Conflict, Geopolitics and Food (In)security

With regional wars, tariff wars and latent conflicts intensifying, and drawing increasingly more states into the crossfire, we use the turbulence of global food systems following the war in Ukraine as an entry point to examine the links between conflict, geopolitics and food (in)security. We investigate the current weaponization of food, what it reveals about the vulnerabilities of our global food system and the possibilities for its transformation.

In a longue durée perspective, Russia’s weaponization of food is not new (Nelson 2022). In the Punic wars with Carthage, the Romans, after defeating Hannibal’s armies, ploughed farmland with salt, destroyed irrigation infrastructure and contaminated wells. In the 1930s, Stalin starved millions of peasants resisting Soviet collectivization. Cold War-era US attempted to impose a wheat boycott on the Soviet Union to destabilize it, which failed as other wheat-exporting countries refused to follow suit. The 1973 US soy export ban (aimed at curbing domestic inflation) caused the so-called ‘soy sauce shock’ in import-dependent Japan.

‘the increasing occurrence of climate change-induced failed harvests has stark ripple effects, with price shocks magnified globally by aggressive speculation’

The first two decades after the Soviet demise in 1991 constituted a relatively stable time when global food production increased and the West widely funded food aid and development cooperation. Geopolitics and the weaponization of food seemed something of the past. That optimistic outlook is quickly fading. The weaponization of food is not unique to Russia. Israel has been starving the Palestinians by blocking food aid deliveries to Gaza. While bombing grain elevators or starving citizens is of a different order than a food ban driving up prices abroad, they all reflect a suspension of ‘business as usual’ of the early post-Cold War era, rising geopolitics and weaponization of food (Sommerville 2024).

Furthermore, the current weaponization of food occurs in a more globalized, interdependent and unstable world, even compared with the Cold War. Next to the alarming climate change-induced food system volatility, the post-WWII globalization of trade and export of subsidized Western food production (especially US wheat) has been succeeded by several decades of deregulation of finance. The excessive hedging with food commodities this enabled means that the increasing occurrence of climate change-induced failed harvests has stark ripple effects, with price shocks magnified globally by aggressive speculation by food traders and investors.

Simultaneously, the post-WWII international institutions that stabilized the global order upon which the contemporary food system relies are weakening. Having supported the US hegemony, institutions such as the UN, IMF and WTO are now under threat from sanctions, tariff wars and financial cuts. For many commentators, the two Trump administrations are hitting the last nails in the coffin of the, previously US-led, ‘liberal international order’ (McCoy 2024), unleashing a multipolar world system characterized by polycrisis and rising authoritarianism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2024).

The international status of countries like China, India and Russia has changed. While the US remained the World Food Programme’s largest financial contributor till Trump-II, China has now also become one of its major donors. Russia has turned from a food aid recipient in the early 1990s into a food exporter and donor (Visser et al. 2017) and overtaken the US as largest wheat exporter. Food aid and exports are likely to increasingly become a tool in geopolitical struggles.

For example, Russia announced that it will prioritize food exports to ‘friendly countries’. And several EU countries are limiting development cooperation in low-income countries (OECD 2025), focusing instead on neighbouring regions in line with strategic interests – particularly to curb migration. The Netherlands, for instance, has reduced development cooperation in Southern Africa and refocused it on the Horn of Africa and MENA. Precise motivations, abilities and the directness of geopolitical self-interest in food imports and aid differ across global powers. Yet the worldwide tendency to see food trade increasingly in terms of security and geopolitics (again), rather than in terms of market and development, is notable.

While the international institutions that shoulder the post-WWII free market order, especially the WTO, IMF and World Bank, have repeatedly been criticized (Li 2007; Peet 2009), a world where they disappear (or become largely inconsequential) looks even less appealing, especially for smaller, poorer and food insecure countries. The war in Ukraine, and especially the short-lived UN Black Sea Grain Initiative, exposed the vulnerability of international institutions (with the FAO hampered by internal divisions along geopolitical lines), but also the difficulty of ensuring food security on a regional and global level in their absence. Is there a way to get out of this catch-22 situation?

EU efforts to ensure global food security amidst the Ukraine grain crisis are an example of how difficult it might be. The establishment of the ‘solidarity lanes’, allowing the circulation of Ukrainian grains through its bordering eastern member states, mainly Romania and Poland, created more problems than solutions, revealing the crumbling foundations of the corporate food regime.

With a Common Agricultural Policy favouring land concentration in capital-intensive farms and a neoliberal agenda over the past decades (van der Ploeg et al. 2015), the EU’s geopolitical ambitions were thwarted by indebted farmers caught wrong-footed by the influx of Ukrainian grains. The latter lowered farmgate prices in the EU. Demanding compensation and the suspension of the solidarity lanes, the farmers’ protests in the EU’s east fuelled dissatisfaction throughout Europe with the Union’s liberal economic policy and Green Deal environmental regulations, culminating in the EU-wide protests of late 2023, early 2024 (Finger et al. 2024). The discontent helped the agribusiness lobby to water down the Green Deal.

The intensifying vulnerabilities in the global food system give a new impetus to the long-standing debate about the need to rethink the global food system. Re-localization to become at least partly self-sufficient might be a more sustainable and dependency-reducing alternative. Following the disruption of global food supply chains due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Bank – for the first time, and somewhat halfheartedly – advises some low/middle income countries to strengthen local production systems and lessen import dependencies, in sharp contrast with its prioritization of export-led agriculture in the past few decades.

Bentley et al. (2022: 284) propose blending imported wheat with local, lower-cost cereals, and the substitution with drought-tolerant crops such as legumes, cassava and millet. This may offer countries a feasible strategy to curb dependence on imported staple crops. The role of the current crisis as a trigger of transition to sustainable agriculture might be more likely in the Global South than Global North. Many smallholders in the Global South, who are not integrated in export-oriented value chains, already work in a low-input, sustainable way. Further, low-income countries are most affected when global wheat shortages arise and prices increase.

‘vulnerabilities in the global food system give a new impetus to the debate about … rethink[ing] the global food system’

Consequently, they have an incentive to stimulate the production of local alternatives and start blending wheat-based flour with other (locally suitable) grains, as already practiced in Benin. Yet the pressure by the World Bank and IFC on low-income countries dependent on their loans not to subsidize food consumption or fertilizer has constrained governments in stimulating local, sustainable production.

The neoliberal World Bank recipe of export-oriented commercial farming rather than domestic production for food self-sufficiency, while encountering less enthusiasm amongst policy makers than before, remains prevalent. The war in Ukraine shows how this recipe only weakens low-income countries’ capacity to face disruptions caused by the weaponization of food, while favouring a handful of multinational food corporations. However, numerous smallholders in Ukraine and Romania remain resilient, despite the neoliberal policies of the international institutions these countries implement (Varga 2023). Many smallholders in the ‘Global East’, like those in the South, practice a ‘quiet’ form of food sovereignty (Siebert 2020; Visser et al 2015). But basing food security on this local, sustainable mode of food production would require fundamental change. Change that would halt food system corporatization and incentivize both smallholders and new de-globalized dietary cultures. To date, however, the dominant neo-liberal, export-led food paradigm has been replaced by an incoherent mix of new security thinking, isolated localization attempts and ongoing market-led, export-oriented trends, within increasingly unstable international governance structures. Yet the current food system turbulence and cracks in international institutions might also open possibilities to reconsider old dogma’s and come up with better interventions and global governance structures