For years, climate campaigners have claimed that our food supply is under grave threat from climate change caused by excessive fossil fuel use. Ironically, the war in the Middle East is highlighting that the much bigger food challenge for the world is not having enough access to fossil fuels.
Today, half of all the calories we consume are only possible because they are produced with artificial fertilisers, overwhelmingly from natural gas. Without fossil fuels, half the global population would suffer a severe lack of food.
The conflict in the Middle East and blocking of the Hormuz Strait is not just driving up global energy prices. Crucially, a quarter of the world's fertiliser normally passes through the Strait, and the blockade is holding back much of the fertiliser that will help grow the food that will feed the world in the coming year. The UN estimates that this could drive up fertiliser prices 15-20% and push at least another 45 million people into acute hunger.
And yet for the last 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.
Over the past 125 years, food has become dramatically cheaper and more abundant. Far from a looming apocalypse, the data reveals a story of remarkable progress, with climate change posing only a relatively minor hurdle.
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 one in ten people worldwide go hungry -- a rate that dipped below 7% before disruptions like Covid-19 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
This isn't luck; it's the 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.
Even now, positives abound. The UN's April forecast points to another record-breaking global harvest for 2025/26 because crops were already planted before the crisis.
Still, there are concerns for next season, and roughly 670 million people continue to suffer from food insecurity today. In regions like sub-Saharan Africa, where crop yields lag far behind global averages, the barriers are clear and should be surmountable: Poor yields, subsistence farming and most importantly, lack of fertiliser, pesticides and mechanised handling.
Yet, Western NGOs and campaigners, well-fed but overly-worried about climate change, have railed against artificial fertilisers because they are fossil fuel based. Backed by rich 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% with other crops showing massive declines.
Climate change will alter farming conditions, benefiting some areas, challenging others, with a net negative but negligible impact. One peer-reviewed study equates the effect on agriculture to shaving less than 0.06% from global GDP by century's end. CO² is also a natural fertiliser. Elevated CO² levels have greened the planet, adding leaves with the equivalent area larger than the continent of Australia since 2000 alone.
Without climate change, global food calories are expected to rise 51% by 2050 from 2010 levels. Even under an extreme warming scenario, global food calories would still rise, just slightly less at 49%.
Drastic emission cuts 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%. Prioritising economic growth, by contrast, is over 100-times more effective, increasing food access by more than 10% in years, not centuries.
And emission reductions harm food production more than climate change. They inflate costs for fertilisers, tractor fuel, and land, pricing out small farmers. Naïve models often overlook that, but careful research clearly shows that a low-emission future with high carbon prices overall means 50 million more people hungry by mid-century.
The war in Iran has exposed the climate-food scare for the distraction it truly is. To end hunger in the developing world, the poor don't need expensive carbon cuts or organic farming mandates pushed by rich-world activists. What they actually need is greater access to affordable fertiliser.
