How Changing Diets Leave Us Exposed to War, Extreme Weather and Market Turbulence

The convergence of global diets means just three crops provide 50% of the world’s calories. When shocks come, they hurt.

By Bloomberg News

December 21, 2022, 7:00 PM EST

Bagels in New York. Cakes in Beijing. Instant noodles in Jakarta. Daily habits for billions, yet just a generation or so ago Indonesians would have likely reached for a bowl of rice or the Chinese a sweet potato.

A combination of rising incomes, the impact of Western culture and industrial farming focused on specific crops means we are all eating increasingly alike. And that means more of us than ever depend on imported food.

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Wheat, now an integral part of most diets, is produced predominantly by just a handful of countries. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted trade, global prices spiked almost 40%. In the resulting scramble for supplies, more than 20 countries imposed agriculture export restrictions, compounding the global food crisis.

It’s not just war that can cause wild fluctuations in the pricing and availability of imports: extreme weather — growing more frequent with climate change — and currency fluctuations can also wreak havoc. While these are issues for everyone, it’s poorer countries that are most exposed.

“The dependence on a few crops makes populations vulnerable to shocks,” said Fatima Hachem, senior nutrition officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “We are not doing our health or the planetary health any favors.”

The upheaval has reawakened interest in neglected traditional foodstuffs and prompted some countries — including Indonesia, the world’s second-largest importer of wheat — to start attempting to shift things back.

Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats nine, of which just three — rice, wheat and maize — provide 50% of all calories. Consumption of meat and dairy has soared, with pork the most widely consumed meat.

Beneath these aggregate figures, there are striking individual changes.

The shifting diets in some cases signify rising incomes: China was overwhelmingly rural and poor in 1961, for instance, and has since leapt into the upper middle income range.

“We need to acknowledge the positive things too,” said Colin Khoury, a researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture who studies diversity in the crops people grow and eat worldwide. “The expansion of the global agricultural trade has introduced new foods to billions of poor people who used to rely on a very limited diet.”

Import Dependence

However, what these dietary changes almost universally mean is that countries have become more dependent on imports, with production of the world’s major staple crops controlled by a handful of countries with the climate and the industrial farming technology to produce food at scale.

Despite warnings from experts, for decades this didn’t seem much of a problem, as a global oversupply in key crops meant cheap foreign grown food helped alleviate hunger and offer choice to millions.

The knock-on impact of the war in Ukraine has upended these assumptions. Even though grain supplies haven’t stopped entirely, almost a quarter of the world’s wheat exports come from Russia and Ukraine.

For import dependent countries, the shock was immense. With the impact rippling through other commodities and into energy, the UN estimates soaring costs will push 71 million people globally below the poverty line.

Another headache is the strong US dollar — global agriculture commodities are typically priced in dollars. Thousands of containers loaded with food recently piled up at ports in Pakistan as the importers scrambled to access currency.

Extreme weather is also posing a risk to supplies, with floods in Australia to scorching heat in India threatening harvests. Climate change is likely to worsen the situation. Global crop yields could fall about 30% because of climate change, while food demand is expected to jump 50% in the coming decades, according to United Nations’ estimates.

While these are also issues for rich countries — the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence services Eliza Manningham-Buller recently called for food supplies there to be treated as a national security priority — it’s less wealthy countries that are most vulnerable.

Note: Charts showing average trade data between 2011 and 2020, the latest data available.

Poorer countries are more sensitive to price increases and during a supply shortage have less purchasing power to compete for a limited amount.

Diversity Drive

Both the current and potential future disruptions have sparked a new interest in traditional crops such as sorghum, rye, cassava, fonio, sweet potato, and yam which have been marginalized as diets shifted to alternative staples.

Lesser-known crops like finger millet and grasspea can be reliable food sources in times of drought and crop failure.

The UN declared 2023 the International Year of Millets as part of a push to encourage cultivation of the cereals which can be grown under drought conditions. India offered millet pizzas to delegates at its first G20 Sherpa meeting this month.

Millets are also highly nutritious. Another drawback of the shift to a more industrialized diet has been an increase in consumption of processed foods, which are a contributing factor to the surge in global obesity.

In Indonesia, president Joko Widodo has instructed his ministers to produce a roadmap for expanding planting areas for sorghum — a millet variety traditionally eaten in the country — by at least 200% within two years. This is part of a wider “plan to gradually diversify food sources,” said Muhammad Saifulloh, an official at the country’s Ministry for Economic Affairs.

As well as a general education program, Indonesia is providing free specialized equipment to help farmers process the sorghum and get it ready for sale.

Farmers harvest sorghum at a plantation at Mekarjaya village in West Java, Indonesia. Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg

Milling the harvested sorghum grain in Indonesia. Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg

Edi Supriyadi, a 40-year-old farmer in Majalengka, West Java, started experimenting with growing sorghum three years ago and expanded his plantings in the latest season to over 15 hectares. He said the crop grows well in a dry environment — “the drier the better” — which bodes well for a future changed climate.

“These were planted by our ancestors then they became unknown,” Supriyadi said as he harvested the last of his crop. While describing the government’s drive to boost sorghum output as “extraordinary”, Supriyadi said farmers will need assurance that they’ll be able to sell their produce. “Currently we only sell sorghum to buyers we know, unlike rice which we can sell anywhere to everyone.”

Photo of Edi Supriyadi in Indonesia. — Edi Supriyadi at his sorghum fields at Mekarjaya village in Indonesia. Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg

New Opportunities

Campaigners see these types of initiatives as the first stepping stones to a more resilient food supply.

“I see growing political awareness that we need to be careful that all this industrialization of agriculture brings a lot of risks,” said Stefan Schmitz, executive director of Crop Trust, an organization dedicated to conserving crop diversity. “It can really be an opportunity for developing countries. Right now they do not have a chance to compete with say wheat from Canada, with maize from the US, with rice from Vietnam.”

In Indonesia, some local companies are developing new products using alternatives to wheat. An example is Nusava mi goreng made from cassava — a starchy, gluten-free crop — which taps on Indonesia’s demand for instant noodles, second only to China. However they are more expensive and only available online.

And in West Africa, there are moves to boost fonio, a neglected nutrient-rich grain which doesn’t require much fertilizer. Yet these are small scale: a $2 million grant for a processing mill here, a planting support program there.

Photo of cooked cassava instant noodles on a plate.

The instant noodle made from cassava has a similar taste to wheat noodles, but with a chewier texture. Jin Wu/Bloomberg

Bags of fonio are packaged for distribution at the La Petite Damba factory in Conakry, Guinea. Annika Hammerschlag/Bloomberg

In Egypt, pasta maker Egyptian Swiss Group is experimenting with new recipes using rice, corn and lentil flour while in the Congo the government is supporting a program to produce manioc flour made from cassava to make bread and pastries.

It will be a long road for any of these initiatives to make a notable difference against the trend for homogenisation the industrialized supply chain promotes.

Right now, Indonesia imports about 10 million tons of wheat annually. The current government target of an additional 40,000 hectares of sorghum planting by 2024 would only add about 150,000 tons of grain.

Additionally, on a global scale where the number of people facing acute food insecurity has soared - from 135 million to 345 million - since 2019, there is no short term replacement for the quantities that can be produced by functioning global supply chains.

“People have to keep the scale in mind when they’re talking about food security,” Timmer said. “Keep your eye on the big picture, which is how many hundreds of millions of people are calorie short and how do we get calories to them efficiently in the short run?”

Story by Jasmine Ng and Eko Listiyorini

Graphics and data by Jin Wu and Yasufumi Saito

Edited by Emily Cadman, Jane Pong and Bill Faries

Assistance from Adrian Leung, Elina Ganatra, Agnieszka de Sousa and Pratik Parija

Data sources: Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank, “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security” (2014, Colin K. Khoury, Anne D. Bjorkman)

Methodology: To calculate similarity in diets between countries, Bloomberg News used the per capita daily calorie intake of 50 major food groups from FAO’s food balances data, including cereals, vegetables, meats, fish and eggs. The data covers 1961 to 2019.

Countries that were historically part of another nation, such as the former Soviet Union, were backfilled with data from their former states. Belgium and Luxembourg were reported together between 1961 and 1999 and therefore backfilled as above. Our analysis covers 171 comparable countries in total, after filtering out countries with inconsistent data points. Countries were classified into income groups according to the latest World Bank groupings.

To show converging diets in the consumption of 50 different food groups between nations, we used a statistical method called non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS), which calculates a level of similarity of datasets based on distances between them.

Photography: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg, Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg, Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg, SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg, Rob Dawson/Bloomberg, Paul Goguen/Bloomberg, Matt Goldman/Bloomberg, Eric Medsker/Bloomberg, George Osodi/Bloomberg, Mohd Rasfan/AFP via Getty Images, Victor Sokolowicz/Bloomberg, iStock/Getty Images Plus

How Changing Diets Leave Us Exposed to War, Extreme Weather and Market Turbulence

Import Dependence

Export Dominance

Diversity Drive

New Opportunities