Food shortages rarely begin with empty supermarket shelves. They begin months earlier, in fields that receive too little rain, farmers who cannot afford enough fertiliser, ships that cannot obtain insurance, crops planted on fewer acres and governments responding to rising prices by protecting their own supplies. By the time consumers notice that bread, meat and cooking oil have become markedly more expensive, much of the damage has already been done.
Michael Snyder argues that three developments are now converging in precisely this way: disruption to fertiliser supplies caused by the Middle East conflict, severe disruption to Ukrainian grain exports, and a rapidly strengthening El Niño capable of damaging crops across several major agricultural regions simultaneously. His language is characteristically apocalyptic, and his conclusion that we face a food crisis of unprecedented magnitude goes considerably further than mainstream forecasters presently do. But the three underlying risks are real, and independent sources are warning about essentially the same combination.
The first problem is fertiliser, and this is easily underestimated by people who have never had much to do with agriculture. Modern civilisation feeds billions of people partly because modern farming can replenish nutrients removed from soils by enormous harvests. Nitrogen fertiliser in particular is deeply tied to natural gas and energy markets, while international agriculture depends upon large quantities of fertiliser and feedstocks moving through a surprisingly small number of trade routes.
Disruption around the Strait of Hormuz has therefore been more than an oil-market problem. The World Bank reported in June that Middle East disruption had affected energy supplies as well as urea and phosphate fertilisers, pushing input costs sharply higher. If elevated fertiliser prices persist, farmers do not simply absorb the expense indefinitely. They apply less fertiliser, reduce planting, or move into crops requiring fewer inputs. The eventual consequence can be lower yields.
The OECD and FAO make much the same point in their 2026–2035 Agricultural Outlook. Their modelling of the Middle East conflict finds that reduced fertiliser use would decrease cereal production, with particularly serious effects in poorer countries. Wealthier consumers can generally absorb higher food prices by spending a little more of their incomes on groceries. Poor households have much less room for adjustment and may respond by eating less or switching to cheaper foods.
This is the first reason that what happens during the remainder of 2026 may become more visible in 2027. Agriculture works with long delays. A farmer confronted with expensive or unavailable fertiliser today may reduce application during the next planting cycle. The resulting yield reduction does not become apparent until harvest, and shortages then work their way through wholesalers, processors, livestock producers and retailers before appearing fully in consumer prices.
The second problem is grain from the Black Sea. Ukraine remains an important agricultural exporter, and Snyder points to recent attacks on ports, ships and export infrastructure as a serious impediment to getting the harvest onto world markets. His article reports that Ukrainian grain shipments since the beginning of August had fallen to around one-fifth of potential exports, while shipping companies faced growing insurance difficulties around Black Sea ports.
The distinction between food production and food availability matters here. A tonne of wheat sitting in Ukraine has unquestionably been produced, but it is not much help to an Egyptian or Indonesian miller if nobody can safely and economically transport it there. The modern food system is not merely an agricultural system. It is a vast logistical machine involving ports, railways, rivers, insurers, commodity traders, storage facilities and shipping companies. Break enough links in that chain and abundance in one location can coexist with shortage somewhere else.
The problem becomes particularly serious because import dependence is highly uneven. Some countries produce large surpluses of grain and can absorb international disruptions relatively easily. Others depend heavily upon imports to feed rapidly growing populations. Snyder notes particularly high exposure among countries buying Black Sea wheat. Recent modelling of global staple-food networks likewise finds import dependence to be one of the principal determinants of how vulnerable national food supplies are to production shocks.
Then comes the third factor, and potentially the greatest wild card: El Niño. The strengthening 2026 El Niño is no longer merely Snyder's catastrophe scenario. Reuters reported last week that there was more than a 90 per cent probability of the event developing into a very strong El Niño during the northern autumn and winter. Strong El Niños can produce drought across South and Southeast Asia, Australia and southern Africa while creating excessive rainfall elsewhere. Agriculture can be damaged by either extreme. Crops require water, but they require it at the right time and in roughly the right quantity. Note, this is seasonal variation and has nothing to do with climate change alarmism.
India provides an immediate warning. Its monsoon supplies roughly 70 per cent of the country's annual rainfall, yet rainfall this season is running substantially below normal, with the developing El Niño threatening further deterioration. Cotton, soybeans, corn and pulses can suffer directly, while depleted soil moisture can subsequently affect winter wheat and rapeseed. India is such a large producer and consumer that significant agricultural disruption there cannot be treated as a purely domestic event.
Other commodities have different geographical vulnerabilities. West Africa dominates world cocoa production. Vietnam and Indonesia are giants in robusta coffee. India and Thailand matter enormously for sugar. Indonesia and Malaysia dominate palm oil. Brazil is central to soybeans, sugar, coffee and other agricultural commodities. An El Niño does not damage all of these places simultaneously in exactly the same fashion, but a sufficiently powerful event can disturb several major producing regions during the same agricultural year.
That is where the three threats become more serious together than separately. A drought is manageable if grain can cheaply be imported from somewhere enjoying a bumper crop. A fertiliser shortage can be endured more readily if weather produces exceptional natural growing conditions. The loss of one exporting region can be compensated by another exporter. International agricultural trade has developed precisely because different parts of the planet rarely suffer identical conditions at the same time.
But resilience diminishes when shocks begin stacking up. Imagine farmers applying less fertiliser because it is expensive, while drought simultaneously reduces yields, while a major grain-export route is disrupted by war, while expensive fuel raises harvesting and transport costs. Then imagine governments confronted with rising domestic food prices imposing export restrictions to protect their own populations. That last step can transform a shortage into something considerably worse.
The World Bank specifically warns about this danger. During earlier food crises, governments imposed restrictions on grain and edible-oil exports in an attempt to insulate domestic consumers. Individually such policies can make political sense. Collectively they remove supplies from international markets, push world prices higher and encourage still more countries to restrict exports. The result can become a feedback loop in which fear of shortage helps create additional shortage.
There is another pressure that Snyder does not emphasise as strongly: biofuels. When energy becomes expensive, converting agricultural commodities into fuel becomes more attractive. The World Bank notes that maize and sugar can be diverted towards ethanol while vegetable oils can be used for biodiesel. Governments have also increased blending mandates in several countries. Food crops are consequently competing not merely with other foods but with the enormous global demand for transport energy.
All of this needs an important qualification. Snyder's bleakest conclusion is not presently the mainstream forecast. The world is not simply running out of food. The OECD–FAO baseline projects global agricultural production increasing by about 13 per cent over the coming decade, principally because of continuing productivity improvements. The World Bank also began 2026 from a relatively favourable position of ample grain and edible-oil supplies. Agricultural technology, international trade, irrigation, improved varieties and large inventories provide buffers that previous civilisations could only have dreamed of.
Indeed, Reuters recently reported that near-record global grain inventories and decades of improvements in agricultural productivity give the world considerably greater capacity to withstand even a very strong El Niño than alarming headlines might suggest. Brazil and Russia have emerged as enormous exporters, while countries including India and China hold substantial grain reserves.
That is the other side of the argument and it matters. There is a large difference between saying that food-production risks are unusually elevated and predicting an inevitable worldwide famine. The evidence currently supports the former much more strongly than the latter.
But reassurance should not become complacency. Food systems possess enormous resilience until several supposedly independent safeguards fail together. The disturbing feature of 2026 is precisely the conjunction: weather risk, war, fertiliser disruption, energy costs, damaged transport routes and the possibility of protectionist responses are arriving together.
For Australians and other inhabitants of wealthy food-producing countries, the likely first manifestation would not be starvation. It would be prices. Bread becomes dearer. Vegetable oils rise. Coffee and chocolate become luxuries rather than casual purchases. Meat prices respond later as feed costs work through livestock production. Supermarkets remain full, but households discover that filling the trolley consumes an ever larger proportion of their income.
For poor import-dependent countries, the consequences can be vastly more serious. A family already spending half its income on food cannot respond to a 20 or 30 per cent price increase by cancelling Netflix or postponing a holiday. It reduces consumption. Children receive less protein. Governments increase subsidies they cannot afford. Political instability rises, particularly in countries where bread prices have historically been capable of bringing people onto the streets.
This is why the next year deserves close attention even without accepting Snyder's most dramatic predictions. The question is not whether humanity suddenly forgets how to grow food. It is whether several parts of the extraordinarily complex system that produces and distributes that food deteriorate at the same time.
Modern agriculture has achieved something historically astonishing: billions of human beings expect food to appear every day at reasonable prices regardless of droughts, wars, political upheaval and events thousands of kilometres away. That expectation exists because an enormous technological and commercial system normally absorbs the shocks before consumers ever notice them. In 2026 and 2027, that system may receive a considerably harder test.
The sensible position is neither panic nor dismissal. Snyder is right to identify fertiliser disruption, Black Sea grain problems and El Niño as serious threats. Mainstream institutions are warning about them too. Where caution is required is in moving from "serious simultaneous risks" to certainty about global catastrophe.
We do not yet know what the harvests of 2027 will look like. But we can already see several of the forces that will determine them, and too many of those forces are presently moving in the wrong direction.
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/3-critical-factors-that-will-lead