Global disruptions from the war in the Middle East are forcing a rethink of what truly threatens the world’s food supply. While climate change has long dominated the conversation, there is a far more immediate and practical vulnerability: access to the energy resources that modern agriculture depends on.
Artificial fertilizers account for 50 percent of all the calories we consume, and they rely heavily on natural gas. Without fossil fuels, half the global population would suffer from severe food shortages.
The war in Iran and the blocking of the Hormuz Strait are not just driving up global energy prices. Crucially, a quarter of the world’s fertilizer normally passes through the strait, and the blockade is holding back much of the fertilizer needed to grow the food that will feed the world in the coming year. The United Nations estimates that this could drive up fertilizer prices 15 percent to 20 percent and push at least 45 million people into acute hunger.
Yet for decades, we’ve been told ad nauseam that fossil fuel use driving global warming was the big challenge to the world’s food supply. That claim is almost entirely wrong.
This climate-apocalyptic argument was given attention only because we lost sight of the marvel of one of humanity’s greatest achievements in the modern age: our ability to tackle food security.
Over the past 125 years, food has become dramatically cheaper and more abundant, thanks to soaring productivity and innovation. Far from a looming apocalypse, the data reveals a story of remarkable progress, with climate change posing only a relatively minor hurdle. Radical emission cuts risk making food scarcer and more expensive for the world’s most vulnerable.
Consider the arc of history. In 1928, the League of Nations estimated that more than two-thirds of humanity endured constant hunger. Today, fewer than 1 in 10 people worldwide goes hungry — a rate that dipped below 7 percent before disruptions such as COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This isn’t luck. It’s a result of humanity quintupling cereal production since 1926 while more than halving global food prices in real terms. Incomes have surged, lifting billions out of extreme poverty and enabling families to afford more nutritious meals. This has avoided more than 4 billion people starving, a testament to agricultural ingenuity and economic growth.
Even now, positives abound. The U.N.’s April forecast points to a record-breaking global harvest for 2025/26 because crops were already planted before the crisis.
Still, there are concerns for next season, and 670 million people continue to suffer from food insecurity today. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where yields lag far behind global averages, the barriers are clear and should be surmountable: poor yields, subsistence farming and, most importantly, lack of fertilizer, pesticides and mechanized handling.
Yet, Western nongovernmental organizations and campaigners, well-fed but overly worried about climate change, have railed against artificial fertilizers because they are fossil-fuel-based. Backed by wealthy donors and foundations, they blithely suggest that Africa should go organic despite evidence showing this reduces harvests and food security. When Sri Lanka went organic in 2021, rice yields, the country’s staple food, plunged by more than 30 percent, with other crops showing massive declines.
Climate activists paint a dire picture of rising temperatures devastating crops and fueling famine, but they are mostly wrong. Climate change will alter farming conditions, benefiting some areas, challenging others, resulting in a net negative but negligible effect. One peer-reviewed study estimates the effect on agriculture at shaving off less than 0.06 percent of global GDP by century’s end.
Carbon dioxide is also a natural fertilizer. Elevated levels have greened the planet, adding leaves covering an area equivalent to that of the continent of Australia since 2000 alone.
Without climate change, global food calories are expected to rise 51 percent by 2050 from 2010 levels. Even under an extreme warming scenario, global food calories would still rise, just slightly less at 49 percent.
Drastic cuts to emissions are a bad policy if we want to boost food security. Climate policy is a blunt, expensive tool: Even aggressive action takes decades or centuries to measurably affect weather, costing hundreds of trillions while boosting calorie availability by under 0.1 percent. Prioritizing economic growth, by contrast, is more than 100 times more effective, increasing food access by more than 10 percent in years, not centuries.
And emission reductions harm food production more than climate change. They inflate costs for fertilizers, tractor fuel and land, pricing out small farmers. Naïve models often overlook this, but careful research clearly shows that a low-emission future with overall high carbon prices means 50 million more people will be hungry by mid-century.
The lesson from today’s geopolitical shocks is clear: Food security depends less on distant climate projections than on reliable access to energy and agricultural inputs. If the goal is to reduce hunger, especially in poorer regions, the priority should be to make fertilizer more accessible — not to restrict the very resources that make large-scale food production possible.
Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.” He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
