising food prices generally have forced WSCAH to spend a million more dollars on food this year, while the growing migrant crisis in New York – in which more than 150,000 people have arrived without access to long-term housing, work, or benefits like SNAP – has exacerbated the city’s food insecurity situation. More than 1 in 7 NYC residents are now food insecure, he said, a significant increase from previous years.
And it is not just the Big Apple. According to theUSDA, 13.5% of all US households, or about 18 million people, were “food insecure at some time during 2023.” That’s a million more than the year before. And of that group, nearly 7 million people suffer “very low food security,” meaning they actually go hungry at times. These are households where someone’s mom, dad, brother, or sister is not eating in order for another member of the household to get enough food.
Hunger, of course, is a cascading problem, particularly for kids. It is hard to focus on class if you’re hungry, and that can start a bad cycle of stunted learning, school dropouts, and derailed lives. If you think the cost of eating is high, try the costs of not eating.
But what can we do about it?
This is campaign season, which is the time when political leaders serve up all kinds of promises to fix stuff. But so far food insecurity has drawn as much political interest as a slab of tofu at a steakhouse. Greg wants to change that.
It turns out there are some basic policy solutions that could make a big difference to millions of hungry Americans, at substantially lower cost than, say, building a border wall or trying to federally manage grocery prices. And it can happen in a SNAP, literally.
Greg says there are two bills in Congress that would strengthen SNAP. The Closing the Meal Gap Act, which would boost benefits for all participants, and the Hot Foods Act of 2023, which would enable beneficiaries to purchase hot prepared foods from food retailers.
At the state level, Greg argues there is even more to do. “States could create a program that would fund food benefits for people currently ineligible for the federal SNAP program due to their citizenship status,” he says.
That would help to end surreal situations like the one where a migrant woman came to WSCAH, ineligible for SNAP support because she didn’t have a Social Security number. When she mentioned she was pregnant, WSCAH pointed out to her that when a child is born in the US, he or she automatically becomes eligible for SNAP, along with the mother.
In other words, in the United States in 2024, a pregnant migrant woman can’t get support to eat until her child is born. It makes no sense.
“By removing immigrant exclusions, we can ensure that every New Yorker has the food they urgently need,” Greg says. You wish a politician would talk so clearly.
Maybe making America great – in whatever way we imagine that – isn’t about riling people up or demonizing hungry, vulnerable people like the folks in Springfield.
Maybe it’s about restoring dignity to people who long ago were pushed to the floor, left to crawl around for political crumbs. After all, “dignity” is part of the core mandate of WSCAH, and it matters.
“Folks need to bring this back to communities and people,” Greg says. “It’s hard to hate people as individuals once we meet each other, when we break bread, when we help each other. We don't ask about politics, income, we just help each other and as the Ohio controversy shows, we forget the biggest thing: that hunger may be driving people to desperate ends.”
World Bank economist: The poorest are getting poorer globally
It’s a staggering statistic and a marked setback from the years before the COVID-19 pandemic—the world’s poorest countries are falling further behind, and the wealth gap between the least and most developed nations is growing. One in three of these countries is poorer today than in 2019.
Ayhan Kose, World Bank Group’s Deputy Chief Economist, said that the combined shocks of multiple crises, including the pandemic, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, food insecurity, and inflation, have taken a massive toll on the 75 least developed economies.
Kose spoke to GZERO’s Tony Maciulis as the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were underway this week in Washington, DC.
“When the food price goes up, the price of oil goes up. That has significant implications for these economies,” he told GZERO. “Where we are now, when you look at 2020-24, they registered the weakest growth rate on average since the 1990s.”
In many ways, the global economic outlook presented this week tells a tale of two post-pandemic realities. Kose explained that the most developed nations, particularly the US, showed greater resilience than expected early in 2023, and the threat of recession has been kept at bay. However, the negative impacts on poor countries, many of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa, cannot be ignored and could lead to greater geopolitical risk and humanitarian emergencies.
This week, World Bank leaders are calling for a renewed commitment to the International Development Association (IDA), which provides zero-interest loans and grants to nations most in need. Kose said the risk associated with crippling sovereign debt has caused some private sector funding to dry up and that politics and protectionism are impacting how wealthier nations approach funding.
But he also pointed to enormous opportunity in nations that are IDA-funded, including a younger population that could serve as a future global workforce and rich natural resources.
With proper investment and funding, he explained, other developing countries have been lifted to find sustained growth.
“At the end of the day history is full of examples. China, India, Indonesia, Chile, (South) Korea. They all used to be IDA borrowers. They were poorer countries. They became much richer.”
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Glogal Stage.
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Ukraine grain farm
This year, the world held the line against hunger. Next year looks harder.
The worst fears of a global food crisis in 2023 did not come to pass, but the outlook for 2024 is grainy at best.
First, the good news. Although more than a quarter billion people in 53 countries faced acute food insecurity in 2023, that number held steady since 2022. Even the collapse of the Black Sea grain export deal – which enabled Ukrainian grain exports to get through a Russian naval blockade – didn’t cause prices to soar. In fact, the International Grain Council’s benchmark grains and oilseeds price index is down nearly 9% since the deal collapsed on July 23.
That’s partly because higher prices at the beginning of 2023 incentivized farmers all over the world to do what they do best and grow more food. With prices for fertilizer and shipping coming down from post-pandemic highs, and some cooperative weather in South America, the world saw bumper harvests that helped rebalance the market.
But 2024 could be different. The fall and winter have been unseasonably dry in Asia thanks to the El Niño weather pattern, which is expected to continue depressing rainfall for several months. That will crimp production of rice, which nearly half the world depends on. India, which normally accounts for around 40% of global rice exports, has already imposed export restrictions in order to keep prices lower at home.
At the same time, a sluggish global economic picture is eating aid budgets worldwide, with the Food and Agriculture Organization requesting $1.8 billion in donations to finance its efforts to support 43 million subsistence farmers around the world.
And supply of food is only one part of the picture when it comes to hunger crises. The UN identified violence and conflict as a key driver of hunger in 12 countries and territories home to over 430 million people, including Gaza, Sudan and Mali.Graphic Truth: Food insecurity and poverty in the US & Canada
Poverty and food insecurity, exacerbated by COVID and the soaring cost of living, plague both the US and Canada. At the height of the pandemic, school closures in the US deprived many children of their vital food source: free school lunches. This, coupled with job losses and inflation, plunged many into food insecurity. The economic outlook has still not improved for these families, thanks to the high rate of inflation, which is keeping grocery and gas prices elevated.
In Canada, a cost-of-living crisis has seen demand for food banks surge, with the 2023 Hunger Count by Food Banks Canada revealing a 32% rise in year-on-year visits in 2022. Parents made up the largest share of food bank users. Like in the US, they are grappling with exorbitant housing, food, and fuel costs, compounded by childcare expenses. A record 1.9 million Canadians sought assistance from food banks in just March 2023 alone.
How has US food insecurity increased, but not poverty? The poverty line, defined by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963, hasn't been reassessed since. Back then, poverty was defined as anyone spending a third of their income on a “bare essentials diet.” But thanks to globalization and agricultural advances, an average American now spends only one-eighth of their income on food.
Instead, housing and childcare are the biggest budget busters. An American renter making $30,000 likely allocates over half their income to housing and may struggle with food insecurity. But, given the 1960s “poverty” guidelines, they need to earn nearly three times less, or $12,880, to be considered poor.
Ian Explains: Why is Russia trying to starve the world?
Why is Russia trying to starve the world?
Nearly a year-and-a-half into its invasion of Ukraine—after the massacre of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, after the indiscriminate shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia, and after the torture of countless Ukrainian POWs—Moscow’s latest move may be its cruelest so far.
In July, Russia pulled out of a landmark wartime deal, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations, that had allowed for 33 million tons of food to flow from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. And soon after announcing their withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Russian forces engaged in strikes against the port of Odessa, destroying substantial grain stocks while also inadvertently damaging the Chinese consulate there (oops).
So why is it in Moscow’s interest to spike global food prices? What does it have to gain from exacerbating hunger in the Global South? Many of the African nations likely to be hardest hit, like Ethiopia, have taken pains to remain neutral in the Ukraine war.
Maybe Putin is losing patience.
For more on the Russia Ukraine war, watch the upcoming episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on US public television and at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld.
A collage depicting food price increases.
Are high food prices here to stay?
A perfect storm of pandemic shortages, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and extreme weather events have driven up food prices and threatened food security globally. Now, a strong El Niño event stretching into 2024 could exacerbate this food crisis, but not for everyone.
A 2023 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that as many as 783 million people worldwide faced food insecurity in 2022 – 122 million more than in 2019. The pandemic brought supply chain challenges that have been slow to abate. Extreme weather and global conflict further drove up hunger by limiting access to food. The problem is acute in the developing world, but it’s hitting people hard in North America, too.
Faint hope but gathering despair
Recent weeks have brought better news about food inflation in the US and Canada, with signs that it’s beginning to cool. In June, the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers pointed out that it was slowing after a long period of elevated growth, driven largely by declining egg and fruit prices. They cautioned, however, that prices would remain above pre-pandemic levels throughout 2023.
North of the border, the Royal Bank of Canada found the same: Prices rose 18% in two years, and the rate of growth is slowing though prices are unlikely to come down. A fifth of Canadians, nearly 7 million people, lived in a food-insecure household in 2022. In the US, a study by the Urban Institute found that in 2022, a quarter of Americans reported being food insecure – a whopping 83 million people.
Peter Ceretti, director of Global Macro Geo Strategy at Eurasia Group, echoes the numbers from the Biden administration and RBC. “Consumers are seeing food price inflation begin to cool in the US and Canada, which is a good thing, but I don’t think that food price levels are likely to fall economy-wide in the near future,” he says.
Experts in the United States and Canada are already warning that changing weather will continue to drive up food prices as it delays or kills crops. And that’s not all. “In addition to putting upward pressure on prices,” Ceretti notes, “climate change introduces more uncertainty into weather patterns and growing conditions, which can increase volatility in food costs, too.”
The El Niño factor
What exactly do climate change and El Niño, the warming in the Pacific that impacts weather worldwide, bring to the table? Writing in The Conversation, David Ubilava, associate professor of economics at the University of Sydney, argues that El Niño will not have a significant aggregate effect on food prices at the global level. Instead, while the aberrant weather induces some crop failures (palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia), it could lead to better harvests for others (in the Horn of Africa). The effects, however, will not be borne equally and could produce famine and conflict.
US Special Envoy for Global Food Security Cary Fowler has highlighted Southeast Asia, Central America, and southern Africa as particularly at-risk areas from El Niño. Meanwhile, Peru’s higher-than-normal water temperatures threaten its fishing industry.
With El Niño arriving and climate change threatening food security, the US and Canada are being asked to do more to support food aid. The Biden administration has launched the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils. With an initial pledge of $100 million, the program is currently focused on Africa and developing resilient crops in the face of climate change. Last year, Canada announced CA$250 million in food aid, blaming Russia for soaring prices, but cut foreign aid by 15% – a projected CA$1.3 billion – in its 2023 budget.
Climate change is the game changer – and it comes with conflict
Even if El Niño spares some, climate change combined with its attendant crises, such as geopolitical instability and conflict, threatens us all. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s breadbasket, has shown what can happen when conflict converges with extreme weather events.
Long term, the effect won’t be pretty. “Global food demand will increase by more than 50% in 2050, but due to climate change, agriculture yields of major crops could decrease over that same period,” according to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
Global food producers are already producing relatively smaller yields than in recent decades, says Canada’s largest farmland owner Robert Andjelic. This won’t be helped by the weather this summer, with the hottest month in recorded history – July – and wildfires that ravaged Canada and the US. In recent days, sea temperatures in Florida broke records – hitting 101 degrees Fahrenheit. El Niño or no El Niño, extreme temperatures, and weather events are going to hurt crops and affect food prices and security.
Andjelic issued a stark warning that he expects high food prices to become the new normal when he spoke recently with The Toronto Star. “What I’m going to say is not going to be very well received by the consumer, because I see prices going much higher. This is not just in Canada. It is a worldwide supply and demand issue.”
Trade under pressure
Crop failures could also shape trade and international relations. Canada, for instance, relies on the US and Mexico for much of its produce imports. Last year, the USDA said the US was on track to become a net food importer. Canada became a net exporter in 2019 – but remains a top importer of US agricultural exports, while the US scoops up nearly 60% of Canadian agricultural exports.
Both countries, however, can feed themselves and have plenty of arable land to do so. Ceretti says deep integration and interdependence and (mostly) tariff-free exchange between the US and Canada means that while “there may be disruptions or trade imbalances that emerge in certain food products, generally, I think that trade relations will remain strong.”
But both Canada and the US rely on Caribbean, Central American, and South American states for certain commodities. Consumers may soon face higher prices for coffee and chocolate as futures in sugar, cocoa, and robusta coffee are through the roof, with the latter hitting an all-time high.
Ceretti warns that food security concerns can lead to potential export restrictions, “which can shock global food prices and make it difficult for net food importing countries to buy sufficient supplies at prices they can afford.”
Political risks abound, too
High food prices and insecurity also pose a political risk to incumbents. The 2024 US presidential race is taking shape, and in Canada, PM Justin Trudeau is due to face the electorate by October 2025.
The cost of food and other goods will factor into the US and Canadian elections, putting pressure on Biden and Trudeau to act. But with climate change running unchecked, persistent global geopolitical instability, and potentially greater and more unpredictable El Niño and other weather events in the future, just about every politician is going to face these pressures for the foreseeable future.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Russia, Sudan & the power of diplomacy
Can diplomacy solve the world’s most urgent crises?
GZERO World travels to UN headquarters in New York for a special conversation with US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield ahead of the United States taking over the presidency of the Security Council for the month of August.
The United States has a lot of priorities for the session, including food security, human rights, and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But with Russia a permanent, veto-wielding member of one of the world’s most powerful diplomatic bodies, how much can really get done?
“What Russia is doing undermines everything that the UN stands for,” Thomas-Greenfield told Bremmer in an interview with Ian Bremmer from the floor of the Security Council chamber. “They are undermining the work of this council by carrying out this unprovoked war on Ukraine.”
Thomas-Greenfield spoke with Bremmer about the contentious relationship with Russia, worries about the world’s food supply after the collapse of the Black Sea grain deal, and the urgency of addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sudan.
Can the countries of the world put aside their differences and competing interests to effectively deal with the most pressing international security challenges? And what else does the US hope to accomplish during its Council presidency in August?
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
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