For farmers such as North Wales-based George Tomlinson, the declaration of drought conditions last week was a confirmation of hard times.
It is not just the increasingly hard ground and dusty dry patches across every field. It is the empty storage barns as crops come in shorter and are cut earlier. Mr Tomlinson has described how devastating the lack of rain has been for his farm.
The straw crop he relies on to get through the winter is down 60 per cent, which means selling the livestock that makes the farm money.
It is a tale told around the country. Gavin Lane, president of the Country Land and Business Association, told Monday’s Guardian that the country was suffering its worst harvest in years. “This is the third drought in five years,” he said. “What was once extraordinary has become part of farming in Britain.”
The UK supply crunch is in step with pressures elsewhere, with a squeeze coming that is set to hit all countries no matter how efficient their food systems are.
What is clear is that the world is relying on farming to defy the gravity of both climate and conflict. How long it can keep pulling off that trick is now the open question.
Tipping points have accumulated so rapidly that the international food system’s resilience is rightly under fierce scrutiny.
A prime risk is the current El Niño. On Friday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that the strengthening system was “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”. “El Niño does not bring heat alone – it profoundly affects the world’s rainfall,” he said.
“India’s monsoon is already running well below average. Forecasts point to worse ahead for a subcontinent where more than a billion people depend on the monsoon.
“Hotter and drier conditions are forecast from Central America and the Caribbean to parts of South America, South Asia, the Southwest Pacific, Europe and Africa.”
There is already evidence from Australia that wheat planting is down with the onset of low rainfall conditions. The constraints on fertiliser under the shadow of the US-Iran war pose dangers of its own.
One of the features of the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is how the fertiliser producers of the Arab Gulf states have kept production from collapsing despite the blockade.
In many markets, fertiliser prices have levelled off but are a third higher than a year ago. The International Rice Research Institute says farmers in key markets such as Thailand are paying up to 50 per cent more than they did in 2025.
The danger to agriculture from Iran’s continued disruption of trade through the Strait of Hormuz is precisely what the world food system does not need.
“Diplomacy and the planting season don’t have the same cycle,” said Jorge Moreira da Silva, who co-ordinates the UN Strait of Hormuz Task Force. “I am extremely alarmed about what will happen on food security.”
There is mounting evidence that the fifth food crisis of this century is already a fact.
The political impact of the first, in 2007-8, rivalled that of the global financial crisis then building up. Another food crisis struck with the political turmoil of the failed street revolutions in 2011.
That was followed by the disruptions of Covid in 2020 and the Ukraine war shock of 2022, from which the global food system has yet to recover.
In a paper for Chatham House in June, Arif Husain, chief economist of the UN World Food Programme, warned that as many as 10 billion meals a week could vanish from the global food system, pushing a further 45 million people into acute hunger.
The immediate prospect for the coming year is broader and simpler: not enough food in the system to keep inflation in check.
Food inflation in war zones and the poorest nations can often run in triple digits. In advanced economies, double-digit food price increases can be enough to trigger a damaging bout of wider inflation.
Technological and genetic advances are accelerating just to keep agriculture in step with shortages. A paper last week by Yiwei Jian of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research measured the harm to global rice yields from greenhouse gas-induced warming. It found that rice yields fall by 8.1 per cent for every 1°C of global warming. This is twice the rate previous assessments have suggested. As rice has already seen enormous scientific advances to maintain its place as the staple food crop for more than half of the world’s population, the longer-term pressures for sustainable consumption are laid bare.
Followers of Malthusian predictions that population growth is bound to outstrip constrained resources have always been wrong over the longer term.
Innovation has a great deal to contribute to getting food on to our tables, whatever the conditions.
Yet two things can be true at once. If we do have a fifth food crisis in 20 years and the third in this decade, it is fair to say we’ve had our wake-up call and then some.
And a third: peace is essential, because it is peace that gives us the space to address every other pressure crowding in on farming.
