“Bad harvests and attacks on trade passages threaten to
drive food prices higher.
Instant noodles. Hot chapatis. Sliced bread.
Wheat is at the heart of the modern diet, and this year, it
is facing an accumulation of modern dangers. The breadbaskets of the world are
getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher
amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.
Heat and drought have diminished harvests in some of the
biggest wheat-producing countries, including the United States, which is
expected to have its worst wheat harvest in a half-century, spiking prices.
Poor countries that agreed to buy American wheat under the threat of Trump
tariffs could be stuck paying abnormally high prices.
The Black Sea, a crucial passage for the global wheat trade,
is an active theater of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while the Houthi militia’s
attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have already forced grain shipments to take
a longer, more expensive route around South Africa.
Beyond that, a supercharged El Niño further threatens water
levels in the Panama Canal, while drought has reduced water levels to
perilously low levels in transit routes like the Rhine and Danube rivers in
Europe, raising transportation costs.
All this at
a time when the global atmosphere is hotter than normal because of a century of
fossil fuel burning, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers in poor
countries.
The
simultaneous troubles reveal the risks inherent in the global food system
today. Only a few crops, like wheat, provide most of the world’s calories.
Relatively few governments dominate the export of wheat, including Russia,
Canada, the United States, Ukraine, and the European Union. Their customers are
mainly low-income countries that no longer grow much of the food their people
eat.
“The system
we currently have in place depends on three things: seamless trade, cheap
energy, stable climate,” said Evan Fraser, a professor who studies the global
food system at the University of Guelph, in Ontario. “Today, it seems none of
these assumptions are met.”
Few things are as politically potent as the price of bread,
and wheat prices were already at a three-year high in July, according to the
Food and Agriculture Organization. The U.N. agency has warned of higher prices
later this year.
The saving grace is that the world had a bumper crop of
wheat last year, and global stocks remain strong. The risk, said Monika
Tothova, an economist who specializes in commodities at the Food and
Agriculture Organization, is that “several sources of uncertainty begin to
reinforce one another.”
“A combination of El Niño-related weather impacts across
major exporters, renewed constraints on Black Sea exports and further
disruptions to key shipping routes would have implications far beyond wheat
production itself,” she said.
Conflict
Hits the Black Sea, a Grain Choke Point
Russia and
Ukraine together account for nearly a third of the wheat that the world buys.
This year, just as harvests began, their grain shipments have nearly ground to
a halt.
In recent
weeks, both Russia and Ukraine have stepped up their attacks on each other’s
grain export terminals and ships in the Black Sea, a waterway they share to get
their goods out to the world.
In the
critical Russian Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk, grain terminals suspended
operations after a drone attack in early August.
There was also a Russian bombing campaign against the
Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which Ukraine relies on to get its grain out. A
potential alternative, the Danube River, is far more difficult to begin with —
and this year, the Danube’s water levels have plummeted because of drought.
When events started in Ukraine and blocked its Black Sea grain trade in 2022,
the sharp increase in global food prices put tens of millions of people at
increased risk of acute food insecurity.
This time,
the Ukrainian Agri Council, a trade group, has warned of a potential wave of
bankruptcies amid the blockade, saying that “the challenges currently facing
the agricultural sector are significantly more dangerous and severe in their
consequences than even those of 2022.”
Weather Is Scrambling Harvests
Wildfires this summer spared the wheat belt of France, the
European Union’s largest wheat producer. But the heat has not.
France expects lower yields because of record heat this
summer, according to government projections. Germany’s main farmers group said
on Tuesday that yields were down for several crops, including wheat, because of
drought and heat. In July, the European trade group for agricultural
commodities, Coceral, issued a special bulletin, estimating lower grain yields
of 286.6 million metric tons this year, compared with 310 million metric tons
in 2025, for the continent and for Britain.
Australia,
also a major wheat exporter, planted fewer acres of wheat because of high
fertilizer costs, stemming from the Strait of Hormuz closure.
The United
States is about to have its worst wheat harvest since 1970, largely because of
a terrible drought in the Great Plains, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
estimated in its latest report this month. American farmers had devoted fewer
acres to wheat, and yields per acre were also down.
Currently, there is enough grain stored in the silos of
farmers, traders and government reserves globally.
But the smaller harvests are raising prices on the world
market. Prices of U.S. soft red wheat have jumped by nearly 25 percent in the
first seven months of the year, according to an analysis by Joseph Glauber, an
economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute. Prices of hard
red wheat have soared even more sharply. U.S. wheat stocks are down too.
“It’s not a question of availability. It’s a question of
affordability,” Mr. Glauber said. “Anybody who is selling wheat will profit
from the higher price.”
Importing Countries Feel the Pinch
Rising prices of imported wheat puts enormous pressure on
governments that are forced to buy high and then help subsidize the costs to
keep bread prices within the reach of its people.
Egypt, which buys most of its wheat from abroad, including
from Russia and Ukraine, has tried to bolster wheat production at home, with
the government offering higher prices to farmers. Still, Egypt remains far from
reaching anything close to self-sufficiency. There is simply not enough water
to produce what the country needs.
Then there are President Trump’s tariffs. To try to avoid
additional higher rates, some wheat-importing emerging economies, such as
Bangladesh, agreed to buy substantial amounts of U.S. wheat.
That means they are obliged to pay whatever price U.S. wheat
goes for this year, even it is substantially higher than what other countries
are offering.
Analysts in Bangladesh have denounced the deal as unfair.
History’s Grim Lessons
The perils facing the world’s breadbaskets come at a time
when an El Niño, a naturally recurring weather pattern, is raising the risks of
extreme weather for farmers in many parts of the world, including in countries
like Ethiopia and Guatemala, where millions of small farmers subsist on what
they grow on their own land.
The last major El Niño event, in 2015 and 2016, worsened
food insecurity for an estimated 60 million to 100 million people, the World
Food Program estimated.
This time, the W.F.P. says, it could expand the ranks of
those who are unable to meet their daily food needs to 274 million, up from 225
million today. The biggest effects are expected in Central America and southern
Africa.
“It is naïve to think we can rely on a food system built for
a different era,” Mr. Fraser said. “And so we need to reimagine how to feed
ourselves.”” [1]
1. The World’s Breadbaskets Are Getting Pounded by War,
Weather and Trade Spats. Sengupta, Somini. New York Times (Online) New York
Times Company. Aug 23, 2026.
