The symbolism of Ireland’s government telling its farmers to grow more crops because of wartime shortages should be lost on no one: it recalls Irish ministers in the 1940s ordering growers to plant more grain during the second world war. This time round the programme, designed to replace imports from Russia and Ukraine, relies on cash rather than coercion. The rush across the EU to get more crops in the ground goes against the decades-long direction of European agricultural policy and subsidies. Warnings of a global food crisis are not a drill.
It’s not Covid-related general interruptions to trade that are causing soaring food prices and shortages. There was a false alarm along those lines early in the pandemic, when governments worried about shortages and export restrictions similar to those on personal protective equipment. In fact, the supply chains held up quite well. The current episode looks more like the global food crisis in 2007 to 2008. Shocks didn’t emanate from the trading system but ended up there, with countries slamming on export controls to keep produce at home.
Food prices have been rising sharply since the middle of last year, chased higher by energy costs — not mainly the diversion of crops to biofuels but the fossil-fuel intensity of modern agriculture, including the use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. The Ukraine war has disrupted output and exports of grain and fertiliser from two of the world’s biggest producers. There’s a historical irony here: Stalin’s insistence that Ukraine keep exporting grain in the early 1930s to pay for imports of machinery to industrialise the Soviet Union worsened the Holodomor famine, in which more than 3mn Ukrainians starved to death.