Two Wars and a Weather Pattern Are Coming for Your Dinner

A Multidirectional Squeeze, Which Is Consultant for Everything Is Bad

The S&P Global Institute put out a report this week, covered by Axios, describing what it calls a "multidirectional squeeze on world agriculture." That is a very polite phrase for a very impolite situation. Two wars and extreme weather are colliding, and the target is the global food supply.

The report is notable for being unusually holistic, meaning it doesn't just stare at one problem and pretend the others aren't there. It looks at how these pressures stack on top of each other. Because that's how this works in real life. Nobody gets to deal with one crisis at a time. Farmers and grocery shoppers get all of them, simultaneously, whether they asked or not.

The Fertilizer Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About at Dinner

Here's the part that should get more attention. Fertilizer is not glamorous. Nobody puts it on a protest sign. But modern agriculture runs on it, and the report flags restricted supplies of key fertilizer ingredients as one of the central problems.

Growing food without fertilizer is like running a car without gas, except the car is roughly eight billion people's breakfast. When the supply of those ingredients tightens, yields can fall and prices climb. That's not ideology. That's chemistry meeting geopolitics, and chemistry doesn't negotiate.

The Iran war and the Ukraine-Russia conflict are both leaning on the inputs that farmers need. Two separate conflicts, two separate sets of disrupted trade, one shared dinner table.

Diesel Doesn't Grow Itself, and Neither Does Hope

Then there's fuel. The report points to higher fuel costs on the farm, which is another way of saying that every tractor, every harvester and every truck hauling grain to market just got more expensive to run.

Those costs don't vanish. They travel down the supply chain and land on a shelf price. A farmer in Iowa and a farmer in the Horn of Africa are both paying more to do the same work. The difference is that one of them has a cushion and the other is one bad season away from catastrophe.

Enter El Niño, Because Of Course

As if the wars weren't enough, the report explores how the El Niño phenomenon could compound all of this. El Niño is a climate pattern that can scramble weather across the globe, bringing drought to some regions and flooding to others. Extreme weather is already part of the mix the report describes.

So the setup is this. Supplies of key inputs are restricted. Fuel is pricier. And a weather pattern that can wreck harvests is potentially on the way. Stack those and you don't get a bump in the road. You get the conditions the report says could spiral into a crisis.

No single factor here is a surprise. The unnerving part is the overlap.

The Bill Lands on the Most Vulnerable Economies First

The report is explicit about who bears the brunt: vulnerable economies. That's the pattern with every food price shock. Wealthy countries grumble about the cost of eggs. Poorer countries face shortages, unrest and hunger.

Countries that import most of their food and have little room in their budgets can't just absorb a price spike. They can't outbid richer buyers when supplies tighten. When grain gets expensive, they don't pay more. They get less.

That is the core of why this matters. Food insecurity doesn't land evenly. It lands hardest on the people with the fewest options and the least say in how any of these wars started.