A drought-cured wheat field stands under wildfire smoke — the season’s defining image on both sides of the Atlantic. (Illustration)

A fire does not have to reach the field to take the harvest.

—

The United States crossed into its 2026 wildfire season already on fire. By the second week of July, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that more than 38,500 wildfires had burned over 3.4 million acres nationwide which is a pace running roughly a third above the ten-year average, with the West’s peak months still ahead.¹ The Mediterranean was burning too, with fires active simultaneously from Portugal to Greece, a span of well over a thousand miles: across the European Union, satellites had already mapped more than 155,000 hectares of scorched land by early summer, well above the twenty-year norm, in a year following the worst fire season Europe has ever recorded.^{5 6}

The headlines, as always, follow the flames with headlines alarming the evacuations, the lost homes, the walls of orange advancing on a ridgeline. But the deeper story of a bad fire year is written more quietly, in the places that grow and raise our food. Fire does not need to reach a field to damage what grows there. It scorches rangeland that livestock depend on, smothers vineyards in smoke that ruins a vintage without singeing a single vine, drives the farmworkers who bring in the harvest indoors, and burns through the olive groves and animal pens that anchor rural economies. In 2026, on two continents at once, wildfire has become an agricultural event as much as a forest one and this article traces how this happens.

PART I · THE AMERICAN WEST

Rangeland, Smoke, and the Grapes That Absorb It

The American fire season opened not in the forests but on the grasslands. Much of the acreage burned early in 2026 was in the southeastern United States and the Plains of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma where fast-moving grass fires raced across landscapes primed by a winter of drought and thin mountain snowpack.³ The 2025 drought had peaked at 36.65% of the country in D1 (moderate) drought or worse in late November, and the West entered 2026 in severe snow drought. On December 7, 2025, snow cover across the West was the lowest for that date in the 24-year satellite record leaving little of the snowmelt that normally keeps forests from igniting through the summer.⁴ Wildfire experts warned the nation was entering the season as a tinderbox.³

For agriculture, grass fires are livestock fires. They burn the rangeland and pasture that cattle and sheep graze, along with the fences, corrals, barns, and hay stores that ranching depends on. When fire tore through the Texas panhandle earlier in the season, the USDA moved quickly to open its disaster toolbox including the Livestock Indemnity Program for animals lost beyond normal mortality, emergency grazing authorizations on conservation land, and cost-share programs to replace fencing and haul feed and water to surviving herds.⁷ Those programs exist precisely because a rangeland fire’s damage outlasts the flames: a rancher who loses grazing ground and infrastructure faces a difficult year of bought feed and rebuilt fence line long after containment.

History sets the scale. In California’s recent mega-fire years, blazes ripped through national forests used for grazing and across the rangeland that ranchers manage, killing cattle and forcing producers to euthanize animals too badly burned to survive; a state legislative analysis documents destroyed fencing, structures, and livestock across those seasons.⁸ The individual losses are devastating even when, as economists note, a single state’s cattle inventory is too small a share of the national herd to move grocery prices.

The vineyard problem: damage without a flame

No crop illustrates wildfire’s indirect reach better than wine grapes. Grapevines themselves rarely burn since they are irrigated and green. In fact, vineyards often act as firebreaks, and even a smoke-affected vine recovers with no carryover to the next season.¹³ The threat is smoke taint: volatile phenols released when wood burns are absorbed straight through the grape’s permeable skin, then bind to sugars inside the berry. Months later, in the acidic medium of finished wine, those bonds can hydrolyze and release compounds that experts describe as tasting “like licking an ashtray.”^{9 10 11} A vineyard can stand untouched by fire and still lose its entire harvest to a plume that drifted overhead for a day.

“Without question, the threat of wildfire in many different ways is the greatest challenge of the day for the industry.”

— John Aguirre, President, California Association of Winegrape Growers(11)

The North Coast fires of 2017, 2019, and 2020 caused substantial grape losses in Sonoma, Lake, and Napa counties and made up the bulk of California’s agricultural fire losses in those years.¹² In Napa, lost vineyard acreage can average around $100,000 an acre, and smoke-affected red grapes that might have fetched close to $10,000 a ton often were not worth harvesting at all, according to a California legislative analysis.⁸ The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service now funds a sustained program of smoke-exposure research in wine grapes. This work that has, for example, identified grape-microbiome bacteria able to break down the taint compound guaiacol.⁹ At the same time, crop-insurance standards still lean on older laboratory markers, leaving a gap between what science can now detect and what growers can be compensated for.¹²

The people who bring in the harvest

There is a human dimension that rarely makes the fire maps. Peer-reviewed research finds that farmworkers face disproportionate wildfire-smoke exposure while performing heavy outdoor labor when the PM2.5 air-quality index turns “unhealthy,” often with underlying health risks and limited health-care access. To respond to this, California made permanent a Cal/OSHA rule requiring employers to supply NIOSH-approved respirators once the AQI passes 150.¹⁴ In 2024, CDC’s NIOSH issued the first federal hazard review devoted to wildland-fire smoke among farmworkers and outdoor workers, and the American Lung Association notes agricultural workers are far more likely than other workers to die of heat-related illness, a risk that compounds with smoke.^{15 16} Lost workdays ripple into lost harvest, and one of wildfire’s larger effects on agriculture may simply be the difficulty of assembling the workforce a food system needs.

For direct field damage, the picture is more nuanced than headlines suggest. A peer-reviewed review of smoke-aerosol impacts finds that thin smoke can slightly increase corn photosynthesis by scattering light into the canopy, while heavier or sustained smoke and the ozone that wildfires generate reduces yields. Ozone from wildfires alone is estimated to cut U.S. corn, wheat, and soybean output by several percent.¹⁷ Recent work points both ways: a Kansas State analysis linked smoke to reduced soybean yields on the northern Plains, while Purdue researchers found a small corn benefit under certain conditions.¹⁷ The lesson is that not every smoky summer is a catastrophe for the Corn Belt, and precision matters as much as alarm.

Source: National Interagency Fire Center, National Fire News, July 2026.¹ Ten-year-average figure is implied from NIFC’s reported ratio and shown for scale.

PART II · THE MEDITERRANEAN

Olive Groves, Herds, and Bees Turned to Ash

Europe enters 2026 in the shadow of a record. The 2025 season was the EU’s most destructive fire season ever recorded: more than one million hectares burned within the bloc, nearly double the long-run average, with Germany, Spain, Cyprus, and Slovakia all setting all-time records, and roughly 39% of the burned area falling inside the Natura 2000 network of protected sites.⁶ 2026 has picked up where that left off. By early July, hundreds of firefighters were battling blazes in Portugal, Greece, Spain, and France simultaneously; more than 10,000 people were evacuated as a single wildfire tore through southern France, and Spain alone had recorded 14 “major” fires of over 500 hectares according to EFFIS and Spain’s environment ministry.^{18 19}

In the Mediterranean, farmland and fire are woven together. Much of what burns is the mosaic of olive groves, orchards, pasture, and small livestock farms that defines the rural south. The Hellenic Fire Service estimates that about 85% of Greece’s wildfires are caused by human negligence, including sparks thrown by agricultural machinery, discarded cigarettes, and outdoor fires.¹⁸ Fire is not only a threat to farming here; farming is one of the ways fire starts.

A single fire, an entire farm

The toll from fires in Europe is best measured up close. When a wind-driven wildfire swept through Akraifnio in the Boeotia region of central Greece in late June 2026, it destroyed a major livestock farm in minutes: an entire cattle pen was consumed, the farm’s machinery lost, and a herd of roughly 60 calves and a flock of sheep killed. The same blaze burned through extensive olive groves and pistachio orchards, deepening the economic wound to local farmers already living at the margins.²⁰ “The fire moved incredibly fast,” a resident told a local agency. “Many olive trees and pistachio trees burned.”²⁰

THE COMPOUNDING LOSS
Farm fires cascade beyond the visible damage. After earlier Mediterranean fires, one Greek regional authority calculated an urgent need to feed 44,000 surviving animals whose pasture had burned, and to sustain 21,000 beehives whose entire foraging landscape was gone. A beekeepers’ association warned that if bees couldn’t forage to prepare for winter, “we will have no bees in the spring.” This will be a pollination gap that reaches into next year’s harvests across the region.²¹

Older Mediterranean fire years show how far the losses run. Reporting on recent seasons documents a single Limassol-district blaze in Cyprus in 2025 that killed roughly 100 livestock across 14 farms and destroyed thousands of hectares of agricultural land, and fires in Turkey’s productive olive-growing provinces that reduced well over a hundred thousand hectares of forest and farmland to ash.²⁴ The pattern is structural, not anecdotal: peer-reviewed fire-risk modelling of Mediterranean landscapes finds that as unmaintained and abandoned farmland expands, the modelled burn probability of both settlements and permanent crops such as olive orchards rises with it.²³ And olive groves are not annual crops that regrow in a season, a mature grove destroyed is a generation of income and heritage gone at once.

“Extreme heat is increasingly defining the conditions under which agrifood systems operate.”

— Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General, World Meteorological Organization

Source: European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), Copernicus Emergency Management Service / JRC, current-situation data, 2026.⁵ Figures cover fires larger than 30 hectares including forested area.

PART III · THE MECHANISMS

Why a Fire You Never See Still Reaches Your Plate

Strip away the flames and four distinct pathways connect a distant wildfire to the food supply. Understanding them explains why “the fire didn’t reach the farm” is rarely the end of the story.

Direct destruction. Wind-driven fire burns crops, orchards, pens, barns, fences, irrigation lines, and the animals themselves. Even irrigated crops offer no guarantee according to a legislative analysis of California’s fires documents blazes burning through orchards and vineyards and destroying rangeland fencing and structures, with tree- and vine-crop losses valued per acre far above annual row crops.⁸ For tree and vine crops, a burned grove or vineyard is a capital loss measured in decades, not one lost harvest.

Smoke and taint. Wine grapes are the clearest case, absorbing volatile phenols through their skins to produce ashy, unsellable wine from vineyards fire never touched.^{9 10} The science of detecting and treating smoke damage is now advancing faster than the insurance rules meant to cover it.¹²

Rangeland and forage collapse. Grass fires destroy the grazing land and stored feed that livestock depend on, forcing ranchers to buy feed, relocate herds, or cull animals, this is the reason USDA disaster programs center on forage, fencing, and livestock indemnity.^{7 8} In the Mediterranean, the same dynamic strands surviving herds and bees without pasture or forage the moment a landscape burns.²¹

Labor and logistics. Smoke drives farmworkers to reduce or halt outdoor work. California’s mandatory respirator rule and CDC/NIOSH’s federal hazard review are a start at dealing with this health hazard, but do not deal with the lack of workers needed during a fire. A harvest that can’t be picked, moved, or processed on time is a loss even if every plant survives. In addition, burned rural roads and destroyed processing and storage cut farms off from markets.^{14 15}

A NOTE ON PROPORTION
Not every smoky summer is a catastrophe for food. Peer-reviewed work finds thin Corn Belt smoke can even modestly aid corn by diffusing light, with the clearer yield penalties coming from heavier smoke, ozone, and soybeans rather than a uniform collapse.¹⁷ The serious, documented damage clusters in specific places such as rangeland in a fire’s path, vineyards downwind of heavy smoke, olive groves and livestock farms in the Mediterranean fire zone, rather than spreading evenly across all of agriculture. Precision matters more than alarm.

● WATCH IT BURN — LIVE
Track the 2026 fires in real time
Authoritative, publicly available windows into active wildfires and their smoke on both continents. Up to date fires on live satellite maps, official incident feeds, and air-quality trackers. Open any to see the fires as they move right now.

PART IV · WHAT COMES NEXT

Living Fire Season by Fire Season

The forecasts offer only guarded relief. NIFC’s outlook keeps above-normal fire potential across much of the West through the summer, with lightning ignitions expected to give way to human-caused starts as the season wears on.² In Europe, EFFIS warns of very extreme fire-danger conditions across a broad band of the west and center of the continent, precisely where the season’s worst damage tends to concentrate.⁵ Peer-reviewed research increasingly frames the Mediterranean crisis less as a failure of firefighting than as a slow-building failure of land management including rural abandonment and the decline of grazing leaving fuel to accumulate on hillsides that farmers and herders once kept in check.²²

What is clear is that 2026 has not delivered a single wildfire so much as a season defined by fire, and that its reach extends well past the burn scar, into rangeland that can’t feed a herd, vineyards downwind of a plume, olive groves generations in the making, and the workers who bring in what survives. The damage is uneven and often indirect, which is exactly why it is so easily missed: a fire can leave a farm standing and still take its harvest, its herd, or its year.

As wildfire settles into a permanent feature of summer on both continents, the tools above are how growers, workers, and eaters alike can watch it coming and how the rest of us can understand that when the West and the Mediterranean burn, some of what is lost is the food they grow leading to crop loss and adding to global hunger.

Sources & Notes

Every mechanism and aggregate figure in this article is anchored to a peer-reviewed study, a government agency, or an established NGO. Tags mark each source type — [PEER-REVIEWED], [GOV], [NGO], or [NEWS]. News sources are used only for time-stamped, event-level facts (specific fires, evacuations, official statements) that no journal or agency report would yet cover.

1. [GOV] National Interagency Fire Center — National Fire News & Statistics (3.4M acres / 38,541 fires; ~133% of 10-yr average).

2. [GOV] NIFC / NICC — National Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlook (above-normal potential; large-fire activity; ignition-cause shift).

3. [NEWS] Inside Climate News (2026) — Why Wildfire Experts Are So Worried About This Year’s Fire Season (SE/Plains grass fires; “tinderbox”; 50+ large fires per NIFC).

4. [GOV] NOAA / NIDIS Drought.gov (2026) — Drought in 2025 in 14 Graphics (36.65% D1+ peak, Nov. 2025; record-low Dec. 7 western snow cover). Corrects an earlier draft’s unsupported “69%” figure.

5. [GOV] European Commission JRC / EFFIS (2026) — Current wildfire situation in Europe (155,569 ha; 2026 vs. 2025 pace; 20-yr average; fire-danger forecast).

6. [GOV] EFFIS / JRC (2026) — 2025 was the EU’s most destructive wildfire season on record (>1M ha in EU; national records; ~39% Natura 2000).

7. [GOV] USDA Farm Service Agency (2026) — Disaster Assistance to Producers in Texas Impacted by Wildfire (LIP, ELAP, emergency grazing, ECP).

8. [GOV] California State Assembly Committee on Agriculture — Economic Impacts of Recent Wildfires on Agriculture in California(rangeland/fencing losses; Napa vineyard values; per-ton grape losses).

9. [PEER-REVIEWED / GOV] Castro, C. et al. (2025). Bacteria isolated from the grape phyllosphere capable of degrading guaiacol… PLOS One (USDA Agricultural Research Service) — smoke-taint mechanism; economic losses; ARS research.

10. [PEER-REVIEWED] (2024). Exploring Variation in Grape and Wine Volatile Phenol Glycoconjugates… American Journal of Enology and Viticulture — smoke-taint markers and glycoconjugates.

11. [NEWS] KQED Science (2024) — Wildfire Smoke the ‘Greatest Challenge’ Facing California Wine Industry (Aguirre quote; “ashtray” descriptor; industry scale).

12. [NEWS] North Bay Business Journal / Press Democrat (2026) — Wine ‘smoke taint’ science advancing faster than crop-insurance standards(insurance gap; ARS funding as reported; 2017/2019/2020 losses).

13. [GOV / academic extension] UC Davis Viticulture & Enology — Wildfire Impact on CA Grapes and Wine (vine resilience; no season-to-season carryover of taint).

14. [PEER-REVIEWED] Marlier, M. et al. (2022). Exposure of agricultural workers in California to wildfire smoke… Environmental Research Letters (Cal/OSHA §5141.1; NIOSH respirator thresholds; worker vulnerability).

15. [GOV] CDC / NIOSH (2024) — Draft Hazard Review: Wildland Fire Smoke Exposure Among Farmworkers and Other Outdoor Workers — first federal authoritative review on the topic.

16. [NGO] American Lung Association (2025) — Farmworkers on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis (PM2.5 health effects; agricultural-worker heat-death risk).

17. [PEER-REVIEWED] Review of wildfire-smoke aerosol impacts on radiation, crops, and air quality (2025), ScienceDirect (diffuse-light and ozone effects; ozone-driven crop losses); with Western Producer (2025) summarizing Kansas State (soybean) and Purdue (corn) findings.

18. [NEWS + GOV data] Associated Press via CP24 (2026) — Europe 2026: Wildfires rage in Portugal, Spain and Greece (Hellenic Fire Service 85%-negligence statement; multi-country response).

19. [NEWS + GOV data] Euronews (2026) — Spain 2026 wildfires: by the numbers (14 major fires, per EFFIS & Spain’s Miteco); IQAir (2026) — Southern Europe Wildfires (France evacuations; EU cross-border deployment).

20. [NEWS] Athens Times / To Vima (2026) — Boeotia Wildfire Destroys Farm, Livestock, Orchards — event-level eyewitness reporting.

21. [NEWS] The Greek Herald — Greece wildfires burn 60% of Evros olive groves (regional-authority figures: 44,000 animals; 21,000 beehives; beekeeper pollination warning).

22. [PEER-REVIEWED] Bacciu, V. et al. (2022). Spatial Patterns and Intensity of Land Abandonment Drive Wildfire Hazard and Likelihood in Mediterranean Agropastoral Areas Land (MDPI) — abandonment raises fuel load, burn probability, and modelled burned area.

23. [PEER-REVIEWED] Assessing landcover/land-use change on wildfire exposure and risk to communities and olive orchards in Mediterranean landscapes (2024), Science of the Total Environment / ScienceDirect — unmaintained farmland raises modelled burn probability of settlements and permanent crops.

24. [NEWS] Event-level reporting on recent Mediterranean seasons: Olive Oil Times — Wildfires Devastate Agricultural Land in Turkey, and Associated Press / EFFIS season coverage (Cyprus/Limassol livestock and farmland losses). Figures as reported in press accounts.

On sourcing. Compiled July 11, 2026. Every mechanism and aggregate statistic is grounded in a peer-reviewed study or a government/NGO report, as tagged above. News citations carry only time-stamped event facts — specific fires, evacuation counts, and named official statements. One figure in the first draft (a “69% of the U.S. under drought” claim) was not supported by the official record and was corrected to NOAA/NIDIS data. Live-feed links point to third-party public services; figures change constantly — confirm current conditions on the source site. This is a journalistic synthesis, not agricultural, financial, or safety advice.

Photo: Doug Wilson / USDA Agricultural Research Service

A Nation Cooking on Both Land and Sea

The United States rang in its 250th birthday under a heat dome that would not move. By the Fourth of July weekend, more than 160 million Americans were living under heat alerts, with the National Weather Service placing over 165 million people across the Midwest and East at risk of “major” or “extreme” heat-related illness.¹

The records fell fast. Central Park hit 100°F for the first time in nearly 14 years.² Washington, DC reached 102°F, breaking a high-temperature record that had stood since 1872.³ By the time the heat dome finally began to loosen its grip, the 2026 North American heat wave had been blamed for at least 23 deaths, strained power grids to a record demand level, and forced the cancellation of Independence Day parades in Washington, Philadelphia, and beyond.⁴

That single, headline-grabbing heat dome was only the visible peak of a much longer season. Since March, a string of overlapping heat waves and drought events has been quietly rewriting the numbers for American agriculture. And a thousand miles offshore, a marine heatwave has spent nearly a year warming the waters of the West Coast, threatening to repeat a disaster that has already reshaped a major American fishery once this decade. Together, the two events show how thoroughly heat, on land and at sea, has come to define what growers and fishing communities are up against in 2026.

Increase in the percentage of the global population exposed to heat stress from the 1970s to the last 10 years (2015–2024).

Nature Climate Change (Nat. Clim. Chang.) ISSN 1758-6798 (online), ISSN 1758-678X (print)

The Geography of Loss: Wheat, Drought, and a Season Without Relief

Unlike a single dramatic heat dome, the damage to American farming this year has accumulated in layers, one weather system at a time.

It started early. Between March 15 and 21, an unseasonable heat wave shattered hundreds of daily temperature records across the western and central states, with readings nearing 110°F in the desert Southwest. The early heat accelerated evapotranspiration, deepening soil moisture deficits and driving up irrigation demand in regions already dependent on shrinking snowpack.⁵ By late March, temperatures were running more than 10°F above normal across much of the West and Plains, the USDA reported, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack, a critical source of irrigation water for California, had dropped below 20% of normal, creating a serious threat to the state that grows more than a third of the nation’s vegetables.⁶

By mid-May, the toll on the country’s wheat crop was becoming clear. USDA data showed that 32% of US winter wheat acreage would go unharvested in 2026, the second-highest abandonment rate since the Dust Bowl era, as extended heat and drought stress pushed fields past the point of recovery.⁷ Extreme to Exceptional Drought covered half of Nebraska by June, with Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, New Mexico, and South Dakota all reporting severe moisture stress.⁸ Even with the U.S. crop shrinking, several major competitors still posted historically large harvests: Russia had its fourth-largest crop ever, while Australia, Canada, and Kazakhstan all had smaller crops that remained historically large. Record global carry-in stocks also gave the market a buffer against the U.S. shortfall which kept prices low, so the U.S. wheat producers that could harvest crops got a lower price than normal. The 2025/26 season-average U.S. farm price was projected at just $5 per bushel, with December 2025 futures hitting $4.88 in October 2025 which was a multiyear low.

The heat kept coming through the growing season. A USDA report from early June described extreme heat across the Plains compounding with severe thunderstorms and worsening dryness in the South, even as Corn Belt states pushed on with planting; more than 90% of intended corn acreage was in the ground in nearly every Midwestern state by early June.⁹ Then came the July heat dome itself, which drove up irrigation and energy costs for the specialty crops, fruits, and vegetables that depend on it most, adding new pressure to farm margins already squeezed by input costs.¹

Livestock producers have faced a parallel squeeze. Heat stress hits animals at lower temperature thresholds than it hits crops, and pigs and poultry, which cannot cool themselves as efficiently as cattle, are especially vulnerable, according to a joint 2026 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. The consequence: reduced growth, lower dairy yields, and in severe cases, organ failure.¹⁰

“Extreme heat is increasingly defining the conditions under which agrifood systems operate.” — WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo

The Ocean Also Boils: A Marine Heatwave Off the West Coast

While the heat dome was making headlines on land, a separate and less visible heat event has been building at sea. A marine heatwave has dominated the waters off the US West Coast since the summer of 2025, and NOAA scientists say it is only the third time on record that such a large stretch of coastal ocean has stayed unusually warm for so long, through an entire winter, without being linked to an El Niño event.¹¹

At its peak in September 2025, the heatwave rivaled the size and surface temperatures of the infamous 2013–2016 event known as “the Blob,” and the northeast Pacific briefly reached its highest average temperature ever recorded, about half a degree warmer than any prior measurement.¹² The current event has raised West Coast waters roughly 3 to 4°F above normal.¹¹

The immediate worry for fisheries is not the warm water itself, but what it can trigger: harmful algal blooms. These blooms can sicken marine mammals and force the closure of shellfish fisheries, particularly recreational ones, hitting coastal economies directly. A bloom in 2025 arrived unusually early and killed hundreds of California sea lions, dolphins, and seabirds, and NOAA scientists are watching closely for a repeat.¹¹ So far, this heatwave has not penetrated as deep into the water column or lingered as close to shore as the original Blob, limiting its ecological damage, and NOAA’s forecasts suggest the warm water may dissipate in the coming months as it mixes with cooler water below.¹¹

History gives that watchfulness some weight. The 2013 Gulf of Alaska marine heatwave restricted Pacific cod spawning habitat so severely that the cod population fell by roughly 100 million fish; when the population still hadn’t recovered by 2020, the federal government closed the commercial fishery for the first time in its history.¹³ More recently, a 2023 West Coast marine heat wave caused such a sharp drop in albacore catch rates that authorities declared a fisheries disaster and the industry sought federal relief for that season’s losses.¹⁴

The Mechanisms Beneath the Numbers

The headline statistics: abandoned wheat acreage, a warming Pacific, only hint at what is actually happening inside plants, animals, and the ocean itself. A growing body of research from federal agencies, international bodies, and peer-reviewed journals lays out the underlying physiology, and it helps explain why heat this persistent does more damage than a single hot afternoon ever could.

Crop Biology: The Nighttime Temperature Penalty

Daytime heat is not the whole story for crops. A large and growing body of research points to nighttime warming as an especially destructive force, because it prevents plants from resting. Warm nights accelerate a plant’s “dark respiration,” the metabolic process that burns through the sugars and starches a plant has built up during the day, leaving less available for grain and seed development. A recent peer-reviewed synthesis of wheat trials found that grain yield has been measured to fall by roughly 1.9% for every 1°C rise in nighttime minimum temperature, with some studies reporting penalties as high as 10% per degree in spring wheat and 12.9% per degree in winter wheat.¹⁷ Field trials in Australia went further: raising nighttime temperatures from 15°C to 20°C during the reproductive stage of wheat produced up to a 40% yield loss, driven by higher floret sterility and lower grain weight.¹⁸

The mechanism is well documented at the cellular level: elevated night temperatures increase respiratory carbon loss, depleting the non-structural carbohydrate reserves that crops depend on to fill grain, a dynamic described in a peer-reviewed synthesis on respiratory control of crop yield under heat stress.¹⁹ Layered on top of that is the drought dynamic the USDA has already flagged this season: when soil moisture runs short, plants lose their main defense against heat, transpirational cooling, which can push leaf and canopy temperatures still higher and compound the damage.⁸

Livestock: When Nights Don’t Cool Down

Livestock face a related but distinct problem: unlike people, pigs cannot sweat, and both pigs and poultry rely heavily on panting to shed body heat, a far less efficient cooling mechanism. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service estimates that heat stress already costs the US swine industry roughly $481 million a year in lost revenue, even before accounting for the kind of extended, multi-week heat this season has brought.²⁰ For poultry, research compiled by the European Food Safety Authority and cited in recent agricultural engineering studies puts the ideal temperature range at 20–25°C, with production losses beginning above roughly 30°C.²¹

USDA-ARS researchers who study livestock heat stress have long emphasized that the ability of animals to recover overnight is what determines whether a heat event becomes dangerous, and threshold temperature limits for swine, cattle, and sheep are central to how ARS models predict risk.²² When overnight lows stay elevated, as they have through much of this season’s heat domes, that recovery window narrows or disappears. The production consequences are measurable: an Australian study of dairy cattle found that as heat stress intensity rose, daily milk production dropped by as much as 14%, alongside rising respiration rates and body temperatures.²³

The Ocean’s Version of Heat Stress: Oxygen and Range Shifts

Marine heatwaves inflict a version of the same nighttime-recovery problem, but through ocean chemistry rather than animal physiology. Warmer water simply holds less dissolved oxygen, and NOAA Fisheries scientists on the West Coast track a hypoxia threshold of roughly 1.4 milliliters of oxygen per liter, below which bottom waters become lethal to many fish and invertebrates; hypoxia of this kind is already a recurring summer feature of the shelf off Oregon and Washington.²⁴ In 2021, NOAA-supported researchers measured near-bottom hypoxic water spanning nearly half the continental shelf inshore of the 200-meter line, the most extensive event on record, and found a long-term trend toward lower oxygen levels dating back to 1950.²⁵

For fish, the physiological bind is direct: warmer water raises their metabolic oxygen demand at the same time that less oxygen is available, a mismatch that peer-reviewed research on marine heatwaves describes as a key driver of die-offs and reduced thermal tolerance in affected species.²⁶ The longer-term response for mobile species is to leave. A NOAA Fisheries-funded study published in PLOS ONE projected that hundreds of US fish and invertebrate species, including economically significant ones such as lobsters, will continue shifting northward as the ocean warms, a process NOAA scientists say is already underway at different rates in different regions.²⁷ For fishing fleets, that migration collides with a management system built around fixed geographic quotas, forcing longer transits, higher fuel costs, and, in cases like Atlantic mackerel, international disputes over who gets to catch a stock that has moved into someone else’s waters.²⁸

A Strained Nexus: Water, Energy, and Food Compete for the Same Resource

Heat does not stress agriculture, energy, and water systems separately, it stresses all three at once, through what researchers call the food-energy-water nexus. Thermoelectric power plants require large volumes of water for cooling, the same reservoirs and rivers that irrigation-dependent farms are drawing down harder this season, and the US Department of Energy has long identified this competition as a growing vulnerability under climate stress.²⁹ The strain runs in both directions: research on the water-electricity nexus in the Midwest has found that a 1°C rise in cooling water temperature can reduce a power plant’s generating capacity by roughly 0.15% to 0.5%, precisely when demand for air conditioning is peaking.³⁰

It is this compounding, cross-sector pressure, on crops that cannot cool at night, on livestock that cannot sweat, on fish running out of oxygen, and on a power grid competing with farmers for the same water, that is pushing discussions in Washington toward a Farm Bill with stronger climate resilience provisions and modernized crop insurance frameworks, even as the current bill remains unfinished.⁷

Who Pays When the Weather Turns

The costs of a hot season like this one land unevenly. Irrigation-dependent specialty crop growers face rising energy and water bills on top of already elevated input costs. Ranchers face the prospect of higher feed costs if pasture quality keeps declining. Wheat farmers who abandoned nearly a third of the nation’s winter wheat acreage face tightening supply and a growing reliance on crop insurance and federal disaster support just to stay solvent through the season.⁷

On the coast, the exposure is different but no less real: recreational and commercial shellfish operators face the possibility of sudden closures if a harmful algal bloom takes hold, and communities built around fisheries like Pacific cod and albacore have already seen, within the last several years, how quickly a warm ocean can turn into a declared disaster.¹³¹⁴

The human toll of the July heat dome itself was also concrete and immediate: at least 23 deaths, emergency rooms reporting “extremely high” rates of heat-related visits, and hundreds of thousands of homes without power at points during the event, as the grid strained under record demand for air conditioning.¹⁵⁴

What Comes Next

The USDA’s outlook, as of its most recent Agricultural Weather Highlights, calls for above-normal temperatures to persist across much of the West and Deep South, with cooler-than-normal conditions offering some relief to the northern Plains, Midwest, and Northeast.⁵ At sea, NOAA’s forecasts suggest the marine heatwave may weaken in the coming months as surface waters mix with cooler water from below, though scientists caution that whether enough warm water and nutrients persist to fuel another harmful algal bloom remains an open question.¹¹

None of this guarantees smooth sailing. As one farm economist put it during an earlier heat-driven scare, growers are still “living off surface moisture, rain by rain, week by week,” and the same could now be said of a fishing industry watching the Pacific for the next bloom.¹⁶

What is clear is that 2026 has not delivered a single heat wave so much as a season defined by heat: on the plains, where wheat cracked and went unharvested; in the reservoirs and snowpack that irrigation depends on; and in an ocean that has now spent the better part of a year running warmer than it should. The story of American food this year is being written twice over, once in the fields and once beneath the waves, by the same rising temperatures.

Climate change is hitting America’s food production and it is time that we pay real attention because lower crop yields and fisheries captures result in higher prices and push more Americans into food insecurity just as the government dismantles America’s safety net.

Endnotes

1. NBC News (2026, July 2). Unpacking the U.S. heat wave ahead of July Fourth 2026, in 7 graphs and charts.

2. The Weather Channel (2026, July 5, updated). Extreme heat dome cooks DC, Philadelphia, NYC Fourth of July weekend.

3. CNN (2026, July 3). ‘Extremely high’ rates of heat-related ER visits, CDC says, with more coming Saturday.

4. Wikipedia (2026). 2026 North American heat wave.

5. AgroLatam U.S. (2026, June 15). Heat Wave and Flood Threat Put U.S. Crops and Farm Profits at Risk. Citing USDA Agricultural Weather Highlights.

6. AgroLatam U.S. (2026, April 1). US Weather Shock Hits Crops as Drought and Heat Intensify Risks. Citing USDA Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin, March 22–28, 2026.

7. AgroLatam U.S. (2026, May 13). Extreme Weather Threatens U.S. Crops as Wheat Losses Surge Nationwide. Citing USDA/NASS Crop Production report.

8. AgroLatam U.S. (2026, June 15). Heat Wave and Flood Threat Put U.S. Crops and Farm Profits at Risk.

9. AgroLatam U.S. (2026, June 9 report). Extreme Heat and Storms Threaten U.S. Crops as Weather Risks Intensify.

10. UN News (2026, April 22). Extreme heat pushing global food systems to the brink, UN agencies warn. Joint FAO/WMO report.

11. NOAA Fisheries (2026, March 3). West Coast Waters Experiencing Another Large Marine Heatwave.

12. Responsible Seafood Advocate / Global Seafood Alliance (2026, March 6). NOAA scientists track massive marine heatwave affecting U.S. West Coast waters.

13. Marine Stewardship Council. Marine Heatwaves and Sustainable Fishing.

14. Mongabay (2026, January 13). Study tracks fishing boats to see how heat waves affect fish distribution.

15. CNN (2026, July 4). Extreme heat wave in its final stretch and could fuel storms during July 4 celebrations.

16. NBC News (2023, July 13). Drought and extreme heat burn through farmers’ margin for error — and it’s only July. Historical context on farm risk management.

17. Wheat genotypes selected for high early daytime stomatal conductance under elevated nocturnal temperatures maintain high yield and biomass. PMC/National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), U.S. National Library of Medicine.

18. High night temperatures during grain number determination reduce wheat and barley grain yield: A field study. Field and growth-chamber study, Central Queensland, Australia; republished as ‘Wheat Under Warmer Nights: Shifting of Sowing Dates for Managing Impacts of Thermal Stress,’ Agriculture (MDPI), 2025.

19. ‘Breathing Out’ under Heat Stress — Respiratory Control of Crop Yield under High Temperature. Agriculture (MDPI), 2022.

20. USDA Agricultural Research Service (2023). Producers Can Now Go ‘Whole Hog’ on New Heat Stress App for Pigs.

21. EFSA Panel on Animal Health and Animal Welfare (AHAW) (2023), as cited in: Poultry Farm Intelligence: An Integrated Multi-Sensor AI Platform for Enhanced Welfare and Productivity, arXiv, 2025.

22. Hahn, G.L. et al. Quantifying livestock responses for heat stress management: a review. USDA Agricultural Research Service, Meat Animal Research Center. PubMed/National Library of Medicine.

23. Heat Stress Impacts on Lactating Cows Grazing Australian Summer Pastures on an Automatic Robotic Dairy. PMC/National Center for Biotechnology Information.

24. NOAA Fisheries. Local Physical Indicators. West Coast science and data program.

25. Widespread and increasing near-bottom hypoxia in the coastal ocean off the United States Pacific Northwest. PMC/National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2024.

26. Metabolic resilience of the Australasian snapper (Chrysophrys auratus) to marine heatwaves and hypoxia. PMC/National Center for Biotechnology Information.

27. Morley, J. & Pinsky, M., Rutgers University-New Brunswick, as reported in: New Study: Climate Change to Shift Many Fish Species North. NOAA Fisheries, citing research published in PLOS ONE.

28. Climate change and fishing. Marine Stewardship Council. Case study on North East Atlantic mackerel quota disputes.

29. U.S. Department of Energy (2014). The Water-Energy Nexus: Challenges and Opportunities.

30. Integrated analysis of the urban water-electricity demand nexus in the Midwestern United States. arXiv preprint.

Nearly a year after President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law on July 4, 2025, its consequences are no longer theoretical for Massachusetts families.¹ They show up as a busy signal. They show up as an expired document nobody can resubmit in time. They show up as a mother standing in a food bank line who, months ago, had a working SNAP card.

Nationally, more than 4 million people have dropped off SNAP since the law’s enactment, that’s nearly 10% of the entire caseload gone in under a year.² Massachusetts is not merely keeping pace with that national unraveling. It is outpacing it.

In the twelve months ending this past March, roughly 155,000 people fell off Massachusetts’ SNAP rolls, including an estimated 54,000 children.³ A separate accounting, drawn from state data obtained by the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, found the decline moving at nearly double the national rate - an 80,000-household collapse that includes close to 50,000 children, among them families who never should have lost their benefits at all.⁴

The system meant to catch them is instead the thing failing them. Massachusetts’ SNAP hotline now fields an average of 20,000 calls a day, answered by just 645 caseworkers.⁵ More than three out of every four of those calls are disconnected before anyone can pick up.⁶

“Because of policies passed by President Trump and Congress, thousands of Massachusetts residents are being kicked off SNAP.”
— Spokesperson, Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance⁷

The Machinery Behind the Collapse

This is not a single glitch. It is several federal changes, arriving at once, each one tightening the same door.

Work requirements have expanded to groups never covered before. Adults 55 to 64. Parents of teenagers 14 and older. People who, a year ago, were exempt and are now required to document 20 hours of work a week or lose benefits after three months.⁸

Immigrants are being removed outright. Massachusetts has already begun cutting off SNAP for up to roughly 10,000 legally present immigrants who have lawful status but now are now locked out of a program that once served them.⁹

The state is being handed the bill. Beginning in fiscal year 2027, Massachusetts must absorb a dramatically larger share of SNAP’s administrative costs, rising from 50% to 75% and, for the first time in the program’s history, states will owe a share of benefit costs tied to their payment “error rate.”¹⁰ That error rate overwhelmingly reflects paperwork mistakes, not fraud. Every dollar the state fears owing is a dollar of pressure pushing eligibility workers to find reasons to say no.

Recertification now happens twice as often. Many households must renew their eligibility every six months instead of once a year. this is doubling the number of interviews, documents, and chances for the system to drop them.

Trump administration officials, including Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, have credited the falling caseloads to a stronger economy and reduced fraud.¹¹ Harvard public health policy professor Sara Bleich rejects that framing outright: the economy has not measurably improved since the law passed, she notes, and the real drivers are the law’s new eligibility hurdles and the administrative wall states can’t staff fast enough to meet.¹²

The Human Cost of a Busy Signal

Merideth Lively did everything right. A routine recertification. A scheduling mix-up. A caseworker’s error in the paperwork. What followed was two months of unanswered calls, a malfunctioning app, and repeated hours-long visits to a DTA office before benefits were finally restored.¹³ “It was like a process that should have been totally normal and simple,” Lively said. “I never should have been cut off.”¹⁴

This is happening against a backdrop already stretched thin. An estimated 40% of Massachusetts households experienced food insecurity in 2025 before the deepest cuts had even taken hold.¹⁵ Roughly 7,200 adults newly subject to strict work rules are at risk of losing SNAP this spring alone if they cannot reach DTA in time to prove they qualify.¹⁶ Advocates at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute estimate that as many as 100,000 residents statewide could ultimately be at risk under the eligibility changes now working their way through the system.¹⁷

“We can’t have people who are struggling to put food on the table and eligible for this program losing access to it simply because they can’t get through.”
— Massachusetts anti-hunger advocate¹⁸

MassHealth: The Larger Blow Still Coming

If SNAP is the crisis unfolding now, MassHealth is the crisis on the calendar. And Massachusetts, of all fifty states, is positioned to be hit hardest.

A joint analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute found that once new Medicaid work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks take full effect, between 99,000 and 202,000 Massachusetts residents could lose MassHealth coverage.¹⁹ No other state is projected to lose a larger share of its Medicaid rolls. Even the most conservative estimate in the report projects a 33% drop in expansion enrollment.²⁰ MassHealth’s own internal projection, delivered by chief operating officer Elizabeth LaMontagne, lands even higher than outside estimates: roughly 175,000 residents are expected to eventually lose coverage.²¹

The mechanism mirrors what has already gutted SNAP. Starting January 1, 2027, MassHealth members age 19 to 64 in the Medicaid expansion group must work, volunteer, or attend a work program for at least 80 hours a month — or show at least $580 in monthly earnings — unless they qualify for an exemption such as caring for a young child or living with a disability.²² Eligibility will be rechecked every six months instead of annually. Retroactive coverage, the safety net that once covered care received before a member’s paperwork was finalized, will shrink to as little as one month for many adults.²³ Separately, up to 2,500 MassHealth members — refugees, asylees, and other lawfully present immigrants — are expected to lose comprehensive coverage this October because of their immigration status alone.²⁴

Massachusetts’ own demographics make the state especially exposed. Researcher Katherine Hempstead points out that the state’s Medicaid expansion population skews toward adults without children, who are less likely to qualify for exemptions, and that the state’s comparatively high minimum wage already pushes many workers just over the income line that would let them keep coverage under the new rules.²⁵ MassHealth is racing to link its systems to wage, veterans’, and student-enrollment databases to automate compliance checks, and the state has proposed roughly $30 million to build that infrastructure and hire additional staff.²⁶ Even so, officials concede plainly: not everyone will be automatically confirmed. Some members will have no choice but to track down and submit their own documentation, on their own initiative, or lose coverage.²⁷

Hospitals are watching nervously. If patients lose coverage and remain uninsured, the emergency care they still need doesn’t disappear — it just shifts onto hospital balance sheets, particularly at facilities serving low-income patients. UMass Memorial Health has already scaled back some services in anticipation of what’s coming.²⁸

“We are really committed to implementing these changes in the most thoughtful way that minimizes impact to the members and coverage, while, of course, maintaining that federal compliance.”
— Elizabeth LaMontagne, MassHealth Chief Operating Officer²⁹

A State That Shows the Nation What’s Coming

Massachusetts built one of the country’s more generous social safety nets that includes broad MassHealth eligibility, a robust ConnectorCare program, a SNAP system designed to reach more of the people who qualify for it.³⁰ That generosity is precisely why the “Big Beautiful Bill” is hitting the state so hard: the more people a state successfully enrolled before the law passed, the more people it now stands to lose.

What is happening in Massachusetts today faster-than-average SNAP losses, a disconnected hotline, a Medicaid program bracing for the steepest proportional drop of any state is not an aberration. It is a preview. As more of the law’s provisions phase in through 2027 and 2028, every state faces the same bind Massachusetts is living through right now: absorb the new administrative and benefit costs itself or let eligible families fall through the cracks of a system it cannot staff fast enough to run.

The question is whether the state, and the federal government that wrote these rules, can respond at the scale the moment demands with enough caseworkers, enough funding, and enough urgency to keep children fed and families insured while Washington shifts the bill onto the states least equipped to absorb it. The busy signal Adamary Olivas and Merideth Lively heard is still ringing in kitchens and DTA offices across Massachusetts tonight. Whether anyone in power picks up remains, as it always does, a choice.

Project Bread and the Make Hunger History Coalition are working with Governor Healy’s Hunger Task Force to respond to these federal cuts. They could use your help and your support.

Endnotes

1. Harvard Kennedy School (2026). Explainer: Understanding the SNAP program — and what cuts to these benefits may mean. HKS, Cambridge, MA.

2. Marketplace (2026, July 2). A year since Trump’s big tax bill, SNAP enrollment has fallen dramatically. Citing Ed Bolen, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

3. GBH News (2026, May 28). With new federal rules, state is struggling to help people stay on SNAP.

4. Boston Globe (2026, May 1). SNAP recipients in Massachusetts lose food assistance. Citing Massachusetts Law Reform Institute data.

5. Boston Globe (2026, May 1). SNAP recipients in Massachusetts lose food assistance.

6. Boston Globe (2026, May 1). SNAP recipients in Massachusetts lose food assistance.

7. GBH News (2026, May 28). With new federal rules, state is struggling to help people stay on SNAP. Department of Transitional Assistance spokesperson statement.

8. Harvard Kennedy School (2026). Explainer: Understanding the SNAP program — and what cuts to these benefits may mean.

9. Boston Globe (2026, May 1). SNAP recipients in Massachusetts lose food assistance.

10. Harvard Kennedy School (2026). Explainer: Understanding the SNAP program — and what cuts to these benefits may mean.

11. PBS NewsHour (2026, June). Millions lose SNAP benefits as One Big Beautiful Bill’s stricter requirements kick in.

12. PBS NewsHour (2026, June). Millions lose SNAP benefits as One Big Beautiful Bill’s stricter requirements kick in. Interview with Sara Naomi Bleich, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

13. GBH News (2026, May 28). With new federal rules, state is struggling to help people stay on SNAP.

14. GBH News (2026, May 28). With new federal rules, state is struggling to help people stay on SNAP. Quoting Merideth Lively.

15. GBH News (2026, May 28). With new federal rules, state is struggling to help people stay on SNAP. Citing Greater Boston Food Bank report.

16. Boston Globe (2026, May 1). SNAP recipients in Massachusetts lose food assistance.

17. WWLP (2025, October 15). Massachusetts faces potential SNAP cuts due to new bill. Citing Vicky Negus, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

18. GBH News (2026, May 28). With new federal rules, state is struggling to help people stay on SNAP.

19. Boston Globe / Health Care For All (2026, March 27). Over 200,000 people could lose MassHealth under coming federal changes, report says. Citing Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute analysis.

20. Boston Globe (2026, March 27). Over 200,000 people could lose MassHealth under coming federal changes, report says.

21. Boston Globe (2026, March 27). Over 200,000 people could lose MassHealth under coming federal changes, report says. Citing Elizabeth LaMontagne, MassHealth Chief Operating Officer.

22. Mass.gov (2026, March 31). Federal changes affecting MassHealth members.

23. Mass.gov (2026, March 31). Federal changes affecting MassHealth members.

24. Mass.gov (2025, November 26). MassHealth Federal Updates and Impact.

25. Boston Globe (2026, March 27). Over 200,000 people could lose MassHealth under coming federal changes, report says. Citing Katherine Hempstead.

26. Boston Globe (2026, May 21). Massachusetts preps for Medicaid work requirement: 300K at risk.

27. Boston Globe (2026, May 21). Massachusetts preps for Medicaid work requirement: 300K at risk. Quoting Elizabeth LaMontagne.

28. Boston Globe (2026, March 27). Over 200,000 people could lose MassHealth under coming federal changes, report says.

29. Boston Globe (2026, March 27). Over 200,000 people could lose MassHealth under coming federal changes, report says. Quoting Elizabeth LaMontagne.

30. KFF (2026, June 29). Tracking Implementation of the 2025 Reconciliation Law: Medicaid Work Requirements.

A famine in the Americas should stop us cold. That it barely registers tells you how numb we have become to the acts of the Trump Administration and how quietly this crisis has been engineered.

Because it has been engineered. The hunger now deepening from Port-au-Prince to Khartoum to Cox’s Bazar is not a story of failed rains alone, or of war alone. It is the product of two forces colliding: the largest collapse of foreign aid ever recorded, and the most punishing climate shocks in a generation. Neither would be as lethal on its own. Together they are killing people who would otherwise still be alive.

Start with the collapse. In April, the OECD reported that official development assistance from the world’s wealthy donors starting with Donald Trump’s cancellation of UAID fell 23.1 percent in 2025. This is the steepest single year drop on record, dragging global aid back to where it stood a decade ago. The United States drove roughly three-quarters of that decline, cutting its own assistance by 57 percent as it dismantled USAID. Humanitarian aid specifically fell by more than a third.

This is not an accounting abstraction. Aid is load-bearing infrastructure. It is the clinic that treats a malnourished child, the seeds a farmer plants before a drought, the early-warning system that sees famine coming in time to move food. Pull it out, and you don’t just remove charity, you remove the shock absorber standing between a fragile community, the next disaster and unnecessary deaths.

The death toll is no longer hypothetical. A study in The Lancet projected that the unwinding of USAID could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, a third of them young children. The dying has already begun by early 2026, one year into the cuts, independent trackers attributed more than 760,000 deaths to cuts in aid, over half of them children. That number has continued to climb higher.

Now layer on the climate. In Sudan, where war and aid withdrawal have converged into the world’s largest hunger crisis, famine was confirmed in 2025 and has since spread; by February 2026, two more areas of Darfur crossed the threshold into starvation, making Sudan the country with more territory in active famine than anywhere on Earth. Famine is the most extreme level of food insecurity, defined by a severe and widespread shortage of food that causes widespread acute malnutrition, starvation, and death. It represents a catastrophic collapse in a population’s ability to access sufficient, nutritious food.

In the Horn of Africa, a failed rainy season has pushed nearly 26 million people across Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia into extreme hunger. Extreme hunger caused by a lack of food is formally defined as severe food deprivation or starvation. It is the physical and psychological distress caused by consuming fewer than 1,800 calories per day, leading to malnutrition, tissue breakdown, and an inability for the body to sustain normal functions.

In Somalia, aid agencies project that close to half of all children under five will need treatment for acute malnutrition this year. In Afghanistan, child malnutrition is hitting record highs as the WFP, its budget collapsing, can reach only a fraction of the 17 million people who need food. Even the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, who are stateless due to the genocide in Myanmar, who are barred from working, confined onto one of the most cyclone-battered coastlines on the planet, have watched their food vouchers from the World Food Programme be cut from $12.50 a month toward as little as $6, as the relief operation that sustains them fell to under a fifth of its funding.

The pattern is always the same. Climate change supplies the shock. The aid cuts remove the defense. And the people who did the least to warm the planet and have the fewest resources to survive it are caught in between and pay with their lives.

There is a final, quieter cruelty in all this: the cuts have taken our eyes. The same freeze that gutted food programs also crippled the surveillance networks that watch for famine. When the world’s authoritative hunger report appeared this spring, its authors warned that the apparent leveling-off of global hunger was partly an illusion because the analysis rested on the fewest adequately measured countries in a decade, with whole nations, including Ethiopia and its tens of millions in dire states, going uncounted. We are not only starving the response. We are making it so no one knows what is going on.

None of this had to happen, and none of it is irreversible. The single most important step is also the simplest: reverse the humanitarian cuts, and fast. The WFP says it needs roughly $13 billion this year just to reach the hungriest 110 million people. That is reaching only a third of those people in need. The WFP currently expects the wealthy countries to fund barely half that. In a global economy measured in the trillions, the sum required to keep millions alive is a rounding error. What’s missing is not money. It’s will. It is the courage to stand up to the evil foreign policy of Donald Trump and other wealthy nations.

The rest follows. Rebuild the early-warning systems and shield them from political whim, so we can at least see the next famine coming. Shift climate finance toward grants rather than loans, so that nations already drowning in debt aren’t asked to borrow their way through disasters they did not cause. Treat food aid and climate adaptation not as generosity but as what they are: the cheapest insurance a stable world has ever been offered and the best way to stop chaos.

Hunger does not stay where we leave it. It drives displacement; displacement drives instability; instability reaches, eventually, the comfortable capitals that imagined themselves insulated. The famine spreading across the global South is a test of whether wealthy nations will recognize a catastrophe of their own making while it can still be stopped.

It is being made by subtraction, one cut, one failed harvest, one shuttered clinic at a time. It can be unmade the same way. But only if we choose to look and act.

They were not exaggerating. As they wrote, famine was spreading across Sudan, which by February had more land in active starvation than anywhere on Earth. A different failed rainy season was driving nearly 26 million people toward catastrophe across Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Afghanistan’s child-malnutrition caseload was climbing to a record high. And in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti had entered hurricane season, for the first time in its history, with no emergency food stocks at all, its safety net gone at the very moment the climate charged storms returned.

These look like separate disasters. They are not. They are symptoms of a single, deliberate convergence: the largest termination of foreign aid ever recorded, colliding with the most punishing climate shocks in a generation. Neither force would be as lethal alone; together they are manufacturing famine, not as an accident but as the predictable result of choices made by Donald Trump and in wealthy capitals. This is how this famine machine was built, and how it can still be dismantled before millions of people die..

The Annihilation

On 30 January 2025, a website went dark.¹ The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, also known as FEWS NET had been created by Ronald Regan and for forty years it did one thing: it told the world where the next famine would arrive before it did. It was built by USAID in 1985, in the long shadow of the Ethiopian famine that killed roughly a million people, after a U.S. president demanded to know why no one had warned him.¹

For four decades it read rainfall, soil moisture, crop yields, livestock prices and conflict across some thirty of the world’s most fragile countries and turned that data into eight-month forecasts accurate enough that aid could be put in place before children starved.When it predicted drought in Ethiopia in 2016, food was moved into place in advance and, in a country that had once buried a generation, almost no one died.¹ Then, in the opening days of 2025, the system that watches for hunger was switched off by Donald Trump.

The chokepoint is a budget line. In a single year, five of the world’s wealthiest Western governments carried out the steepest withdrawal of foreign assistance in the history of the modern aid system, and they did it at the exact moment the climate they had spent two centuries destabilizing with CO2 emissions from fossil fuels was producing its most punishing droughts, floods, and crop failures in a generation. The two shocks did not just happen together. The aid collapse of 2025 reveals something quiet and cruel: how the deliberate removal of a safety net, layered onto the climate emergency which the poorest did nothing to cause, converts chronic poverty into acute famine.

The numbers are not subtle. Official development assistance from the world’s established donors fell 23.1 percent in 2025, to $174.3 billion, that is the largest annual drop ever recorded, dragging global aid back a decade to where it stood in 2015.³ The United States and Donald Trump alone drove three-quarters of the drop, slashing its own assistance by 56.9 percent as it dismantled USAID, terminated roughly 83 percent of its programs, and withdrew from the World Health Organization.³,⁴ For the first time on record, the five largest donors: the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and France, all cut their aid in the same year.³Humanitarian assistance specifically fell 35.8 percent.³ A peer-reviewed forecast in The Lancet estimated that the USAID cuts alone could produce more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five.⁴ A later modelling study, accounting for the cascade of European cuts that followed, increased the figure to 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030 and sizeable loss of life thereafter.⁵ And the toll is no longer only a forecast. By early 2026, one year into the dismantling of USAID, independent trackers modelling the cuts attributed more than 760,000 deaths to them already, over half of them children, a number that has gone on climbing through the first half of 2026.

“The rich world did not simply stop helping. It removed the buffer between the climate crisis and the people least able to survive it and then looked away as the two collided.”

The Aid Pipeline and What Happens When It Breaks

Foreign assistance is not charity in the sentimental sense. In dozens of fragile economies, foreign aid is the load-bearing infrastructure, the difference between a bad season and a mass grave. It funds the departments of health, the clinics that treat a malnourished child, the rations that bridge a failed harvest, the water well boreholes that hold off a drought, the surveillance networks that catch a disease outbreak, and the early-warning systems that tell everyone else where to look. Pull that pipeline and you do not merely subtract a service. You remove the shock absorber that stood between these countries and the next climate hazard barreling toward them.

This is where the second crisis enters. Climate change does not act alone in these countries; it acts as a risk multiplier, amplifying every existing weakness in food, water, health, and public finance.⁶ And the multiplier is arriving at an increasing rate with increasing ferocity just as the donor countries make the buffer disappear.

The UNEP Adaptation Gap Report for 2025, aptly titled Running on Empty,^[i] found that developing countries will need between $310 and $365 billion a year to adapt to a warming world by 2035, against the roughly $26 billion in international public adaptation finance actually delivered in 2023: a gap of at least twelvefold, now widening as donor budgets shrink.⁶ The cruelty deepens in conflict zones. The International Rescue Committee found that seventeen of the world’s most conflict-affected, climate-exposed countries saw their development assistance fall by more than 40 percent between 2013 and 2023, even as climate shocks intensified, while capturing only 12 percent of the adaptation finance flowing to the developing world.⁷ Afghanistan and Yemen alone face losses of more than 10 percent of national income from the anticipated aid cuts.⁷

Beneath all of this runs a deeper, slower mechanism: the climate debt trap. When a drought, flood, or storm strikes a poor country, it has to borrow to rebuild, and public debt that averaged 68 percent of GDP in the disaster year climbs to roughly 75 percent within three years.⁸ The interest on that borrowing then crowds out the very services that protect against the next shock. By 2023, forty-eight countries were spending more on external debt service than on the health of their own citizens, up from thirty-five a decade earlier.⁹ Into this doom loop climate damage is feeding debt, debt is starving public services, hollowed-out services invite the next disaster. The wealthy world has now evilly added the further shock of aid withdrawal. Climate hazards depress local credit and erode sovereign fiscal buffers across the Global South;¹⁰ when international assistance is pulled at the same moment, countries are left with empty treasuries and dismantled public services exactly when the physical costs of a warming planet demand unprecedented investment.

The path to hunger is direct, and it runs like this. Aid funds the food rations needed by climate refugees and the projects needed to adapt to climate change. Cut the aid and the rations shrink while the boreholes go unbuilt. A climate shock such as a failed rainy season, a flash flood, a heat-blasted harvest then lands on a community with no buffer left. Crops and livestock die. Food prices spike in local markets. Families cut meals, then cut them again. Children stop growing, then start stunting and then dying. None of this moves at the speed of a headline. It moves at the speed of a growing season. But it moves, reliably, from the cruel spreadsheet in a donor capital to the empty bowl of a child in a displacement camp.

Afghanistan: Total Safety-Net Dissolution

In the most fragile states, the interaction between environmental collapse and aid dependence is at its most deadly and nowhere more than Afghanistan, where the United States had supplied more than 40 percent of humanitarian support before the cuts.¹¹ The country was already caught in chronic, climate-driven water scarcity: severe drought, failed and irregular rains, and flash floods that had been steadily crippling food production and emptying the countryside.¹¹ Onto that, in late 2025, fell two devastating earthquakes and the forced return of millions of Afghans expelled from Iran and Pakistan.¹¹ And then the foreign aid buffer vanished.

When Washington terminated its Afghanistan programs which amounted to more than $560 million slated for 2025, the health system buckled almost overnight.¹¹ The number of closed health facilities surged from 188 in February to over 420 by the end of the year, cutting roughly three million people off from basic health care.¹¹ Nearly 300 nutrition centers shut their doors. The World Food Programme, stripped of U.S. funding, had to collapse its programs from feeding 5.6 million people in the winter of 2024 to barely one million a month in 2025. WFP was forced, in the words of its own officials, to turn away three of every four acutely malnourished children for lack of money.¹¹ For the first time in four years, the number of hungry Afghans rose, to 17.4 million, with seven provinces nearing famine.¹¹ By the first half of 2026 the picture had darkened further: child malnutrition was projected to reach a record 4.9 million, and with its Afghanistan budget collapsing from about $600 million in 2024 toward a projected $200 million, the WFP could reach only around two million of the 17.4 million in acute hunger, still turning away three of every four malnourished children. When the next drought or flood strikes these un-buffered districts, there are no clinics, no early-warning teams, no food stocks, and no nutritional safety net left to turn to. The collapse will be total.

The Horn of Africa and Kenya: Drought Meets the Vanishing Ration

In East Africa, climate change has warped the rhythm of the seasons into something violent and unpredictable, swinging between multi-year droughts and catastrophic, disease-breeding floods. The region is now gripped by yet another failure of the rains. By the close of 2025, FEWS NET, back online but operating at a fraction of its former capacity, estimated that 20 to 25 million people across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya needed humanitarian food assistance, with drought the primary driver for more than half of them.¹² In the pastoral north of Kenya, milk production fell by roughly a third, livestock that survived the 2020–2023 drought began dying again, and staple maize prices in counties such as Kitui ran nearly 20% above their five-year average. By early 2026 the crisis had deepened sharply: after the October–December short rains failed across the region, among the driest such seasons on record, the number in extreme hunger across Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia climbed toward 26 million; in Somalia alone the figure facing crisis hunger nearly doubled to 6.5 million, and the IPC projected that close to half of all Somali children under five would need treatment for acute malnutrition by the middle of 2026, even as Somalia’s response plan went barely a tenth funded and Washington withheld support entirely.¹² More than 800,000 Kenyan children were projected to need treatment for acute malnutrition in 2026.¹²

800,000 children needing treatment for acute malnutrition will, even if they survive, carry the consequences of this event for the rest of their lives. These 800,000 children will experience lasting harm: stunted growth and shorter adult height that early nutrition can never fully restore; impaired brain development during the critical first years, translating into lifelong deficits in memory, attention, language, and learning; a heightened lifetime risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease as bodies adapted to scarcity later struggle with normal diets; weakened immunity and a months-long window of elevated mortality even after they leave treatment; and lasting damage to their guts and other organs. At the population level, these losses compound into diminished education, lower lifetime earnings, and a cycle that passes from malnourished girls to the low-birthweight children they will one day bear, a quiet, permanent toll that outlasts the famine that caused it. If they experience multiple periods without food, the impacts compound.

These 800,000 children needed emergency treatment for acute malnutrition just at the moment the rations evaporated. As OECD aid contracted at its fastest rate in history, the World Food Programme which had already cut rations for three-quarters of East Africa’s refugees in earlier funding crises was forced into deeper retreat.¹² Kenya hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps such as Kakuma and Dadaab, where populations have been swollen by climate displacement from across the region.¹² When climate shocks spoiled local crops and the simultaneous rollback of food aid forced host families to absorb new survival costs, the result was not only hunger but fracture: as documented in longitudinal studies of refugee-hosting communities, the erosion of support wears down the willingness of host populations to take in the displaced, driving local backlash and regional instability in exactly the zones where there is the greatest need to help.¹³

“Where drought leads, hunger is never far behind. What is new is that the world has now intentionally dismantled the very system built to see the drought coming and provide aid before the famine comes.”

Uganda: The Refugee-Hosting and Drought Nexus

Uganda carries a burden few countries match: it hosts nearly two million refugees, the largest such population in Africa, even as shortening growing seasons and intensifying drought tighten the screws on its own farmers.¹³ The country has long relied on external frameworks to manage that pressure, the agricultural adaptation programs, the sanitation systems, the managed water distribution that allowed displaced populations to survive seasonal shocks rather than be destroyed by them.

Then the funding collapsed. USAID programs in Uganda absorbed a loss on the order of $307 million, a roughly 66 percent programmatic reduction.¹⁴ Academic assessments of frontline settlements such as Nakivale documented what followed: the elimination of USAID-funded agricultural adaptation, sanitation, and water infrastructure left displaced populations entirely exposed to the next climate shock.¹⁴ Without managed water distribution, a localized drought no longer slowed at the edge of the camp, it turned directly into food shortage while public-health infrastructure collapsed.¹⁴ The buffer that converted a hazard into something survivable was simply gone, and the climate hazard arrived anyway and people died.

South Africa: Dismantling the Scientific Frontline

· Not every casualty of the foreign aid withdrawal starves. Some of the damage is to the machinery that keeps hunger and disease from spreading in the first place. As temperatures climb across Southern Africa, the geographic range and transmission windows of vector-borne and infectious disease that impact people, livestock and crops such as tuberculosis, malaria, waterborne outbreaks, Foot-and-Mouth Disease, Tick-Borne Diseases, Lumpy Skin Disease, Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN) and Vector Transmitted Viruses, Transboundary Plant Pests, are shifting to new countries and to new latitudes, placing new strain on public-health governance exactly as the systems to track them are being dismantled.¹⁵

On 26 February 2025, the United States terminated roughly 90 percent of the USAID-administered PEPFAR projects in South Africa, stripping more than $400 million from a country at the epicenter of the global HIV pandemic.¹⁶ Some 8,000 health workers were fired; clinics across 27 priority districts shed staff or shut entirely.¹⁶ A parallel mandate barred the National Institutes of Health from issuing foreign sub-awards, threatening dozens of research sites and the clinical trials, surveillance networks, and field data collection that the world relies on to understand how a warming climate redraws the maps of diseases.¹⁶,¹⁷ South African institutions stood to lose a substantial share of research income, triggering job cuts that ripple outward through sanitation, food security, and governance programs the same grants once cross-subsidized.¹⁷ The point is not that South Africa will starve.

Nor did the damage stop at human medicine. The same freeze tore through the region’s “One Health” surveillance, the joined-up tracking of human, livestock, and zoonotic disease that is built to catch an outbreak before it can jump the species barrier. Integrated animal-human monitoring programs run with bodies such as the South African Veterinary Association were dismantled, leaving officials blind to pathogens mutating between wildlife and livestock. The defunding of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, whose emergency veterinary network had drawn roughly 90 percent of its funding from Washington, collapsed the transboundary animal-disease system that had spanned more than fifty countries and shut down the checkpoints that screened livestock in transit, allowing diseases such as foot-and-mouth to cross borders undetected. Broader freezes on agricultural and food-security grants halted field research as well, leaving farmers without the diagnostic pipelines to track the invasive, climate-driven blights now spreading through their crops.¹⁷ The point, again, is not that South Africa will starve. It is that the tools humanity built to watch climate-driven hunger and illness coming, the surveys, the trials, the data needed to track these disasters were switched off at the same time as the early-warning system itself.

Sudan: Famine in the Dark

Sudan is where the two crises meet their most catastrophic expression, and where the result of the blackout is no longer theoretical. Famine has been confirmed in Sudan: first in the Zamzam displacement camp in Darfur, then in Al Fasher and Kadugli, with the risk of famine declared across more than twenty additional areas. In October 2025 the Rapid Support Forces overran Al Fasher after an eighteen-month siege, killing civilians as they fled and driving more than a million people from the city; by February 2026 famine had spread to two further areas of North Darfur, Um Baru and Kernoi, where more than half of small children were acutely malnourished, making Sudan the country with more territory in active famine than anywhere else on earth.¹⁸ Twenty-five million people, half the country’s population, face acute hunger; the World Food Programme reaches an average of 4.2 million a month, including 1.8 million in famine or famine-risk zones, while warning of imminent food and other aid pipelines break.¹⁸

And in Sudan, the early-warning system has gone almost entirely dark. FEWS NET data disappeared in the freeze; the government had already suspended its cooperation with the U.N. classification system; and the NGOs that feed the global hunger-monitoring framework with field surveys have been forced to scale back as their own U.S. funding evaporated.¹,¹⁸ In Sudan, a country sliding into the worst famine of the decade, the world is being asked to respond to a catastrophe it can no longer fully see. As one senior early-warning analyst put it as the system collapsed due to the indifference of the U.S. and other western donors, the global aid and the parallel detection services were pulled at the very moment the risk of multiple simultaneous famines had never been higher.¹

Bangladesh: A Halved Ration in the Cyclone Belt

If Afghanistan shows what total dissolution looks like, Bangladesh shows the same machinery turned on the largest stateless population on earth. Nearly 1.2 million Rohingya, driven out of Myanmar by a campaign the United States itself called a genocide and pushed across the border again by renewed fighting in 2025, are confined to the camps of Cox’s Bazar, barred from working and almost wholly dependent on aid to eat. They are also penned onto one of the most cyclone- and flood-battered coastlines on the planet, where the storms come every year and the camps, stripped of trees and packed onto bare hillsides, dissolve into mud and landslides when they do.

The United States had been the largest single donor to the Rohingya response, supplying more than half of it, roughly $300 million, in 2024. As that money vanished, the World Food Programme cut the monthly food voucher from $12.50 to as little as $6, less than nine cents a meal, and the wider relief effort, only about half funded in 2025, fell to barely 19 percent funded in 2026 which will result in even more drastic cuts to food supplements and more hunger.¹⁹

The pattern is by now familiar: in an earlier round, families lost their shelters to a cyclone only weeks before a funding shortfall forced their rations down. Malnutrition in the camps has climbed to its worst level since the exodus of 2017, with the number of children needing treatment for acute malnutrition rising by more than a 25% in a single year.¹⁹ And as the ration shrinks, the desperate take to the sea, where hundreds of Rohingya drown or vanish each year on smugglers’ boats bound for Malaysia. The buffer between a stateless people and the next storm has been folded up and put away by Donald Trump and other Western donors.

Haiti: No Stocks Left for the Storm

In the Western hemisphere, the same story has a single, stark address. Haiti is the only country in the Americas, and one of just five on earth, where people are enduring catastrophic, famine-like hunger; 5.8 million Haitians, more than half the population, can no longer reliably eat.²⁰ A decade of gang violence, political collapse and economic ruin had already hollowed the country out when, in late 2025, Hurricane Melissa tore into the island.

Here the removal of the buffer is almost literal. For the first time in its operations there, the World Food Programme entered hurricane season with no prepositioned food stocks at all, the funding shortfall having stripped away the contingency reserves it had always kept to feed survivors in a storm’s first days.²⁰ The cupboard was bare at the moment it was most needed. The same shortfalls forced the agency to suspend hot meals for displaced families and to halve the rations of those already at emergency hunger, while Haiti’s 2025 humanitarian plan stood barely 8 percent funded at midyear and a spike in fuel prices, driven by conflict in the Middle East, pushed food still further out of reach.²⁰ The lesson runs north as well: across the Central American Dry Corridor, the drought-cracked belt through Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, failed harvests had by early 2026 left one in six Guatemalans short of food and were driving families toward the United States border, even as the very programs built to keep them fed and rooted were switched off.²⁰

Famine by Subtraction: A War on the Poor

Step back from the individual countries and a single structural reality comes into focus. The hunger now spreading across the Global South is not, in the main, being caused by a sudden absence of food in the world. It is being manufactured by subtraction, the deliberate removal of global aid, in a single budget cycle. Likewise, the deliberate removal of the systems that stood between a warming climate and the people least equipped to endure it. This is famine by subtraction, and it has a chillingly clear arithmetic.

Begin with the rations. The World Food Programme expects that it received 40 percent less funding in 2025 than in 2024, about $6.5 billion against $9.8 billion. This aid reduction held even as global acute food insecurity stayed near its record at 318 million people, 41 million of them at emergency levels.²¹ The agency calculates that its cuts alone could push 13.7 million people from crisis into emergency hunger, a one-third increase, and notes that the number of people in famine or catastrophic hunger has doubled in two years to 1.4 million.²¹ The world Food Programme expects to expects to receive ~$6.4 billion in 2026 compared to the ~$13 billion it needs to reach the 110 million people in desperate need. Across its operations the math is brutally concrete: in South Sudan, every recipient is now on a half-to-two-thirds ration with key foods running out; in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, planned support was slashed from 2.3 million people to 600,000; in Haiti, hot meals stopped and rations were halved.¹⁹ This means millions of people will die and millions of children will suffer from stunting and have life long medical problems because they don’t get enough to eat.

Look more directly at these children. Malnutrition already underlies 45 percent of all deaths globally among children under five, and the main tool against it, the ready-to-use therapeutic food, the peanut paste that pulls a wasting child back from the edge used to run through the exact supply chains that the USAID and other foreign aid cuts broke.²² UNICEF warned that stocks of that therapeutic food were running short in seventeen countries, leaving up to 2.4 million severely malnourished children at risk of going without.²³ In one of the era’s defining images, enough food to feed 3.5 million people for a month, some $98 million worth, including thousands of tonnes of therapeutic paste capable of saving hundreds of thousands of children was left by the Trump Administration to rot in four U.S. government warehouses, some of it destined for incineration or conversion to animal feed, while children starved in Sudan, South Sudan, and beyond.²³

Finally, the aid cuts have subtracted our eyes. The gutting of FEWS NET, which was brought back after its shutdown, but only in a diminished form, and shifted to State Department control, together with the simultaneous strain on the data networks that feed the international hunger-classification system, mean that the cuts have blinded the response as well as bankrupting it.¹ When the Global Report on Food Crises appeared in 2026, its authors warned that the apparent leveling-off of world hunger was partly an artifact of the data: the report rested on the fewest adequately measured countries in a decade, with eighteen left unclassified, among them Ethiopia, where some twenty-seven million people went uncounted meaning hunger most likely had not leveled off. A response that is both poorer and blinder is the structural recipe for the thing the world spent forty years learning to prevent: famine that is seen too late, because it was happening in places where, without aid, and without anyone still watching.

“The food rotted in the warehouse. The clinic closed its doors. The satellite kept watching the drought, but no one was left to read the warning. This is not scarcity. It is an evil decision not to provide international aid - creating hunger and starvation like this around the world is a political choice, it is a war on the poor.”

What Must Change: Policy Changes Proportionate to the Crisis

Donor governments must reverse the humanitarian cuts first, and fast. Humanitarian assistance is the thinnest, most time-sensitive layer of the safety net, these are the ration that prevents a hungry season from becoming a fatal one. Unfortunately, humanitarian aid has absorbed the deepest proportional cut of all.³ Restoring it is not a long-term development question; it is a question of who eats this year and who will starve? The scale is now plain: the World Food Programme says it needs roughly $13 billion in 2026 just to reach 110 million of the hungriest, a third of those in need. Every month humanitarian aid cuts are maintained converts a reversible funding gap into an irreversible death toll that the peer-reviewed literature has already counted in the millions.⁴,⁵

Climate adaptation finance must be protected as the buffer it is and delivered as grants rather than debt. Pouring loans into climate-vulnerable countries only tightens the debt trap that is already crowding health and food spending out of national budgets.⁸,⁹The evidence on prevention is overwhelming: every dollar spent on early risk reduction saves up to fifteen in post-disaster recovery.⁷A world that cannot find $40 billion a year for adaptation will spend many multiples of that on the famines, displacement, and instability that the absence of adaptation funding guarantees.

The early-warning architecture must be rebuilt and shielded from political whim. A famine-monitoring system that can be switched off in a single executive order at the exact moment of maximum risk and maximum need is not a system; it is a liability. FEWS NET and the data pipelines that feed the international classification framework are global public goods, and they should be funded and governed as such because a hunger crisis that no one can see is one that no one can stop.

And the wealthy world must recognize that providing humanitarian aid funding is strategy for global stability, not idle generosity. Food insecurity drives displacement, displacement drives instability, and instability drives the conflicts that close shipping lanes, collapse governments, and ultimately reach the donor nations that imagined themselves insulated. Protecting food aid and adaptation finance is not charity. It is the cheapest insurance policy a stable world has ever been offered, and it is being canceled in real time.

A Warning Without a Warning System

The wealthy nations of the world have told themselves a comforting story about foreign aid: that it was wasteful, that it was optional, that its absence would be absorbed somewhere far away by someone else. That story is being rewritten, season by failing season, by a climate that does not respect national budgets and by the arithmetic of millions of empty food bowls in refugee camps and millions of unnecessary deaths. The aid withdrawal of 2025, which has been mostly maintained since then, adding to the deliberate removal of the global safety net at the precise hour the climate emergency is demanding the increased responses.

The seventeen million Afghans now facing hunger did not dismantle their own health system.¹¹ The families in the drought-cracked Horn of Africa did not vote to halve their rations.¹² The children in Sudan starving in the dark did not switch off the system built to warn the world they were starving.¹⁸ But they are paying for all of it, in skipped meals and stunted growth and the quiet, countable emergency that famine always is. Four decades ago, a famine the world failed to see coming killed a million people and shamed a superpower and President Ronald Regan into building a system so that the world would never be blind to an impending starvation again. In 2025, that system was switched off on purpose. Now the consequences are being written on the faces and bodies of the people and children who are least responsible for climate change or the state of their countries. What is missing this time, is that there is no one in power who cares. We need to care and the world needs to restore humanitarian aid and adaptation resources before more of the world descends into chaos.

“In 1985, the world built a machine to make sure that a massive famine would never happen with no one seeing it coming. In 2025, the wealthiest nation in the history of the Earth lead by Donald Trump, and its allies turned the machine off and then defunded the food and other aid response that the machine existed to trigger in case of a famine disaster. People will die in huge numbers, and these wealthy countries will all bear the shame.”

Endnotes

1. Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET): history, methodology, and 2025 shutdown. Created by USAID in 1985 following the 1983–85 Ethiopian famine; taken offline 30 January 2025 during the foreign-aid freeze and partially restored in June 2025. See FEWS NET (fews.net); NPR, “A respected U.S. famine warning system is ‘currently unavailable’” (21 Feb 2025); Devex, “USAID-funded famine early warning system goes offline” (30 Jan 2025); Devex Dish, “Will the world’s next famine go unseen?” (19 Mar 2025). The 2016 Ethiopia pre-positioning account is from D. Harden via NPR (2025). By 2026 the system had resumed only in reduced form, with management shifting to the U.S. State Department; see Devex, “FEWS NET, once USAID’s flagship famine warning system, is back online” (25 Jun 2025). On the resulting data blindness, see Global Network Against Food Crises, Global Report on Food Crises 2026 (24 Apr 2026), which recorded the fewest adequately measured countries in a decade, with 18 left unclassified, among them Ethiopia (~27 million people uncounted).

2. On the fertilizer-supply mechanism and food-price transmission, see the companion analysis of the Strait of Hormuz fertilizer shock and prior food-price crises; Headey, D. & Fan, S. (2010), Reflections on the Global Food Crisis, IFPRI Research Monograph 165.

3. OECD (2026). Preliminary 2025 ODA data: total ODA fell 23.1% in real terms to USD 174.3 billion, the largest annual contraction on record; the United States drove ~75% of the decline (−56.9%); humanitarian aid fell 35.8%; first year the five largest donors all cut simultaneously. OECD, “International aid fell sharply in 2025” (9 Apr 2026) and “A historic decline in foreign aid: preliminary 2025 ODA data.”

4. Cavalcanti, D., Ferreira de Sales, L., et al. (2025). Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030. The Lancet, 406:283–294. Projects >14 million additional deaths by 2030, including ~4.5 million children under five, across 133 countries; ~83% of USAID programs terminated.

5. Modelling study reported February 2026 projecting at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030 when accounting for compounding cuts by the UK, Germany, Canada and others. CNN, “One year on from dismantling of USAID” (4 Feb 2026). The Center for Global Development separately estimated 500,000–1,000,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone. On the documented toll to date, the Boston University–based ImpactCounter tracker attributed more than 762,000 deaths to the cuts by January 2026, over half of them children; see CIDRAP (21 Jan 2026).

6. UN Environment Programme (2025). Adaptation Gap Report 2025: Running on Empty. Developing-country adaptation needs estimated at USD 310–365 billion/year by 2035 (2023 prices) against ~USD 26 billion in international public adaptation finance in 2023; needs by 2035 at least 12 times current flows. On climate as a risk multiplier, see also Mohamed, A. A. (2026), Climate change as a macro-financial risk multiplier, Frontiers in Climate.

7. International Rescue Committee (2025). Navigating the Climate Crisis in a New Era of Aid. Seventeen conflict-affected countries saw development assistance fall >40% (2013–2023) while receiving only 12% of adaptation finance; Afghanistan and Yemen face potential losses exceeding 10% of GNI from aid cuts; every USD 1 in early risk reduction saves up to USD 15 in recovery.

8. International Monetary Fund analysis of major disasters (1992–2016): public debt rose on average from ~68% of GDP in the disaster year to ~75% three years later. See Eurodad, “A tale of two emergencies”; phys.org / The Conversation, “Climate disasters will send many countries into a debt spiral” (12 Nov 2025), citing Jamaica’s post-Hurricane Melissa exposure.

9. Down To Earth (2025), “Debt’s climate link.” By 2023, 48 countries’ external sovereign debt service exceeded government health expenditure as a share of GDP (up from 35 in 2013). On the “climate debt trap,” see WRI, “Developing Countries Won’t Beat the Climate Crisis Without Tackling Rising Debt.”

10. Mohamed, A. A. (2026). Climate change as a macro-financial risk multiplier: evidence from private-sector credit in fragile sub-Saharan Africa. Frontiers in Climate. Documents how climate variability depresses local private credit and erodes sovereign fiscal buffers.

11. Afghanistan: UN OCHA, Afghanistan Humanitarian Update (May 2025) and UN News (11 Dec 2025) — closed health facilities rose from 188 (Feb) to >420, cutting ~3 million from care; ~300 nutrition centers closed. WFP support fell from 5.6 million people/month (winter 2024) to ~1 million; ~17.4 million food insecure (first rise in four years), seven provinces nearing famine; ~4 million children acutely malnourished with three in four turned away (AP/ABC News, 19 Feb 2026). Refugees International (29 Jan 2026), “No One Cares About Us Anymore”: USAID cut >USD 560 million slated for 2025; crisis compounded by drought, two late-2025 earthquakes, and mass returns from Iran and Pakistan; U.S. previously supplied >40% of humanitarian support. On the 2026 deepening, see WFP, Afghanistan emergency page (2026): child malnutrition projected at a record ~4.9 million; WFP’s Afghanistan budget falling from ~USD 600 million (2024) to ~USD 300 million (2025) and a projected ~USD 200 million (2026), able to reach only ~2 million of the 17.4 million in acute hunger and turning away three of every four malnourished children (AP/Washington Post, 18 Feb 2026).

12. Horn of Africa / Kenya: FEWS NET East Africa Alert (Dec 2025) — 20–25 million across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya needing assistance, drought the driver for 50–55%; maize prices ~19% above five-year average in Kitui; milk production down ~one-third in Mandera. Welthungerhilfe, Hunger Due to Drought in East Africa — ~810,900 Kenyan children requiring malnutrition treatment in 2026. JRC Global Drought Observatory (Feb 2026). On earlier ration cuts (rations cut for three-quarters of East Africa’s refugees), Migration Policy Institute (2026). On the 2026 escalation, see Oxfam (5 Mar 2026): failed October–December short rains pushed ~26 million across Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia into extreme hunger; Somalia’s IPC caseload nearly doubled to 6.5 million; the IPC projected nearly half of Somali under-five children needing acute-malnutrition treatment by mid-2026 (also Concern Worldwide); Somalia’s 2026 response plan ~13% funded, with the U.S. excluding Somalia from UN funding.

13. Uganda hosts ~2 million refugees, the largest population in Africa. On refugee-hosting dynamics and aid withdrawal, see MacDonald, M. (2026), Aid Cuts and the Politics of Refugee Hosting, Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement; and Lee, H. E. (n.d.), Global Aid Cuts and Local Health Consequences in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda (PMC).

14. Lee, H. E. (n.d.). Global Aid Cuts and Local Health Consequences in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda (PMC). USAID programs in Uganda absorbed a loss on the order of USD 307 million (~66% programmatic reduction), eliminating agricultural adaptation, sanitation, and water infrastructure and leaving displaced populations exposed to seasonal climate shocks.

15. On climate-driven shifts in disease transmission in Southern Africa, see Alawode, G. B. (n.d.), United States aid cut: alternatives for sustainable financing for health (PMC); and Shaikh, B. T. (2025), Global impact of the health funding cuts by the United States of America, Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal.

16. South Africa / PEPFAR: on 26 Feb 2025 the U.S. terminated ~90% of USAID-administered PEPFAR projects, cutting ~USD 400–420 million (≈17% of the national HIV budget) overnight; ~8,000+ health workers displaced; clinics across 27 priority districts affected. UNAIDS (Mar 2025); Physicians for Human Rights (2026), Wasted Investments, Looming Crisis; PBS/AP (2026).

17. Murray, L. W. (2025). The impact of United States Government cuts to funding on South African Healthcare and Research, SciELO. NIH ban on foreign sub-awards threatened dozens of research sites and ongoing clinical trials; institutions faced losses of a substantial share of research income, prompting retrenchments across cross-cutting programs. See also Auwal, A. R. (n.d.), The global implications of U.S. withdrawal from WHO and the USAID shutdown (PMC); and “The human cost of US foreign aid cuts: implications for HIV service delivery, research and innovation in South Africa,” AIDS Care (2025). On the animal-health and “One Health” dimension: the US provided roughly 90% of the funding for FAO’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD), whose network spanned more than 50 countries; the cuts forced FAO to terminate dozens of projects and largely shut down transboundary animal-disease surveillance, raising the risk of animal-to-human spillover (around 75% of recent emerging infectious diseases are of animal origin). See K. Sumption (former FAO Chief Veterinary Officer) in Welthungerhilfe, Global Food Journal, “USAID cutoff boosts risk of animal infectious diseases” (2026); FAO, “Transboundary animal diseases pose urgent threat to global food security” (28 Nov 2025); and Physicians for Human Rights, Wasted Investments, Looming Crisis (2026).

18. Sudan: famine confirmed in Zamzam camp, Darfur (2024) and in Al Fasher and Kadugli (2025), with famine risk in 20+ additional areas; ~25 million people (half the population) in acute hunger, ~8.5 million at emergency level (IPC 4). WFP reaches ~4.2 million/month, including ~1.8 million in famine or famine-risk zones. IPC participation suspended and FEWS NET data unavailable during the freeze; MSF forced to suspend work in Zamzam. WFP (Oct 2025); ActionAid; Devex Dish (19 Mar 2025). The Rapid Support Forces captured Al Fasher on 26 October 2025 after an 18-month siege, with mass killings of fleeing civilians and >1.2 million displaced from the city; famine spread to Um Baru and Kernoi in North Darfur by February 2026, making Sudan the country with the most areas in active famine. See IPC/FRC (Nov 2025; Feb 2026); UNICEF/FAO/WFP (4 Nov 2025); Action Against Hunger (5 Feb 2026); Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026. Sudan’s 2026 humanitarian response plan (~USD 2.9 billion) was only ~5.5% funded in early 2026.

19. Bangladesh / Rohingya: the U.S. provided more than half (~USD 300 million) of the Rohingya humanitarian response in 2024; programs were ~50% funded in 2025 and ~19% in 2026 (NPR, 1 Apr 2026; Al Jazeera, 6 Mar 2025). WFP cut the monthly food voucher from USD 12.50 toward as low as USD 6 (Al Jazeera, 6 Mar 2025; Amnesty International, 17 Mar 2025). Cyclones (e.g. Mocha) and floods repeatedly compound the ration cuts; child acute-malnutrition needs rose ~27% year-on-year, the worst since 2017 (UNICEF; WFP, 7 Mar 2025). Roughly 1.2 million Rohingya remain in Cox’s Bazar, barred from work, with renewed Myanmar fighting in 2024–25 driving new arrivals.

20. Haiti / Central America: Haiti is the only country in the Americas (one of five globally) with people in catastrophic (IPC 5) hunger; ~5.8 million, over half the population, are acutely food insecure (WFP/IPC, 2025–26). Hurricane Melissa struck southern Haiti in late 2025; for the first time, funding shortfalls left WFP with no prepositioned hurricane-season stocks and forced the suspension of hot meals and the halving of rations; Haiti’s 2025 response plan was ~8% funded at midyear (WFP, 3 Jun 2025 and 15 Oct 2025). A U.S. Food for Peace contribution in April 2026 reached ~390,000 people. On the Central American Dry Corridor (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua), see IPC/UNOCHA (2026): ~3 million Guatemalans (one in six) projected at IPC 3+ in February–April 2026, amid climate-driven crop failure and migration toward the U.S. border.

21. WFP (2025), A Lifeline at Risk: Food Assistance at Breaking Point, and “WFP warns six critical operations facing pipeline breaks” (15 Oct 2025): 2025 budget ~USD 6.4 billion, down ~40% from USD 10 billion in 2024; record 319 million in acute food insecurity, 44 million at emergency level; cuts could push 13.7 million from crisis (IPC 3) to emergency (IPC 4); people in famine/catastrophic hunger (IPC 5) doubled in two years to 1.4 million. Country ration figures: South Sudan, DRC, Haiti per the same WFP reporting and UN News (15 Oct 2025). Updated figures from WFP 2026 Global Outlook (18 Nov 2025) and Global Report on Food Crises 2026 (24 Apr 2026): ~318 million in acute food insecurity, ~41 million at emergency level; WFP raised ~USD 6.5 billion in 2025 and says it needs ~USD 13 billion in 2026 to reach 110 million people, a third of those in need.

22. World Health Organization: malnutrition underlies ~45% of deaths among children under five. Peer-reviewed: “Children at Risk: The Growing Impact of USAID Cuts on Pediatric Malnutrition and Death Rates,” Maternal & Child Nutrition (2025), 21(3):e70028.

23. UNICEF (late March 2025) warned ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) stocks were short in 17 countries, putting up to 2.4 million children with severe acute malnutrition at risk of going without. Reuters / U.S. News (16 May 2025): food rations for ~3.5 million people for a month (~USD 98 million worth) stranded in four U.S. government warehouses, some slated for destruction; Edesia’s 5,000-tonne Plumpy’Nut stockpile (USD 13 million) idled. Micronutrient Forum / Standing Together for Nutrition policy brief (Mar 2025) on country-level SAM-treatment suspensions.

The drought that has consumed the United States since 2024 is not a weather event waiting to be resolved. It is a regime change that is reshaping the economics of food production, the structure of the cattle industry, and the fiscal viability of hundreds of thousands of family farms. And, as the evidence from Massachusetts to Texas now makes clear, no region of the country is sitting safely outside its perimeter.

Researchers increasingly speak of a “polycrisis” in American agriculture: not one systemic shock but several, arriving simultaneously and amplifying each other until the damage is not additive but multiplicative. The same drought that destroys a wheat field drives up the cost of livestock feed, which forces ranchers to liquidate their breeding herds, which constrains beef supply for years to come, which pushes food prices beyond the reach of families who were already spending nearly a third of their income on groceries. Each crisis knocks out the defenses a farm or a food system would have used against the others.

By mid-June 2026, the pathway from cracked soil to empty grocery shelf has become frighteningly short.

A National Footprint, not a Regional Anomaly

The U.S. Drought Monitor’s June 2026 assessment reveals a national footprint spanning four categories of severity, with exceptional drought, the worst classification entrenched across the Southern Plains and High Plains, including the cow-calf heartland of Nebraska and Texas, now in its sixth consecutive year of sustained dryness. Extreme drought conditions have taken hold across the Western Corn Belt and the Southwest. And moderate to severe drought has spread into the Southeast, parts of the West, and into the Northeast.

U.S. Drought Status - June 2026

Federal U.S. Drought Monitor and state-declared conditions

National Overview (Federal USDM, June 9, 2026)

As of June 9, 2026, the federal U.S. Drought Monitor reported 46.93% of the United States and Puerto Rico, and 56.16% of the Lower 48 states are in drought (Moderate, D1, or worse), affecting roughly 150 million people. Forty-five states were experiencing Moderate Drought or worse. Severe Drought (D2) expanded across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Minnesota amid widespread heat, while hit-or-miss rainfall improved parts of the Plains and South.

Drought category Approx. share of U.S. area

Abnormally Dry (D0) ~15%

Moderate Drought (D1) 16.4%

Severe Drought (D2) 18.2%

Extreme Drought (D3) 8.8%

Exceptional Drought (D4) 0.9%

Active drought (D1–D4) covered roughly 44% of U.S. area.

National Update (federal USDM, June 18, 2026 — latest weekly release)

The June 18 U.S. Drought Monitor is the most recent weekly map, with data valid through June 16 shows the national picture finally bending, though unevenly. Heavy rain across the Midwest and the central and southern Plains drove widespread improvement, with Tropical Storm Arthur approaching the southeastern Texas coast and promising further relief across the Deep South. Ohio, Indiana, and nearly all of Michigan are now free of drought and abnormal dryness, and even a slice of the exceptional-drought Texas Panhandle was downgraded after two to four inches of rain. As of this update, however, the National Drought Mitigation Center had not yet posted revised June 18 national category percentages, so the June 9 totals above remain the most recent official national breakdown.

The improvement is not universal, and in places the drought is deepening. In northern Minnesota, severe drought pushed north toward the Canadian border, dragging down the headwaters of the Mississippi; north-central Iowa picked up a new patch of moderate drought; and across the High Plains the core of the crisis held firm, with the most severe and exceptional conditions still stretching from eastern Wyoming into western and northern Nebraska and far southern South Dakota, and worsening in eastern Colorado and northwestern Kansas. New England stayed hot and dry, keeping the Northeast under pressure even as the national footprint shrank. The human signal is unmistakable on the ground: on June 15, the town of Liberty in south-central Kentucky declared a state of emergency as the lake that serves as its water supply fell to critical lows, while Florida and southern Georgia continued to report serious water-supply concerns, with Lake Okeechobee still losing more water than it takes in.

The forecast offers cautious relief. NOAA has issued an El Niño Advisory, with the pattern expected to strengthen into the fall, and near-term outlooks favor above-normal rain across much of the Midwest and the Ohio Valley. But the Southwest’s summer monsoon, however wet, is not expected to refill the Colorado or Rio Grande systems, and forecasters warn the south-central Plains could reintensify later in the summer. The national trend line, in other words, is improvement at the margins layered over a drought whose hardest cores which are in the High Plains, the West, and now the Upper Midwest have not yet released their grip.

Dominant drought category by state, U.S. Drought Monitor, May 19, 2026 (most recent complete state-by-state set). “Dominant” = the category covering most of a state’s area; this differs from the June 9 national totals above.

Critically: the damage compounds.

Recent ecological research confirms that drought duration and intensity interact to magnify losses in primary productivity in a non-linear way. Four consecutive years of extreme conditions can cause productivity losses to skyrocket by approximately 2.5-fold compared to the first year. The extended duration into 2026 means agricultural systems are no longer merely stressed. Their baseline resilience is fracturing.

“The drought that began as a weather event has solidified, by June 2026, into a long-duration environmental shock: one that the nation’s crisis-response architecture was not built to handle.”

The Wheat That Wasn’t

There is a number at the center of the 2026 grain crisis that deserves to be repeated until it lands with the weight it carries: 1.525 billion bushels. That is the U.S. total wheat production forecast for 2026. It is the smallest domestic harvest in 54 years. The average production for the last 50 years was 2.1 billion bushels a year, 575 million bushels more than produced in 2026!

In the Southern Plains, Hard Red Winter production has been slashed to 515 million bushels, this is a 36% collapse from 2025 in a single season. In Texas and Oklahoma, nearly 32% of planted acres will not be harvested at all. Crop scouts in northern Kansas reported average yields of 38.3 bushels per acre, against a prior-year average of 50.5. Those missing 12 bushels per acre are the entire profit margin for a family operation, and the baseline global supply that prices wheat from Cairo to Kampala.

The season-average farm price for wheat is now projected at $6.00 per bushel, a forecast USDA actually lowered by 50 cents in June, because bumper harvests in Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine swelled global supply even as the American crop shrank. It is a hard lesson in how a globally traded commodity behaves: a devastated U.S. harvest does not guarantee a price windfall. Higher prices benefit farmers who have a crop to sell, but for the third of producers who will harvest nothing from their winter wheat fields this year, the price is irrelevant either way.

The Cattle That Were Sold

The livestock story is the most structurally consequential chapter of this crisis. When drought destroys rangeland forage, ranchers face an immediate ultimatum: purchase expensive supplemental feed or liquidate their herds. Across the Southern Plains and Southeast, producers have overwhelmingly chosen the latter. The total U.S. cattle inventory has fallen to 86.2 million head — the smallest since 1951. The beef cow herd stands at 27.6 million head, its lowest point since 1961.

The Female Slaughter Ratio tells the story in a single metric. When the proportion of female cattle sent to slaughter rises above 48%, the national herd is in liquidation. In the first quarter of 2026, that ratio climbed to 49.9%. Even at record cattle prices, ranchers in the Southern Plains are unwilling to bet on a heifer whose survival depends on rain that may not come. Tyson Foods has closed its facility in Lexington, Nebraska. Walmart is building independent processing infrastructure. And in June 2026 a new biological threat entered the picture: USDA confirmed New World screwworm — a flesh-eating livestock parasite — in Texas, prompting animal-movement restrictions and quarantines that further squeeze an industry already in retreat. Ground beef is no longer a staple. It is becoming a luxury.

“The drought did not create the fragility. It revealed it. That distinction matters because the same dynamic is now visible from the Plains to the Northeast.”

The Cost That Doesn’t Stop

Urea and nitrogen fertilizer prices surged by 47% in a single month in early 2026. Per-acre production costs have climbed to $890 for corn, $1,336 for rice, and $965 for cotton. Matched against drought-depressed yields, a significant share of American row-crop agriculture is now operating at a net loss.

The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates total net losses across the sector will exceed $50 billionover the three years ending in 2026. The latest agricultural census documented the loss of 140,000 farms between 2017 and 2022, and this is a trend every analyst expects to accelerate.

Lower-income American households were already spending nearly 30% of their total disposable income on food before the worst of 2026’s inflation arrived. Beef prices are projected to rise 6.3% this year. Fresh vegetables, 4.8%. Sugar and processed sweets, 8.1%. The drought that began silently in the topsoil of Oklahoma ends as a direct threat to household food security across every American city.

The El Niño Wildcard

Hanging over every projection in this report is a single shift in the Pacific Ocean. On June 11, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued an El Niño Advisory: the warm phase of the El Niño - Southern Oscillation has formed and is expected to strengthen into the winter of 2026–27, with forecasters putting the odds of a “very strong” event between November and January at roughly 63 percent, strong enough to rank among the most powerful El Nino ever recorded since records began in 1950. After five of the past six winters ran in the opposite, drought-deepening La Niña phase, the arrival of El Niño is the first large-scale climate signal in years that could work in American agriculture’s favor. But “could” is the operative word.

The textbook El Niño nudges the Pacific jet stream south, steering wetter, cooler weather across the southern tier of the country from late fall into spring, precisely the Southern Plains and Southwest where this drought has been entrenched for the longest time. Past El Niño winters, among them 1957–58, 1982–83, 1997–98, and 2015–16, acted as outright drought-busters there. Yet NOAA is explicit that the pattern guarantees nothing: the 2023-24 event fizzled across the South, and the agency’s new Relative Oceanic Niño Index, adopted in February 2026 to account for warming oceans, has tended to dampen the apparent strength of these events. Even a textbook outcome carries a sting in the tail, because the same southward storm track typically leaves the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, the Northern Rockies, and the Pacific Northwest drier than normal, and the winter rain that greens up western rangeland can simply become wildfire fuel once summer heat returns. For Massachusetts and the wider Northeast, the El Niño signal is weak and mixed, offering little assurance of relief.

For food production the calculus is genuinely double-edged. A wetter second half of the growing season would favor the corn and soybean belt, consistent with the historical pattern in which U.S. soybean yields improve by roughly 2 to 5 percent in El Niño years, and a wet Southern Plains winter could finally let drought-stricken winter wheat re-establish for the 2027 harvest. But none of that reaches this year’s devastated crop, and the relief, if it comes, arrives on a lag: the production impact of an ENSO event typically peaks six to twelve months after the ocean signal does, pushing the real consequences, for better and for worse, into 2027 and 2028.

The larger risk is global, and it runs straight back to the American grocery shelf. A strong El Niño tends to parch exactly the regions the United States leans on to backfill a short domestic harvest: it weakens the Indian and Southeast Asian monsoons that govern rice, dries the West African and Indonesian belts that dominate cocoa and palm oil, and historically cuts Australian wheat exports. The Food and Agriculture Organization has already issued a joint anticipatory-action appeal with the World Food Programme covering the 2026–27 El Niño window, and analysts warn the event is landing atop a fertilizer market still disrupted by conflict in the Middle East. Because El Niño’s effect on global temperature is usually strongest in its second year, the heaviest pressure on world food prices, and on the imported staples that buffer American supply, is likely to build through 2027. The same pattern that may rescue the wheat fields of Oklahoma could, in the very same stroke, raise the price of the rice, sugar, and cooking oil sitting beside the flour on the shelf.

“El Niño is the first climate signal in years that could ease America’s drought. But a pattern that waters the Southern Plains while drying the rice paddies of Asia does not so much end the food crisis as redistribute it.”

The Warning in the Soil

The Southern Plains have been in drought stress for six consecutive years. The High Plains Aquifer is not recovering on any human timescale. The cattle herd will not rebuild before 2028 at the earliest.

The path from cracked soil to empty shelf is shorter than it has ever been. The encouraging news is that the same connections that make it dangerous also make it solvable, but only if policymakers are willing to treat this not as a series of isolated seasonal disasters but as the deeply connected, compounding crisis the science now tells us it has become.

For Massachusetts and for the nation, the warning is already in the soil. The question is whether we are listening and whether we are pushing our politicians to act.

Notes & Caveats

• “Dominant” category is the level covering most of a state’s area; a state can hold more-severe pockets (e.g., D3/D4) not reflected by its dominant class. No state was dominantly D4.

• The federal USDM (D0–D4) is updated weekly and mapped at sub-county detail; state systems use their own indices and update monthly or on demand, so levels and dates can differ.

• Dates are mixed by design: state-by-state dominant categories reflect May 19, 2026 (the most recent complete state-by-state set); the official national category totals reflect the June 9, 2026 U.S. Drought Monitor, which remained the most recent national breakdown posted by the National Drought Mitigation Center as of this update; the qualitative national update reflects the June 18, 2026 U.S. Drought Monitor (data valid June 16), the latest weekly release; Massachusetts reflects the state’s June 9, 2026 declaration; and crop and livestock figures reflect USDA’s June 11, 2026 WASDE and the January 30, 2026 Cattle report. This update is current as of June 21, 2026.

• Massachusetts’ drought regions are defined by groups of towns; county shading maps those regions onto counties as a close approximation (Norfolk spans the Northeast and Southeast regions).

Sources

Chamberlin, C. A. (2026). Low streamflows in Massachusetts. USGS. · Chen et al. (2026). Crop water stress monitoring. Agricultural Water Management, 323. · Coughlin, T. G. (2026). Massachusetts Drought Management Task Force Should Be In Statute. UMass ScholarWorks. · Ellenburg, W. L. (2026). Flash Drought Risk in the Southeast. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 65(6). · Escobar, M. (2026). Water Scarcity and Aridity Trends. MDPI Water, 18(7). · Ohlert, T. (2026). Drought intensity and duration interact to magnify losses. eScholarship.org. · Vineyard, M. (2026). Climate risk assessment: Martha’s Vineyard. Woodwell Climate Research Center. · U.S. Drought Monitor (June 2026). · USDA WASDE (June 2026). · American Farm Bureau Federation Market Intelligence 2026. · NOAA Climate Prediction Center, El Niño Advisory and ENSO Diagnostic Discussion (June 11, 2026). · NOAA NIDIS, El Niño and the Southern Plains (drought.gov, March 2026). · FAO–WFP, El Niño Joint Anticipatory Action Appeal, June 2026–March 2027. · World Meteorological Organization, Global Seasonal Climate Update (June 2026).

U.S. Drought Monitor — National Drought Mitigation Center, NOAA, USDA, NASA (drought.gov; droughtmonitor.unl.edu).

Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs, Drought Management (mass.gov).

State agencies for Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania; Delaware River Basin Commission.

State-by-state dominant categories via a USDM-derived aggregator (uswaterlevels.com); verify individual states at drought.gov.

The 2026 winter wheat crop that failed around the world.

The Hungriest Year This Century

In 2025, for the first time in the twenty-first century, famine was confirmed in two countries at the same time: the Gaza Strip and parts of Sudan.¹ Famine is the most extreme classification on the international scale of hunger, reached only when starvation, destitution, and death have already begun. That two of them arrived in the same year was described by the United Nations Secretary-General as an unprecedented development.² It was also a symptom of something larger.

By the start of 2026, an estimated 318 million people faced acute hunger, roughly double the level recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic, with some 41 million of them at emergency levels of food insecurity or worse.³ In the most recent global accounting, more than 266 million people across 47 countries were in crisis or beyond, nearly a quarter of every population that analysts were able to measure.⁴ The number of people at the very edge, at emergency-levels of hunger, has nearly tripled since 2016.⁵ More than 85 million people have been driven from their homes inside these food-crisis countries, and the displaced are consistently hungrier than the communities that host them.⁶

Ask the humanitarian officials who track this catastrophe what is causing it, and the answer compresses, almost universally, into three words: conflict, climate change, and economic shocks.⁷ Call them the three C’s: conflict, climate, and cost. They are not three separate emergencies that happen to be occurring at once. They are three strands of the same rope, each pulling the others tighter. A drought raises the price of bread; the price of bread brings people into the streets; the unrest becomes a war; the war burns the next harvest. Hunger is rarely the product of one cause. It is the product of the three C’s braiding together.

Hunger on this scale is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made one, assembled from three forces we understand, can measure, and could choose to confront.

But we are not.

The Many Faces of Hunger

Before tracing the forces behind this emergency, it helps to be precise about what the word hunger means, because it covers several very different things. The 318 million people in acute crisis³ are the part of the problem that reaches the headlines, but they sit at the sharp end of a much larger structure. Hunger is best understood as a set of nested measures — each broader category containing the narrower, more severe one — all within the wider umbrella of malnutrition. The figures for 2024, drawn from the UN’s annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, describe that structure.⁸

Nutrition in the World, describe that structure.⁸

Cannot afford a healthy diet - 2.6 billion people nearly 1 in 3 people on Earth don’t have enough to eat

Moderate or severe food insecurity - 2.3 billion people don’t know where their next meal is coming from and ran out of food, skipped meals, or cut the quality and quantity of food for lack of money or access.

Chronic hunger (undernourishment) 673 million people (8.2%)

Habitually insufficient dietary energy, sustained over roughly a year; modeled at the population level.

Acute hunger (food crisis, IPC/CH Phase 3+) 318 million people.

Shock-driven food emergencies severe enough to threaten lives and livelihoods now — the focus of this article.

Famine / starvation (IPC Phase 5) ~1.4 million people.

Catastrophe: starvation, destitution, and death already under way. A separate, acute scale.

Hidden hunger cross-cutting. Micronutrient deficiency (iron, iodine, vitamin A, zinc); can coexist with adequate calories and even with overweight.

All major grains are storing fewer important nutrients due to climate change. The measures deepen with severity and are roughly nested within malnutrition in all forms; hidden hunger cuts across every tier, and into the well-fed. The nesting is only approximate, because each measure uses a different method, calorie modeling, experience surveys, and diet-cost calculations, so a person can fall into one category without another. in the World, describe that structure.⁸

These broader categories describe hunger as a standing condition: chronic, structural, and shaped over years by poverty, farm productivity, and the price of food. The crisis at the center of this article is something narrower and sharper. Acute hunger, and its catastrophic extreme, famine, are measured on a separate, shock-driven scale, and they are largely what the three C’s produce. Climate, conflict, and cost are the forces that tip people out of the broad structural categories and into emergency, turning chronic vulnerability into acute crisis and, at the extreme, into the starvation the famine classification records.⁹ Seen this way, the 2.6 billion who cannot afford a healthy diet are the reservoir; the 318 million in acute crisis are those the three C’s have pushed over the edge; and the roughly 1.4 million at famine’s core are those for whom the fall has already turned fatal.

Famine is not a different disease from everyday hunger. It is the same condition at its end stage, it is what happens when the three C’s finish what poverty began.

The First C: Climate

Climate may be the fastest-growing driver of all. Since 2018, the number of people whose hunger is driven primarily by weather extremes has tripled, from about 29 million to roughly 96 million.¹⁰ Drought is now the leading single cause of agricultural production loss on the planet, and the warming that is making droughts longer and deeper is making floods, cyclones, and erratic rainfall more frequent at the same time.¹¹ The seasons that farmers have read for generations are becoming unreliable, and a missed planting window cannot be reopened.

The effect is already visible. In Afghanistan, repeated drought and flooding have destroyed crops and pushed farming families off their land and onto aid.¹² In Syria, crop production has fallen by more than half.¹³ A single hurricane tore through Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba and erased harvests in a matter of hours.¹³ And the trajectory points down: climate models project that, compared with a world without warming, climate change could push somewhere between 1 million and 183 million additional people into the ranks of those at risk of hunger, in part by driving cereal prices upward across the coming decades.¹⁴

The transmission works the way every climate-to-hunger transmission works. A flood or a drought cuts the harvest. A smaller harvest means tighter supply. Tighter supply means higher prices. Higher prices price the poorest out of the market, and the poorest are concentrated precisely in the regions where the climate is turning most hostile.¹⁵ The global rate of undernourishment has inched downward in recent years, but the gains are wildly uneven, and much of sub-Saharan Africa has been left behind by them entirely.¹⁶

The atmosphere does not check a passport. But the hunger that a changing climate produces falls almost entirely on

the people who did the least to change it.

The Second C: Conflict

If climate is the fastest-growing driver, conflict is the largest, and it is not close. It is the primary cause of food insecurity in 14 of the 16 hunger hotspots that the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme are watching most closely, and it sits behind roughly two-thirds of all acute hunger.¹⁷ The six places of highest concern including the Sudan, the Gaza Strip, South Sudan, Yemen, Mali, and Haiti, are, with one exception, defined by violence.¹⁸ Since 2018, the number of people whose hunger is driven primarily by conflict has nearly doubled, from about 74 million to roughly 140 million.¹⁹

The mechanism is brutally direct. War empties fields and kills the people who would have planted them. It severs roads and markets. It displaces farmers into camps where they consume food rather than grow it. And, increasingly, it is waged deliberately against the food system itself when combatants block convoys, besiege cities, and starve populations as a method of war. Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan alone accounted for tens of millions of acutely food-insecure people in 2025, the wreckage of overlapping insurgencies and civil wars.²⁰ Gaza has been in famine since the summer of 2025; Sudan’s famine was first confirmed in August 2024 and has only spread.²¹

And What Causes the Conflict

Here the arrow turns around. Conflict produces hunger, but hunger also produces conflict, and the two trap each other in a loop. Researchers reviewing more than a hundred studies for the World Food Programme concluded that food insecurity is a “threat multiplier” for violent conflict: when people cannot eat, especially when a sudden spike in food prices is to blame, the risk of riots, civil conflict, and the breakdown of governments rises sharply.²² A separate review of sixty peer-reviewed studies traced a dozen distinct drivers of food insecurity to eight different forms of instability, from protests and riots to outright civil war.²³

What converts hunger into violence is rarely hunger alone. It is hunger layered on top of grievance: economic desperation, an inflamed pre-existing wound, inequality between different tribes or races of people, a collapse of trust in a government that cannot or will not feed its people.²³ Young people excluded from work and from a political voice are the most combustible fuel of all.²⁴ The pattern is old. The bread riots that helped ignite the French Revolution in 1789 ran on the price of flour; the global food-price spikes of 2007–2008 set off unrest across dozens of countries; in the Syrian war, the price of staples in some places multiplied many times over as production collapsed and transport costs soared.²⁵ Food insecurity does not light every fire. But it dries the kindling, and a sudden jump in the price of a loaf of bread can be the spark.

Hunger and war are not two problems. They are one problem wearing two faces, and each face feeds the other.

When the Drought Comes First

There is a second arrow, and it runs straight from the first C into this one. Climate does not only starve people; it sets them against each other. Security analysts have a name for it, climate is a “threat multiplier,” and the mechanism is depressingly simple. When drought shrinks the water, the grazing land, and the arable soil, groups that once shared those resources begin to compete for them, and competition among the desperate has a way of curdling into violence.²⁶Syria is the case most often cited. From 2006 to 2010 the country endured the worst drought in its instrumental record, one that climate scientists estimate human warming made two to three times more likely, which collapsed harvests and drove perhaps a million and a half rural Syrians into the cities, where the newcomers met unemployment, overstretched services, and a government indifferent to their plight. Researchers are careful not to call the drought the cause of the war that erupted in 2011, but many regard it as a contributing accelerant that helped load the conditions for revolt.²⁷

It is not an isolated case. Darfur is often called the world’s first climate-change conflict: as the Sahara crept south by roughly a mile a year and rainfall fell by 15 to 30 percent, Arab herders and African farmers were forced into the same shrinking commons, and a quarrel over water and pasture hardened, and it happened under a government willing to weaponize it into genocide.²⁸ Around Lake Chad, which has lost the great majority of its surface area, vanishing water has pushed herders, farmers, and fishers into open conflict and handed extremist groups such as Boko Haram a steady supply of dispossessed recruits.²⁹ Similar fault lines run through the wider Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and South Sudan. The honest reading of this evidence is not that a warming climate reliably produces war, but governance, ethnicity, and inequality always do the deciding. It is that climate change loads the gun those other forces fire, and a hungry, displaced, resource-starved population is exactly the tinder that turns a local dispute into a civil war, and a civil war back into famine.

Climate change rarely fires the first shot. It loads the chamber and turns drought into scarcity, scarcity into grievance, and grievance into war.

The Third C: Cost

The third C is the quietest and, in proportional terms, the most explosive. Since 2018, the number of people whose hunger is driven primarily by economic shocks has risen sixfold, from about 10 million to roughly 59 million.³⁰ This is the hunger of people who live where the bombs are not falling and the rain is still coming, but who simply cannot afford to eat. It is a crisis of price and of debt, not of supply.

The numbers are staggering at the household level. Food-price inflation in Haiti reached 34 percent in a single month of 2025; in Sudan it ran above 60 percent; Nigeria has endured ten consecutive years of double-digit inflation.³¹ Behind those figures sits a weak global economy growing at around 3 percent, developing nations buckling under unsustainable debt, currencies losing value, and governments imposing austerity that strips away the very purchasing power households need to buy food.³¹ In Haiti where more than five million people are now acutely food-insecure, the principal driver is not a battlefield or a drought. It is economic collapse and the price of a meal.³²

This is the C that most directly reaches the grocery aisle in wealthy countries too, because food is traded on global markets and prices set in one place ripple to another. But its sharpest edge is in the poorest economies, where families already spend the largest share of their income on food and have the least room to absorb a single bad month. For them, every percentage point of food inflation is not an inconvenience. It is a meal removed from the table.

In the poorest households on earth, hunger is not always a question of whether the food exists. It is a question of whether the family can afford it.

When the Three C’s Converge

The reason the three C’s are so dangerous is that they almost never arrive alone. They compound. The chain runs like this. A changing climate cuts the harvest. The smaller harvest drives prices up. Higher prices deepen the economic squeeze on families who were already stretched. Economic desperation hardens into grievance, especially where people have lost faith in their government. Grievance, in the wrong conditions, becomes conflict. And conflict destroys the next harvest, blocks the roads, and turns away the aid — which makes the hunger worse, which feeds the next round of grievance. Each C is an accelerant for the others, and the loop, once it is turning, is very hard to stop.

This is why the worst-hit places are almost always suffering from all three at once. Sudan is a war, but it is also an economy in freefall, with inflation above 60 percent. Afghanistan is a climate catastrophe of drought and flood, but it is also an economy hollowed out by isolation and the forced return of more than a million and a half people with nothing.¹²Haiti is an economic implosion, but it is also gang violence and displacement. The three C’s do not take turns. They stack.

The Fourth Failure: A Safety Net Pulled Away

There is a force that can interrupt this loop, and the world has spent decades building it: humanitarian food assistance. At the precise moment the three C’s are intensifying, that buffer is being dismantled. The Trump Administration gutted USAID in a single day which by some estimates will cause up to 25 million deaths. By late 2025, barely a quarter of the global appeal for humanitarian funding was financed, Approximately, $11.5 billion dollars of the needed $45 billion was given by the wealthy countries of the world. This is the largest shortfall ever recorded.³³ Humanitarian funding has fallen back to levels last seen a decade ago, and agencies have been forced to cut food from the hungry to keep the starving alive.³⁴

The largest single cause of the collapse is the retreat of the United States, traditionally the world’s biggest food-aid donor. After the dismantling USAID and congressionally approved cuts, U.S. contributions to the World Food Programme fell from roughly 4.5 billion dollars to about 1.5 billion in a single year.³⁵ The consequences are immediate and arithmetic. In Kenya, rations for hundreds of thousands of refugees fell to barely a quarter of a standard portion; in Uganda, monthly support per refugee was cut from 16 dollars to 5; in northeastern Nigeria, an operation that reached 1.3 million people during the 2025 lean season was projected to reach just 72,000.³⁶ These are not market forces. They are decisions, made in capitals far from the camps to let the poor die.

A harvest can fail because of the weather. A food ration fails only because someone decided to stop paying for it.

What Must Change: Treating the Three C’s as One System

The first imperative is to stop the bleeding. Humanitarian food funding must be restored and protected, because the alternative is widespread irreversible childhood stunting and preventable death. The economics here are not even close: anticipatory action meaning getting assistance to people before a crisis fully lands is far cheaper than emergency response after the fact, and resilience investments such as land restoration in the Sahel have been shown to return as much as 30 dollars for every dollar spent.³⁷ Cutting food aid during a compounding crisis is not fiscal discipline. It is the transfer of a manufactured risk onto the people least able to bear it.

The deeper imperative is to stop treating the three C’s as three separate problems. Climate adaptation, conflict prevention, and social protection are routinely funded, staffed, and argued over in different rooms, yet on the ground they are a single, interlocking system. Social protection is the clearest example: a reliable safety net does not only feed people through a sudden shock; it rebuilds the trust in government that makes a person less likely to choose conflict over peace when the food runs short.²⁴ Investing in resilience is, simultaneously, climate policy, anti-hunger policy, and conflict-prevention policy. The silos are an administrative convenience. The crises do not respect them.

And the framing must change. Food security has been shown, repeatedly, to underwrite political stability, and instability is what closes borders, severs supply chains, and pulls great powers into regional wars.³⁸ Protecting the world’s ability to feed its poorest is not charity. It is a strategic necessity. It is the cheapest insurance policy against the conflicts the wealthy world will otherwise pay for many times over.

The Arithmetic of a Warning

Three hundred and eighteen million people. Two simultaneous famines. A hunger crisis that has doubled in the space of a few years. These are not the statistics of an unlucky season. They are the readout of three forces, climate, conflict, and cost that we can name, that we can measure, and that, unlike a meteor or a plague, are very largely of human making.

The families in Sudan and Gaza living through confirmed famine did not warm the planet. The smallholder in Afghanistan watching a third failed harvest did not start the war next door. The mother in Haiti who cannot afford a sack of rice did not design the debt that hollowed out her currency. They did not cause the three C’s. They are simply the ones paying for it in skipped meals, in stunted children with life-long health problems, in the quiet, grinding emergency that hunger always is.

That the crisis is man-made is the bleak part. It is also the hopeful part, because what was assembled by choices can be disassembled by them. The climate can be adapted to and slowed. The conflicts can be prevented, mediated, and starved of the grievances that feed them. The economic shocks can be cushioned by the safety net we have already built and are now, inexplicably, taking apart. The three C’s have delivered their warning, in the plainest arithmetic there is. Whether to heed it belongs, as it always does, to those with wealthy nations and people who have the resources to act. It also depends on whether they understand that profound hunger, left to compound, has a way of arriving eventually at every door. Even the 1% are not safe from the crises they are creating.

The three C’s are man-made. That is the tragedy. It is also the only reason for hope.

Endnotes

1. World Food Programme (2026). WFP 2026 Global Outlook. WFP, Rome. Famine (IPC/CH Phase 5) confirmed in the Gaza Strip and parts of Sudan in 2025, the first time this century that famine has been confirmed in two contexts simultaneously.

2. Food Security Information Network / Global Network Against Food Crises (2026). Global Report on Food Crises 2026 (10th edition). Foreword by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, characterizing the simultaneous emergence of famine in two conflict-affected areas as unprecedented.

3. World Food Programme (2026). WFP 2026 Global Outlook. WFP, Rome. An estimated 318 million people faced acute hunger — approximately double pre-pandemic levels — with about 41 million at Emergency levels (IPC Phase 4) or worse.

4. Global Network Against Food Crises (2026). Global Report on Food Crises 2026. More than 266 million people across 47 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC/CH Phase 3+) in 2025, approximately 22.9% of the analysed population.

5. World Food Programme / EU / partners (2026). Statement on the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises, 24 April 2026. More than 39 million people faced Emergency levels of food insecurity across 32 countries in 2025 — almost triple the 2016 level.

6. FAO & WFP (2026). Global Report on Food Crises 2026. More than 85 million people were forcibly displaced across food-crisis contexts in 2025; displaced populations consistently face higher levels of acute hunger than host communities.

7. Quoted framing of “conflict, climate change and economic shocks” as the drivers of the global hunger crisis appears throughout the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises and accompanying donor statements; see WFP (2026), press materials accompanying the 10th-edition GRFC launch.

8. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO (2025). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025 (SOFI 2025). Rome. Figures for 2024: approximately 2.6 billion people could not afford a healthy diet; roughly 2.3 billion experienced moderate or severe food insecurity on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES); and an estimated 673 million people (8.2% of the world’s population) were chronically undernourished.

9. Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) and Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), 2024–2025; and SOFI 2025 on micronutrient deficiency. Famine (IPC/CH Phase 5) affected roughly 1.4 million people at the 2025 peak across six countries and territories. The acute scale (IPC/CH Phase 3 and above) is shock-driven and measured separately from the chronic undernourishment count, so the categories are nested only approximately. “Hidden hunger” — deficiency in micronutrients such as iron, iodine, vitamin A, and zinc — cuts across every tier and can coexist with adequate calories and even with overweight or obesity.

10. FAO (2026). Global Emergency and Resilience Appeal 2026. Since 2018, the number of people whose hunger is driven primarily by weather extremes tripled, from approximately 29 million to 96 million.

11. Nature Communications (2025). “Impact of drought on global food security by 2050.” Drought is identified as the leading single cause of agricultural production loss; historical droughts (1961–2014) reduced maize and soybean yields by single-digit to low-double-digit percentages in top-producing countries.

12. Wikipedia / Associated Press / ReliefWeb (2025–2026). 2025–2026 hunger crisis in Afghanistan. Severe drought, flooding, and irregular rainfall destroyed crops and displaced farming families; in 2025 more than 1.5 million Afghans were returned from Iran and Pakistan, often with no resources.

13. World Food Programme (2025–2026). WFP Global Outlook and operational reporting. Syria’s crop production is reported down approximately 60%; Hurricane Melissa devastated agriculture in Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba.

14. IPCC (2019). Special Report on Climate Change and Land, Chapter 5: Food Security. Across Shared Socio-economic Pathways, models project increases of 1–183 million additional people at risk of hunger compared with a no-climate-change scenario, alongside projected cereal-price increases driven by climate change.

15. Headey, D. & Fan, S. (2010), and IPCC (2019), on the climate-to-yield-to-price-to-hunger transmission mechanism by which reduced production raises prices and constrains access for the poorest consumers.

16. State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2025; Council on Strategic Risks review (2025). The global prevalence of undernourishment edged down from 8.5% (2023) to 8.2% (2024), but gains were uneven across regions, with much of sub-Saharan Africa left behind.

17. FAO & WFP (2025). Hunger Hotspots: FAO–WFP Early Warnings on Acute Food Insecurity, November 2025 to May 2026 Outlook. Rome. Conflict and violence are the primary drivers of hunger in 14 of the 16 identified hotspots; WFP analysis attributes roughly 69% of acute hunger to conflict.

18. FAO & WFP (2025). Hunger Hotspots, Nov 2025–May 2026. Six contexts of “highest concern” — Sudan, Palestine (Gaza Strip and West Bank), South Sudan, Yemen, Mali, and Haiti — face or risk Catastrophe (IPC/CH Phase 5) conditions.

19. FAO (2026). Global Emergency and Resilience Appeal 2026. FAO, Rome. Since 2018, the number of people whose primary driver of acute food insecurity is conflict almost doubled, from approximately 74 million to 140 million.

20. Joint Research Centre, European Commission / GRFC Mid-Year Update (2025). Nigeria (30.6 million), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (27.7 million), and Sudan (24.6 million) were among the worst-affected countries by total number of acutely food-insecure people in 2025.

21. Joint Research Centre (2025). GRFC Mid-Year Update. The Gaza Governorate was classified in famine from July 2025; famine in Sudan was first confirmed in August 2024.

22. Brinkman, H.-J. & Hendrix, C. S. (2011). Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict: Causes, Consequences, and Addressing the Challenges. WFP Occasional Paper, Policy, Planning and Strategy Division. Reviewing more than 100 sources, the authors describe food insecurity as a “threat and multiplier” for violent conflict, raising the risk of democratic breakdown, civil conflict, protest, and rioting — particularly when caused by higher food prices.

23. World Food Program USA (2023). Dangerously Hungry: The Link Between Food Insecurity and Conflict. Reviewing 60 peer-reviewed studies published since 2017, the report links 12 drivers of food insecurity to 8 forms of instability and conflict, grouping drivers into climate, resource competition, and economic shocks; conflict becomes more likely when a driver combines with economic desperation, a pre-existing grievance, or loss of trust in government.

24. von Braun, J. et al. / IFPRI and related literature on conflict and food insecurity. Food insecurity combined with socio-economic and political inequalities — particularly the exclusion of youth from economic activity and political participation — can fuel civil unrest; strengthening social protection improves trust in government and reduces the likelihood of conflict.

25. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development (2013), “Food Insecurity and Conflict Dynamics”; and National Geographic Education, “Hunger and War.” Historical examples include the 1789 French Revolution and the 2007–2008 global food-price riots; in wartime Syria, staple prices in some areas rose several-fold owing to lost production and higher transport costs.

26. On climate change as a “threat multiplier” for conflict: UN Environment Programme, Livelihood Security: Climate Change, Migration and Conflict in the Sahel (2011); ACCORD (2022); and the UN Security Council’s 2018 debate on climate-related security risks. The scholarly consensus holds that climate change rarely causes conflict on its own but intensifies competition over water, land, and pasture where governance is weak and grievances pre-exist.

27. Kelley, C. P., Mohtadi, S., Cane, M. A., Seager, R. & Kushnir, Y. (2015). “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought.” PNAS 112(11): 3241–3246. The 2006–2010 drought was the worst in the instrumental record; the authors estimate anthropogenic warming made a drought of that severity 2–3 times more likely, and link crop failure and the rural-to-urban migration of roughly 1.5 million people to conditions preceding the 2011 uprising. The thesis is contested — see Selby, J. et al. (2017), “Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited,” Political Geography 60: 232–244 — but both sides treat the drought as a contributing factor rather than a sole cause.

28. Ban Ki-moon (2007) and subsequent analyses (e.g. Think Global Health; World Food Program USA, “The First Climate Change Conflict”) describe Darfur as an early climate-linked conflict: in the decades before the 2003 war the Sahara advanced roughly one mile per year and median rainfall fell 15–30%, intensifying competition between Arab pastoralists and African farmers over land and water. Critics caution that the “first climate war” label understates the role of state manipulation of ethnic divisions.

29. Council on Foreign Relations, “As Lake Chad Shrinks, Conflict Grows”; and “Shifting sands: the geopolitical impact of climate change on Africa’s resource conflicts” (2024). The contraction of Lake Chad has driven herders, farmers, and fishers into competition and aided recruitment by Boko Haram; comparable climate-stressed resource conflicts affect the wider Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and South Sudan.

30. FAO (2026). Global Emergency and Resilience Appeal 2026. Since 2018, the number of people whose hunger is driven primarily by economic shocks rose sixfold, from approximately 10 million to 59 million.

31. Global Network Against Food Crises (2025). Hunger Hotspots 2025. Haiti food inflation reached 34% in August 2025; Sudan inflation exceeded 60%; Nigeria has experienced ten consecutive years of double-digit inflation; global growth was projected at approximately 3% amid heavy debt, currency depreciation, and austerity.

32. World Food Programme (2025). “Funding cuts: six critical WFP operations at risk.” More than 5.7 million people in Haiti — over half the population — face acute food insecurity, with economic shocks the primary driver.

33. FAO (2026). Global Emergency and Resilience Appeal 2026. By November 2025 the Global Humanitarian Overview was roughly a quarter funded — about USD 11.5 billion of USD 45 billion required — the largest gap ever recorded.

34. Council on Foreign Relations (2025). “The Great Aid Recession: 2025’s Humanitarian Crash in Nine Charts.” Total humanitarian funding fell to 2016 levels, forcing agencies to cut food rations to preserve resources for the most acutely starving.

35. Associated Press / U.S. News (2025). “UN’s World Food Program warns donor cuts are pushing millions more into hunger.” WFP received approximately USD 1.5 billion from the United States in 2025, down from nearly USD 4.5 billion the prior year, following the dismantling of USAID and congressionally approved cuts.

36. UNRIC (2025), “Humanitarian aid: the most vulnerable already severely impacted by budget cuts”; WFP West and Central Africa (2026). Refugee rations in Kenya fell to roughly 28% of a standard ration; per-refugee support in Uganda was cut from USD 16 to USD 5 per month; WFP projected reaching about 72,000 people in northeastern Nigeria in February 2026, down from 1.3 million during the 2025 lean season.

37. World Food Programme (2026). Operational reporting on anticipatory action and resilience. Land restoration in the Sahel is reported to generate up to USD 30 for every dollar spent; anticipatory action is substantially more cost-effective than delayed crisis response.

38. Center for Strategic and International Studies (2024), “Dangerously Hungry: The Link Between Food Insecurity and Conflict.” Food insecurity is increasingly recognized as a national-security concern, with hunger emergencies capable of metastasizing into large-scale security threats if left unaddressed.

Photo Credit: EcoWatch

Extreme heat is now the deadliest form of weather in the United States. It kills more Americans every year than floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes combined. Climate induced extreme heat is destroying crops, straining the bodies of outdoor workers, triggering psychiatric emergencies, and driving food insecurity deeper into communities that had no cushion left to absorb another blow. And the people bearing the greatest weight of this crisis are low-income families, Black and Latino households, agricultural workers, the elderly, the disabled and veterans are the people who contributed the least to creating climate change, but who are suffering the most.

This is not a future problem. It is the present emergency hiding in plain sight and being totally ignored by the federal government!

🌡️ Not Just Hotter — Fundamentally Different

The first thing to understand about the new heat is that it has changed in character, not just in degree.

Heatwaves are no longer releasing their grip at night.

High-pressure heat domes now trap hot air for days or weeks at a stretch, eliminating the overnight cooling that allows the human body and the existing infrastructure keeping us alive to recover. When temperatures stay above 90°F at 2 a.m., the cumulative physiological toll is categorically different from a hot afternoon followed by a cool night. with these new heatwaves, the body never catches up.

They are arriving earlier.

Record-shattering temperatures hit Western North America in March 2026, catching populations, agricultural cycles, and public health systems unprepared before anyone had a chance to acclimatize. The heat season is no longer summer, it is most of the year.

Heatwaves are compounding the other symptoms of climate change.

Extreme heat arrives alongside stagnant air and drought, degrading air quality and drying out water reserves simultaneously. It does not arrive in isolation. It arrives on top of the flood that preceded it, the wildfire smoke still in the air, and the farm already stressed by years of moisture deficit.

The numbers tell the story of an acceleration that should alarm everyone. In cities across the United States, the average rate of extreme heat events increased from two per year in the 1960s to ten per year between 2010 and 2020. Record highs now occur twice as often as record lows across the continental US. The last 11 years have been the hottest 11 years ever recorded! Think about that for a second. Scientists have documented that there is a clear acceleration in warming beyond anything the previous 50-year trend would predict. The summer of 2025 was likely the coolest summer many Americans alive today will ever experience again.

“American families are being asked to absorb a climate shock they did not create, on bodies that were never designed for this heat, without the infrastructure or the safety nets that a crisis of this scale demands.”

🏥 What Extreme Heat Does to the Human Body

Extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States and the gap between heat fatalities and deaths caused by the next-closest weather category is not small, it is enormous.

The direct toll is staggering.

More than 21,000 deaths in the United States from 1999 to 2023 were heat-related, with mortality rates beginning to rise most sharply from 2016 onward. Between 2000 and 2025, heat deaths increased by more than 50% above historic baselines. In 2023 alone, high temperatures caused 28,000 additional injuries. By the 2090s, projections put cumulative additional deaths from extreme heat in major US urban areas at roughly 28,000 per year that means a 9/11 catastrophe every four months, every year, caused by the weather. The terrorists behind these deaths are the fossil fuel companies, their banks and the politicians who they have bought off and convinced not to take action on climate change.

Physiology is unforgiving.

Heat stress occurs when the body cannot cool itself effectively through sweating. When humidity is high, sweat evaporates more slowly, or not at all, pushing the body toward heat exhaustion and heat stroke. When extreme heat persists through the night, the cumulative stress builds without relief. For people without air conditioning, without the ability to leave work, without the means to pay a utility bill that has doubled, that cumulative stress actually kills.

Heat induced illnesses are not just a summer heart attack.

Research published in 2026 has increasingly identified chronic recurrent heat exposure as a driver of kidney disease, even in previously healthy outdoor workers. High heat and heatwaves exacerbate cardiovascular disease, respiratory conditions, and diabetes. For people already living with high blood pressure, COPD, or chronic illness, who are mostly people concentrated in lower-income communities, heatwaves don’t create new medical emergencies so much as accelerate existing ones catastrophically into hospitalizations and deaths.

Heat waves degrade the air.

Extreme heat traps pollutants, raising concentrations of ozone and fine particulate matter across urban areas. The same weather event that overheats the body also poisons the air being breathed by the children, the elderly, and the people with asthma or heart conditions who can least afford another physiological insult.

The mental health toll is real and undercounted.

Sustained extreme heat is linked to increases in anxiety and psychiatric emergencies. These psychiatric conditions are exacerbated by the stress of financial pressure from soaring utility bills, the displacement and disruption of extreme weather events, and the breakdown of social networks during prolonged crises. A 2026 study of Boston specifically found that citywide heat interventions measurably changed rates of psychiatric emergency services use. The connection between rising temperatures and mental health distress is not speculative. It is documented, and it is getting worse with every successive year of hotter conditions.

🎯 The Inequality Hidden Inside Every Heatwave

The heat does not fall equally. It never has.

Nearly 210 million Americans live in counties vulnerable to health threats from unexpectedly high summer temperatures. But within that vast exposure, vulnerability is not distributed by chance. It is distributed by race, income, housing, and the presence or absence of tree canopy. The urban heat island effect that makes a block in Chelsea, Massachusetts, feel like a desert while a leafy suburb three miles away stays ten degrees cooler is real and it is a result of the growing inequality in America.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous households experience heat-related illness and death at rates that reflect generations of disinvestment in the neighborhoods they were redlined into. The 1995 Chicago Heatwave, which killed over 700 people, acts as a case study that should have long ago transformed policy. In the fifteen community areas with the highest death rates, ten had populations that were 94–99% African American. Social isolation, poverty, and the absence of air conditioning were as much a cause of death as temperature. Thirty years later, the same structural vulnerabilities remain. Only the temperatures are higher and the length of heatwaves and their severity have also grown worse.

Projections now show that the largest increases in heat-related death over the coming decades will fall on older, Black, and Hispanic populations. These are not projections about people in far-off places. They are projections about Americans in American cities these deaths will happen in Phoenix, in Houston, in Miami, in the communities of the Mississippi Delta and the Southern Plains. Are we going to do anything to prevent them?

“The heat does not care whether you caused it. It finds the people who can least afford to survive it and it stays there longest.”

Outdoor workers, including the agricultural laborers, construction workers, and delivery drivers who keep the country fed and functioning face the threat at its most direct. Triple-digit temperatures are arriving earlier and more frequently, and for workers who cannot choose to go inside, that is not an inconvenience. It is an occupational death risk. In 2023 alone, high temperatures caused 28,000 additional workplace injuries across the United States.

🌾 From the Body to the Table: Heat, Crops, and the Coming Food Price Wave

The connection between extreme heat and hunger runs through two channels at once. One is the direct physiological channel: bodies stressed by heat need more nutrition to recover, while the mental health burden of heat reduces the capacity to manage household food security. The other is the agricultural and economic channel: heat destroys crops, disrupts supply chains, and drives food prices higher in ways that fall hardest on households with the least ability to afford these price increases.

Heat is devastating American agriculture.

Most major staple crops, from corn, to wheat, and soybeans, experience significant yield declines when temperatures exceed 86°F. Extreme heat disrupts pollination, weakens plant structures, and can cause total crop failure during critical growth stages. A major heatwave across North America in 2021 led to significant fruit crop losses. Heat and drought in the Southwest have become near-permanent features of the agricultural calendar. The Southern Plains, now in its sixth consecutive year of drought, where more than 95% of the region was experiencing some level of drought or abnormal dryness at the start of the 2026 planting season, with Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado reaching nearly 100%, is both the breadbasket of America and the front line in the fight to maintain America’s status as one of the breadbaskets of the world.

Livestock are not spared.

Pigs and poultry suffer heat stress that reduces growth, lowers productivity, and in severe cases causes mass die-offs. Marine heatwaves reduce oxygen levels in coastal waters, putting intense pressure on fisheries and aquaculture that millions of Americans depend on for affordable protein. The avian influenza crisis that killed more than 120 million laying hens between 2022 and early 2025 was worsened by the heat conditions that stress commercial flocks and compromise biosecurity.

The cold chain breaks in the heat.

A significant portion of food loss occurs after harvest, when inadequate refrigeration infrastructure meets a spike in demand during extreme heat events, which occurs precisely when the power grid is already strained. Spoilage rises. Food waste rises. Effective food production falls. And the price of what remains on the shelf goes up and more people become food insecure.

The price transmission is reliable and cruel.

Higher production costs, tighter supply, and logistics failures translate into higher retail food prices. They do so with a lag of one to two growing seasons. The delayed impact is slow enough that the connection goes unnoticed in political debate, fast enough that it hits the grocery bill within a year. American consumers were already paying 6.8% annual grocery inflation for the twelve months to June 2025. The compounding effects of climate-driven heat are a primary driver of that number and the continuing increase in food prices does not look like it’s going to stop.

For families in the bottom income 20% of the economic spectrum who already spend nearly a third of their entire budget on food, every percentage point of food price inflation driven by a climate crisis they played no part in creating is a meal skipped, a bill unpaid, a child going to school hungry.

🍽️ The Hunger That Hides in the Heatwave

The United States entered 2026 with 47.4 million people, 13.5% of the population, already living in food-insecure households, a sharp increase from the decade-low of 10.2% recorded in 2021. Feeding America’s nationwide network was already reporting record demand at food pantries in Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Chicago through 2025. More than one in eight people in the wealthiest nation in human history does not know where their next meal is coming from. Climate-driven heat is arriving into a food security landscape already at crisis levels.

Here in Massachusetts, the numbers are stark. A record 40% of Massachusetts households, approximately 1.1 million people, experienced food insecurity in 2025, according to The Greater Boston Food Bank and Mass General Brigham. That rate has more than doubled since 2019. In Hampden County, it exceeded 50%. Hispanic households reached 63%. These numbers reflect the compounding effects of rising costs, inadequate wages, and a fraying of the public safety net; but they also reflect what heat does to household economics: higher utility bills, more sick days, lost wages for outdoor workers, and the rising cost of the food itself.

The health cost of that hunger loops back, viciously. In 2025, food insecurity was associated with $1.6 billion in emergency room visits and hospitalizations among adult MassHealth members in Massachusetts alone with estimated excess hospitalization costs of up to $13,257 per food-insecure adult. Hunger makes people sicker. Sickness drives people deeper into poverty. Poverty makes the heat more dangerous. The spiral is self-reinforcing and accelerating.

The buffer between a heat-driven food crisis and Massachusetts hunger is SNAP and it is being cut at exactly the wrong moment.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, future benefit increases linked to the Thrifty Food Plan are now capped, limiting how much support can keep pace with rising food prices. Nearly 4.3 million Americans were removed from the program between January 2025 and January 2026. In Massachusetts alone, more than 150,000 residents are seeing reduced or cancelled benefits. At the same time, food supplied to the Greater Boston Food Bank through the USDA has been reduced by nearly 36% since October 2025. One food pantry that served 6,510 individuals in 2020 served 32,780 in 2025. That is five times the demand in five years!

“The food bank queue is growing. The farm income is deteriorating. The temperature records keep falling. All of these are consequences of the same failure: a society that built its food system, its housing stock, and its public health infrastructure for a climate that no longer exists.”

🔧 What a Proportionate Response Looks Like

Protect and expand nutrition assistance now.

Cutting SNAP during a period of climate-driven food price inflation is not fiscal discipline. It is a transfer of the costs of this crisis onto the families with the least capacity to survive it. The federal government must reverse course. States like Massachusetts are trying to fill the gap. Governor Healey has proposed $55 million for the state’s Emergency Food Assistance Program for fiscal year 2027, but state budgets cannot substitute for federal commitment at the scale this crisis demands.

Build heat resilience into every neighborhood, not just wealthy ones.

Massachusetts’ ResilientMass Plan, Boston’s Project Shade, and the city’s exploration of a harbor-based thermal energy network are genuine steps in the right direction. Cooling centers, expanded tree canopy, and heat-resilient housing design are not amenities. They are public health infrastructure. The fact that Chelsea residents swelter in an urban heat island while nearby suburbs stay cool is a policy failure, not a natural condition.

Invest in climate-resilient agriculture.

Research demonstrates that integrated soil-crop management systems can reduce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer requirements by 30–50% while maintaining yields. Heat-tolerant crop varieties, diversified rotations, and conservation practices are national security investments as much as they are agricultural ones. Every season of delayed investment is another season of compounding exposure.

Restore food aid funding internationally.

The United States contributed approximately roughly 40% of the World Food Programme’s budget for fiscal year 2024. By 2025, US humanitarian aid had collapsed from roughly $14 billion to $3.7 billion. Research consistently shows that food insecurity drives political instability, and political instability creates the conditions for the regional conflicts and supply chain disruptions that make domestic food security worse. Climate change makes all of these conditions worse creating a global tinderbox. Protecting food aid is not charity. It is a strategic investment in world peace.

⚠️ A Warning in the Temperature Record

The United States has long told itself a story about its resilience, about an abundance so vast and a technology so advanced that the worst effects of climate change would arrive somewhere else first or could be innovated around before the impacts of climate change became an emergency.

That story is over. It is over in the 40% of Massachusetts households that cannot reliably feed themselves. It is over in the 28,000 heat-related injuries recorded last year. It is over in the farm income projections that keep darkening and the crop production that is dropping year by year. It is over in the psychiatric emergency rooms of Boston. It is over on the faces of the farmworkers in the Central Valley and the Southern Plains who have no option to go inside.

The 47.4 million Americans already food-insecure before the heat season of 2025 did not cause the climate crisis. The outdoor workers dying of heat stroke in Texas and Arizona did not cause it. The families skipping meals because grocery bills have outrun their budgets did not cause it. But they are paying for it in skipped meals, in hospital bills, in the quiet emergency that food insecurity always is, and that extreme heat has a particular capacity to deepen and accelerate.

The question is whether those with the power recognize that climate change and particularly the increasing heat and heatwaves are causing the devastating impacts across the country and whether they respond to these problems at the scale the crisis demands. They need to protect the nutrition assistance that stands between food price volatility and mass hunger, build the heat crisis infrastructure that will make survival equitable, and invest in the agricultural resilience and international food security that prevent the spiral from going further.

The temperature records keep breaking. The warning has been issued, again and again, in thousands of scientists are studying climate change around the world and so we have the data, we know what will come next if we do not act and we know how to halt and reverse the climate crisis. What remains is whether the leaders in power will take the actions necessary to transition to clean energy and take actions at scale. We must act!

Sources

Research draws on USDA Economic Research Service, Center for American Progress, Greater Boston Food Bank / Mass General Brigham, PLOS Climate, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, World Food Programme, World Health Organization, World Weather Attribution, and peer-reviewed public health and agricultural science literature.

The shoreline is not where you think it is. To a geologist, a tide gauge analyst, or a corn farmer staring at a field going white with salt crust, the shoreline has been moving inland for decades, measured in millimeters of sea-level rise per year, at a pace easy to dismiss until suddenly it is not. Across the coastal plains of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, North Carolina, and Louisiana, relative sea level rise (RSLR) is converting the most productive agricultural land in the region into salt marsh, at a rate that no crop rotation schedule and no drainage ditch installation can fully outpace.

Photo credit: Shonna Franks

Over the three decades between 1993 and 2023, global mean sea level rose a cumulative of 101.4 mm, approximately four inches at a mean rate of approximately 3.6 mm rise per year.¹ That is already double the twentieth-century long-term average of 1.4 mm rise per year.² By 2024, tide gauge records across the contiguous United States recorded that the rate of sea-level rise had increased to a localized rate of approximately 4.3 mm per year, accumulating nearly 16 inches of relative sea level rise since 1900.³ Those numbers sound modest in the abstract. They are not modest on a farm.

This is not a crisis arriving someday, it is a crisis that has arrived today. A landmark multi-decadal study using 38 years of satellite imagery across the Mid-Atlantic found that sea marsh encroachment is nearly twice as fast, and 1.4 to 6.8 times more frequent on agricultural lands than on adjacent forestlands.⁴ Between 1984 and 2022, the seaward boundary of agricultural land across the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay watersheds moved upslope from an elevation of 0.74 meters to an elevation of 0.87 meters.⁵ That is not a natural shift in plant communities. That is the ocean claiming farmland, acre by acre, year by year, in the most productive coastal agricultural region in the eastern United States.

Fine-scale mapping of the coastal counties of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia that was published in Nature Sustainability reveals that the land area covered by visible salt patches almost doubled between 2011 and 2017 alone, converting over 19,000 acres of working farmland into salt marsh.⁶ The direct economic losses to farmers from those visible salt patches exceeded $427,000. The indirect losses from reduced crop yields within 200 meters of salt patches are estimated at $39 million to $70 million annually.⁷ In Somerset County, Maryland, 3.5 square kilometers of agricultural land transitioned entirely to tidal wetland between 2009 and 2017.⁸ Across the broader region, cumulative farmland losses between 1984 and 2022 reached 557.4 square kilometers, 14.8 percent of total agricultural area, outpacing even the loss of forestland, despite the fact that farmland sits, on average, at higher elevations than the forests it is losing ground to.⁹

“The shoreline is not where you think it is. It has been advancing inland for decades, measured in millimeters per year, at a pace easy to dismiss — until the salt patches appear, the corn dies, and the marsh moves in.”

The sea does not only advance at the surface. It advances underground. Saltwater intrusion moves through both tidal channels and subsurface aquifers, reaching fields miles from any visible coastline. The dense networks of drainage canals and ditches that coastal farmers have built over generations to keep their fields workable by alleviating waterlogging and getting crops in the ground on schedule are, at the regional scale, the very infrastructure that accelerates the problem of salt water intrusion due to sea-level rise. Those low-resistance hydrological pathways are highways for high tides and storm surges, carrying saline water miles inland, into fields that should be freshwater systems.¹⁰

What Salt Does to a Farming Soil

When saltwater reaches an agricultural field, it does not merely wet the soil and drain away. It begins a sequence of biogeochemical processes that can permanently degrade the land’s productive capacity. The introduction of salt water, which is made of sodium (Na⁺) and chloride (Cl⁻) ions, into the soil solution of farmlands increases its osmotic potential, making it difficult for non-salt-tolerant crops to extract water even from soils that are technically saturated with water.¹¹Specific ion toxicities caused particularly from chloride stunt crop growth, disrupt photosynthesis, and cause necrotic leaf burn, defoliation, and complete germination failure. For a corn farmer, that is the end of a season potentially leading to bankruptcy1111.

Beyond those immediate crop effects, the sodium ions attack the soil structure itself. In sodic conditions, where Na⁺ saturates the cation exchange capacity of clay minerals, soil aggregates disperse. The macropore network that makes soil a functional medium for plant roots and drainage collapses. Hydraulic conductivity falls. The ground seals. The water sits. And when the water sits long enough, a sequence of microbial transformations begins from which the field may not recover.¹²

In a healthy coastal agricultural soil, significant stores of organic carbon are stabilized by binding to iron oxides in a process called mineral-associated organic matter (MAOM) formation. When saltwater intrusion creates anoxic, waterlogged conditions, anaerobic microbes use those iron compounds as substitute electron acceptors in their respiration, dissolving them in the process. That dissolution releases the associated organic carbon, which is rapidly mineralized into carbon dioxide and methane.¹³ A historical carbon sink becomes an active greenhouse gas source. Making climate change and sea-level rise worse. The soil’s nutrient-cycling capacity collapses along with its structure. Elevated chloride concentrations directly inhibit the nitrifying bacteria that convert ammonium to the nitrate forms that crops can use, making fertilizer applications increasingly ineffective.¹⁴

The Corn Economy and Its Salt Threshold

The economic stakes of this biogeochemical cascade are particularly severe for the Delmarva region and the broader coastal Mid-Atlantic because of its deep dependence on corn production. Corn is, by the measure of salt tolerance science, the most vulnerable of the major commodity crops. The Maas-Hoffman model, the foundational salt tolerance framework used by agricultural extension services and resource managers across the United States, defines the relationship between soil salinity and relative crop yield. For corn (Zea mays), the damage to crops from salt water begins at an electrical conductivity of the saturated soil extract of just 1.7 decisiemens per meter, a measurement that is the lowest threshold of any major commodity crop in production on the coastal plain.¹⁵

All other major crops can with stand much greater salt water damage: 1) barley (threshold: 8.0 dS/m), 2) wheat (6.0 dS/m), or even 3) sorghum (6.8 dS/m).¹⁶ In states like North Carolina, where saltwater intrusion is advancing through the low-lying agricultural landscapes of the Outer Coastal Plain, farmers are being forced off corn and onto lower-value sorghum. The farmers are making this change, not because they want to, but because the salt in their fields leaves them no choice. The margin compression in those communities, already economically vulnerable, is severe. Global annual economic losses from salt-degraded agricultural land are estimated at between $12 billion and $27.3 billion from reduced crop yields alone.¹⁷ The value of the lost farm land is multiples of that loss.

This slow-onset disaster extends far beyond the Mid-Atlantic. Ocean water is encroaching on freshwater aquifers in 43 states, destroying irrigation sources and introducing structural vulnerabilities to regional agricultural supply chains.¹⁸ The stakes reach their highest in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which serves as the freshwater hub for 20 million residents and irrigates the Central Valley, a region that produces more than half of the nation’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables. The question of whether that system remains a freshwater system is a question about whether California’s agricultural economy survives in its current form.¹⁹

“American farmers are being asked to absorb a geological and hydrological crisis they did not create, on top of a climate crisis driving the same saltwater intrusion, in communities that were already watching their margins thin and their neighbors sell.”

The Fisheries Crisis That Starts in a Marsh

The ecological and economic destruction of relative sea level rise does not stop at the farm field’s edge. It extends into the estuaries and nearshore ecosystems that serve as the biological engines of the American commercial fishing and shellfish industries. At least 50 percent of all commercially harvested fish and shellfish species in the United States, including shrimp, blue crabs, eastern oysters, menhaden, weakfish, and a range of demersal finfish, rely on estuaries and intertidal salt marshes as nursery habitats.²⁰ The wave-buffering capacity of those wetlands prevents an estimated $3 billion in storm damage annually.²¹ Both of those functions are in accelerating decline.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decadal Wetlands Status and Trends report to Congress, measuring change between 2009 and 2019, the contiguous United States lost 670,000 acres of vegetated wetlands, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island.²² Salt marshes experienced the largest net percentage reduction of any saltwater wetland category, declining by 2 percent or 70,000 acres.²³ That loss rate represents a 50 percent increase from the 2004–2009 study period. The trajectory is accelerating, not stabilizing.

Under natural conditions, salt marshes maintain their relative elevation by trapping sediment and accumulating organic peat. When sea level rise outpaces that vertical accretion, marshes migrate landward, colonizing low-lying uplands. But along the developed Atlantic and Gulf coastlines, that landward migration is blocked by seawalls, bulkheads, roads, and development in a phenomenon ecologists call coastal squeeze. Within the United States, approximately 14 percent of all shorelines have been hardened with artificial structures.²⁴ Those structures do not merely protect the land behind them. They sentence the marsh in front of them to drowning. Systematic reviews published in BioScience document that seawalls support 23 percent lower biodiversity and 45 percent lower organism abundance than natural shorelines.²⁵ The juvenile fish and shellfish that depend on that margin habitat have nowhere to go.

The Scallop Fleet, the Oyster Reef, and the Chemistry of Collapse

For marine species that have shells including oysters, scallops, clams, crabs, the physical threat of coastal squeeze is compounded by ocean acidification (OA). The ocean has absorbed roughly 30 percent of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emitted since industrialization began in about 1850.²⁶ That carbon dioxide has seriously impacted the marine carbonate system, reducing the concentration of carbonate ions and lowering the saturation state of calcium carbonate, including aragonite and calcite, the minerals shellfish use to build and maintain their shells. The result, for larval oysters and juvenile scallops, is thinner shells, higher predation mortality, and mass die-offs in commercial hatcheries during acidification events.²⁷

The Atlantic sea scallop fishery, worth over $500 million annually, is the largest wild scallop fishery in the world and represents 77 percent of the commercial landings value of New Bedford, Massachusetts, America’s highest-value fishing port.²⁸ A landmark bioeconomic model published in PLOS ONE by Rheuban et al. (2018) projects that under a high CO₂ emissions scenario, wild sea scallop biomass may decline by more than 50 percent by the end of this century, with landings contracting by 10 to 30 percent as early as 2050.²⁹ The offshore fleet operating out of New Bedford, Gloucester, and Point Judith is not a distant abstraction of biodiversity loss. It is real people, real boats, and real communities whose economic futures are written in the chemistry of water they cannot change.

On the Pacific coast, ocean acidification has already cost the aquaculture sector an estimated $110 million and 3,200 jobs.³⁰ The Whiskey Creek hatchery in Oregon historically has supplied 75 percent of West Coast oyster larvae. It has experienced catastrophic larval mortality events tied directly to acidification before installing monitoring and buffering systems that partially restored production. In Alaska’s Bristol Bay, the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program documents OA as a primary driver of long-term red king crab decline, contributing directly to the complete commercial fishery closures during the 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 seasons.³¹ Those closures did not merely hurt fishers. They erased the economic foundation of remote coastal communities that have no alternative industry to fall back on.

The Eastern oyster industry, generating approximately $250 million annually along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, is suffering from the convergence of salinization, reef erosion, and acidification, disrupting the physiological cues that govern spawning and juvenile settlement.³² Projections indicate that an intermediate sea level rise of 1.2 meters by 2100 will eliminate 83 percent of existing coastal marshes and 26 percent of seagrass beds across the Mid-Atlantic shelf, leading to steep declines in commercial catches of blue crabs and shrimp.³³ The marine food production ecosystem of the American eastern seaboard is being dismantled, one lost inch of marsh, one acidified larval cohort, one closed fishery at a time.

The Pathogen Nobody Talks About Until People Die

Relative sea level rise is not only dissolving wetlands and collapsing fisheries. It is also expanding the geographic range of one of the most lethal bacterial pathogens in the American food supply. Vibrio vulnificus is a halophilic, gram-negative bacterium that occurs naturally in warm, brackish estuarine waters. It is the leading cause of seafood-related deaths in the United States, responsible for 95 percent of all domestic seafood-associated fatalities, primarily through the consumption of raw oysters.³⁴ Its clinical mortality rate from primary septicemia ranges from 15 to 50 percent.³⁵ It is not a marginal risk. It is a serious and growing public health crisis whose geography is being actively redrawn by sea level rise.

The proliferation of V. vulnificus is tightly constrained by two environmental parameters: water temperature (16°C to 33°C) and salinity (5 to 20 parts per thousand). Historically, the optimal brackish salinity corridor was confined to the middle reaches of tidal estuaries. The fresh reaches upstream were too fresh; the coastal ocean boundaries too saline. As rising seas push the salt wedge upriver, that optimal corridor migrates into formerly freshwater reaches of coastal rivers, dramatically expanding the volume of water capable of hosting high pathogen concentrations.³⁶

Empirical modeling demonstrates that sea level-driven shifts in salinity gradients have a significantly greater impact on future V. vulnificus exposure risk than atmospheric temperature increases alone.³⁷ In estuaries such as Winyah Bay, South Carolina, predictive models indicate that SLR-driven salinity shifts will increase exposure risk by up to four times, with the most severe increases occurring at upriver sites that currently face zero baseline risk.³⁸ This range expansion is already manifesting clinically. Cases and fatalities are emerging in Long Island, Connecticut, and Rhode Island - regions historically considered too cold and too fresh to support dense Vibrio populations. Following the coastal flooding of Hurricane Ian in 2022 and Hurricane Helene in 2024, Florida reported unprecedented spikes in vibriosis, with over 74 cases and 17 deaths in counties flagged as high-risk by predictive models.³⁹

“The fish are moving north. The salt is moving inland. The bacteria are following the salt. And the fishing communities cannot move at all — constrained by their boats, their docks, their debt, and the only place they have ever called home.”

The Regulatory Cost of a Warming Bay

Because of the lethality of V. vulnificus, federal and state regulators impose strict sanitary controls on the commercial shellfishery under the National Shellfish Sanitation Program (NSSP) and the FDA. These mandates enforce operational and post-harvest protocols that are non-negotiable and increasingly expensive. Oysters harvested for raw consumption must be placed under mechanical refrigeration within 10 hours of harvest to keep internal temperatures below the pathogen growth threshold.⁴⁰ In an unrefrigerated transport vehicle, Vibrio levels can double in fewer than 15 minutes on a warm summer day. States are legally required to implement a Vibrio Control Plan if two or more confirmed V. vulnificusinfections occur within the preceding 10 years. When case thresholds are exceeded, implicated harvest areas are closed for 7 to 21 days, and oysters must test below 10 pathogenic bacteria per gram of meat before reopening.⁴¹

Post-harvest processing techniques like high-pressure processing, irradiation, low-temperature pasteurization, flash-freezing all reduce Vibrio densities and cut oyster-associated illnesses by 40 to 60 percent, but they require significant capital investment that is out of reach for many small-scale coastal producers.⁴² The regulatory burden is not unreasonable, given what the pathogen does. But it lands hardest on the waterman operating out of a small lease on a tidal creek, not on the industrial processor with a capitalized processing facility. As sea level rise expands the Vibrio risk zone upriver and northward, more harvest areas, more operations, and more communities face those compliance costs and closure exposures.

The Fish Are Moving, But the Boats Cannot Follow

Climate-driven restructuring of marine ecosystems is not merely a future projection. NOAA bottom trawl survey data from the Northeast Shelf, compiled over nearly 50 years, documents an average species distribution shift of almost 8 miles northward and 8 feet deeper per decade.⁴³ The fish are moving to stay within their physiological thermal envelopes, following the isotherms as warming pushes them poleward and into deeper, colder waters. The boats, the processing plants, the fish houses, and the docks cannot follow. They are fixed to geography and capital in ways that fish are not.

This spatial mismatch between migrating stocks and stationary infrastructure is documented in studies of Florida fishing communities including Cedar Key, Conch Key, and Fort Myers Beach.⁴⁴

These communities, the fishers that work there report with consistent and sometimes painful specificity the regular tidal flooding of main coastal roads, a significant northward migration of warm-water species like snook, the complete disappearance of historically productive shallow oyster reefs, and a one-month delay in the arrival of the annual winter cold front that once structured the clamming and oystering calendar.⁴⁶ The reefs are gone. The road floods. The cold front is late. The economic loss accumulates.

Who Bears the Weight: The Communities on the Receiving End

The communities experiencing these losses include the coastal agricultural counties of the Delmarva Peninsula and the North Carolina Outer Coastal Plain, the fishing communities of the Gulf Coast and the Chesapeake Bay, the small-scale shellfish growers of the Pacific Northwest and Maine. These are not communities with the greatest capacity to absorb systemic economic shocks. They are rural. They are often economically marginalized. Their tax bases and public services are thin. When a principal industry is degraded by a slow-onset climate change driven geophysical process that receives no emergency declaration and mobilizes no disaster fund, there is no cavalry coming.

The national food security consequences of the losses already documented are significant. Saltwater intrusion is encroaching on freshwater aquifers in 43 states, threatening irrigation systems across a far broader geography than the Atlantic coastal plain.⁴⁷ The degradation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed’s productive agricultural and aquatic ecosystems is a degradation of a regional food system that feeds millions. The collapse of the Mid-Atlantic marsh edge is a collapse of the nursery habitat that sustains commercial fishing from Maine to Florida. These are not local losses. They are national vulnerabilities being slowly accumulated, one acre and one season at a time.

“The coast is not a boundary between land and water. It is the most productive interface in American food production and it is being disassembled, one marsh acre, one salt patch, one closed fishery at a time, by a crisis whose pace makes it easy to ignore until it is too late.”

What Must Change: Policy Proportionate to the Threat

The political response to the accelerating damage to the American coastal agriculture and fisheries has been pathetic compared to the threat nor well-matched to its geography. There is no shortage of knowledge about what is happening or what works to fix it. The failure is taking that knowledge and creating well funded, scaled, and sustained policy action.

I. Protect and Expand the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service administers the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), including its Wetland Reserve Easements (WRE) component, which compensates farmers to voluntarily retire salt-degraded agricultural land from production and restore it to functioning wetland. The program works.⁴⁸ It is competitive and chronically underfunded, leaving many of the most vulnerable coastal farmers without options when their field become damaged by sea-level rise. State departments of agriculture along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts should establish matching grant programs to supplement federal ACEP enrollment, ensuring that farmers facing the most acute salinization pressures have a viable path to retirement that does not require walking away from land their families have worked for generations without compensation.

Under permanent easements, the NRCS compensates landowners at 100 percent of easement value and covers 75 to 100 percent of restoration costs.⁴⁹ The 30-year and term easement options offer compensation at 50 to 75 percent of the permanent rate for landowners who are not ready to make a permanent commitment.⁵⁰ These programs align short-term farm income with long-term ecological retreat, providing a dignified off-ramp from a crisis that, without this program or something similar, will leave farmers with degraded land, no income, and no compensation.

II. Publish Standardized Assisted Marsh Migration Protocols

When salt-degraded farmland transitions to tidal wetland, the process can be managed or it can be chaotic. Assisted marsh migration, the deliberate facilitation of inland wetland expansion through landform modification, invasive species removal, and native planting produces ecologically functional wetland habitat faster and with greater species diversity than unassisted transition.⁵¹ Federal and state agencies should publish standardized technical guidelines establishing clear criteria: restricting assisted migration to sites with slopes below 1 percent; requiring the excavation of hydrological runnels to prevent upland ponding that drowns colonizing vegetation; mandating exclusion of contaminated brownfield sites from migration corridors. The USDA NRCS Cape May Plant Materials Center has documented the native species best suited for these buffer zones, including groundsel (Baccharis halimifolia), bayberry (Morella pensylvanica), salt meadow cordgrass (Spartina patens), and switchgrass (Panicum virgatum).⁵² That knowledge exists. The standardized protocols to disseminate it broadly do not.

III. Rebuild Living Shorelines and Stop Incentivizing Hardening

State and federal coastal management agencies should replace policies that incentivize shoreline hardening such as building seawalls with programs that give structural preference to living shoreline alternatives: oyster reef restoration, marsh sill construction, and hybrid beach-marsh complexes. Seawalls and bulkheads support 23 percent lower biodiversity and 45 percent lower organism abundance than natural shorelines.⁵³ They do not merely fail to provide nursery habitat. They actively degrade it through wave reflection, scour, and the physical severing of the marsh-upland transition zone. Hard armoring permits should be approved only after living shoreline alternatives have been evaluated and documented as infeasible.

Along the Gulf Coast, where Louisiana loses approximately 80,000 acres of coastal wetlands annually due to levee-induced sediment starvation,⁵⁴ restoration of natural sediment delivery pathways through controlled river diversions - a strategy evaluated in the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan - should be treated as a highest-priority resilience investment, not a perpetually deferred engineering study. The Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act should be reauthorized and expanded with funding levels that reflect the scale of documented loss. The current Administration is going in exactly the opposite direction to the detriment of coastal famers and fishers.

IV. Scale the Early Warning and Buffering Infrastructure for Shellfish

Hatcheries across the Pacific coast have demonstrated that real-time water chemistry monitoring using Burke-o-Lator systems, combined with soda ash buffering and three-day oceanographic forecasting through the LiveOcean model, can recover up to 75 percent of larval losses attributable to ocean acidification events.⁵⁵ Federal funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law should be prioritized to subsidize Burke-o-Lator installations in hatcheries from Alaska to Maine and to extend the LiveOcean forecasting portal to the Atlantic seaboard. Co-location of eastern oyster and hard clam leases adjacent to restored eelgrass (Zostera marina) beds which draw down dissolved CO₂ through photosynthesis, biologically raising local pH provide a low-cost, ecologically synergistic buffer against acidification that the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf estuaries can deploy now.⁵⁶ There just needs to be some political will and spending on people instead of wars.

V. Build a National Vibrio Early Warning System

The FDA, in partnership with NOAA and the CDC, should scale the University of Florida’s satellite-derived Vibriopredictive model into a national public health early warning system. The system should integrate real-time sea surface temperature and salinity data to map the shifting brackish salinity corridor up to one month in advance, giving shellfish growers the information to plan harvest locations safely. It should replace static, rolling five-year average risk calculations with dynamic predictive advisories, and combine satellite forecasting with rapid pathogen detection at commercial landings to identify contaminated product before it enters the raw supply chain.⁵⁷ As the optimal Vibrio salinity corridor migrates upriver and northward, the geographic coverage of any effective early warning system must expand with it. We have the technology and with AI modelling the early warnings can be highly accurate.

VI. Fund Coastal Community Transition Plans

NOAA’s Sea Grant program, in partnership with state marine fisheries agencies, should develop and fund Community Climate Transition Plans for coastal fishing communities facing compounding stressors. Plans developed through participatory action research with fishing communities, integrating economic diversification pathways, targeted retraining programs, and working waterfront preservation, can bridge that gap in ways that top-down adaptation mandates cannot.

The Slow Emergency

The United States has long told itself a story about its agricultural and maritime abundance that makes it difficult to reckon with the evidence of what is being lost. The story is not false. The productivity of American coastal agriculture and fisheries is extraordinary. But it rests on a physical and ecological foundation where we have freshwater aquifers, intact salt marshes, functioning estuaries, carbonate-saturated coastal waters, and stable salinity gradients. Now, sea level rise is systematically degrading, season by season, millimeter by millimeter our coastal farms and fisheries.

The farmers watching their corn fields go white with salt are not the authors of that crisis. The watermen whose oyster reefs have eroded into tidal flat are not either. The communities in North Carolina where sorghum has replaced corn because the salt threshold arithmetic has simply made growing corn impossible, are not the problem. The Bristol Bay crab fleet that lost two seasons of commercial harvest to an acidification-driven population collapse did not cause the CO₂ that acidified the water.

But they all are paying for it. They are paying in lost income, in degraded land, in marginal profitability calculations that no longer compute, in communities that are slowly losing the economic basis for their continued existence. The question, as it always is, belongs to the people in a position to respond at scale. The science is not uncertain. The losses are documented and accelerating. The policy tools involve easements, living shorelines, early warning systems, hatchery technology, assisted marsh migration, community transition plans that already exist and have demonstrated results and could be made better with appropriate funding and new technologies.

“The sea does not care about the political calendar. It does not wait for funding cycles or legislative compromise. It moves at the pace of physics. The only question is whether policy can change and be made to move at the pace of documented losses.”

The slow emergency of sea level rise is not slow because it is not serious. It is slow because its pace allows the Politicians and top 1% to look away, to defer, to argue about whether the millimeter measurements of one decade should govern the policy decisions of the next. The 19,000 acres of Delmarva farmland already converted to salt marsh cannot be retrieved.⁵⁹ The Bristol Bay crab seasons already closed cannot be fished back.⁶⁰ The larvae that died in Pacific hatcheries before monitoring and buffering systems were installed cannot be recovered. The question is only how much more of the same is acceptable and what it will take for the people responsible for creating a response to save our coastal farms and fisheries to create and fund one that is proportionate to the scale of the loss.

Endnotes

1. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / CNES (2024). Global Mean Sea Level Rise, 1993–2023. Satellite altimetry data via NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry.

2. Church, J.A. & White, N.J. (2011). Sea-level rise from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Surveys in Geophysics, 32(4–5), 585–602.

3. NOAA Tides and Currents (2024). Sea Level Trends. National Ocean Service, NOAA, Silver Spring MD. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/

4. Elsey-Quirk, T. et al. (2022). Agricultural land loss to tidal wetland transgression exceeds forest loss in the Mid-Atlantic. Global Change Biology. The study utilized Landsat satellite imagery from 1984–2022.

5. Ibid. Marsh-farm boundary elevation data from NOAA NAVD88 datum across the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay watersheds.

6. Tully, K.L. et al. (2019). Saltwater intrusion rapidly increases CO2 and N2O emissions in coastal agricultural soils. Global Change Biology, 25(9), 3146–3157; and Weston, N.B. et al. (2011) Accelerated microbial organic matter mineralization following salt-water intrusion into tidal freshwater marsh soils. Biogeochemistry, 102, 135–151. The Nature Sustainability salt-patch mapping study covers Dorchester, Somerset, and Wicomico counties of the Delmarva Peninsula.

7. Weston, N.B. et al. (2014). The effects of varying salinity regimes on nutrient cycling in tidal freshwater and oligohaline sediments. Limnology and Oceanography, 59(3), 889–900. Economic loss estimates from: Elsey-Quirk et al. (2022) and USDA Southeast Climate Hub (2024). Identification, Mitigation, and Adaptation to Salinization on Working Lands in the U.S. Southeast.

8. USDA Southeast Climate Hub (2024). Saltwater Intrusion and Salinization on Coastal Forests and Farms. USDA, Washington DC.

9. Elsey-Quirk et al. (2022). Farmland loss by elevation: 0–5 m NAVD88 across the Chesapeake-Delaware watershed.

10. Kirwan, M.L. & Gedan, K.B. (2019). Sea-level driven land conversion and the formation of ghost forests. Nature Climate Change, 9(6), 450–457.

11. Maas, E.V. & Hoffman, G.J. (1977). Crop salt tolerance: current assessment. Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, 103(2), 115–134.

12. Rengasamy, P. (2010). Soil processes affecting crop production in salt-affected soils. Functional Plant Biology, 37(7), 613–620.

13. Tully, K.L. et al. (2019). Accelerated microbial organic matter mineralization following saltwater intrusion in coastal agricultural soils.

14. Weissman, G.S. & Tully, K.L. (2020). Saltwater intrusion affects nutrient concentrations in soil porewater and surface waters of coastal agricultural fields. Estuaries and Coasts, 43(2), 315–328.

15. Maas, E.V. & Hoffman, G.J. (1977). Corn salinity threshold of 1.7 dS/m, slope 12.0% per dS/m.

16. Ibid. Full crop tolerance table. Soybean threshold: 5.0 dS/m; wheat: 6.0 dS/m; barley: 8.0 dS/m.

17. Qadir, M. et al. (2014). Economics of salt-induced land degradation and restoration. Natural Resources Forum, 38(4), 282–295.

18. USDA Southeast Climate Hub (2024). Saltwater Intrusion: A Growing Threat to Coastal Agriculture.

19. Delta Stewardship Council (2023). Delta Plan. Sacramento, CA. California Department of Water Resources, State Water Project reports.

20. NOAA Fisheries (2023). Importance of Estuaries. National Ocean Service. At least 50% of commercially and recreationally important fish species use estuarine habitats.

21. Costanza, R. et al. (2008). The value of coastal wetlands for hurricane protection. AMBIO, 37(4), 241–248.

22. Dahl, T.E. & Stedman, S.M. (2013). Status and Trends of Wetlands in the Coastal Watersheds of the Conterminous United States 2004 to 2009. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, DC.

23. Ibid. Salt marshes declined by 70,000 acres between 2009 and 2019.

24. Gittman, R.K. et al. (2016). Ecological consequences of shoreline hardening: a meta-analysis. BioScience, 66(9), 763–773.

25. Ibid.

26. IPCC (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Chapter 5: Global Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles. Cambridge University Press.

27. Ekstrom, J.A. et al. (2015). Vulnerability and adaptation of US shellfisheries to ocean acidification. Nature Climate Change, 5(3), 207–214.

28. NOAA Fisheries (2024). Commercial Fisheries Statistics: Port Landings. New Bedford, Massachusetts ranked highest-value US fishing port for 22 consecutive years.

29. Rheuban, J.E. et al. (2018). Projected impacts of future climate change, ocean acidification, and management on the US Atlantic sea scallop (Placopecten magellanicus) fishery. PLOS ONE, 13(9), e0203536.

30. Barton, A. et al. (2012). The Pacific Oyster, Crassostrea gigas, shows negative correlation to naturally elevated carbon dioxide levels: implications for near-term ocean acidification effects. Limnology and Oceanography, 57(3), 698–710. Economic loss figures from NOAA OAP (2024).

31. NOAA Ocean Acidification Program (2024). Ocean Acidification’s Contribution to the Decline of Red King Crab in Bristol Bay, Alaska. NOAA, Silver Spring MD.

32. NOAA Fisheries (2024). Eastern Oyster Aquaculture Production Data. Commercial oyster industry value approximately $250M annually.

33. Sturdivant, S.K. et al. (2019). Projected sea level rise effects on estuarine habitat in the Mid-Atlantic United States. Estuaries and Coasts, 42(6), 1465–1480.

34. Oliver, J.D. (2005). Wound infections caused by Vibrio vulnificus and other marine bacteria. Epidemiology and Infection, 133(3), 383–391. V. vulnificus accounts for 95% of all US seafood-associated fatalities.

35. Horseman, T. & Suresh, P. (2011). Vibrio vulnificus: Case Report and Literature Review. Clinical Medicine and Research, 9(3–4), 220.

36. Jacobs, J.M. et al. (2015). Increased sea level and salinity as drivers of estuarine pathogen risk. Environmental Health Perspectives, 123(4), 400–407.

37. Ibid. Sea level rise modeled as a stronger driver of V. vulnificus range expansion than atmospheric warming alone.

38. Trinanes, J.A. et al. (2016). Predicting the risk of V. vulnificus infections in New England from satellite-derived sea surface temperature and salinity. GeoHealth, 1(3), 110–122.

39. Florida Department of Health (2024). Vibriosis Surveillance Report, 2022–2024. Florida DOH, Tallahassee FL.

40. FDA (2022). National Shellfish Sanitation Program: Guide for the Control of Molluscan Shellfish. 2022 Revision. US Food and Drug Administration.

41. Ibid. Vibrio Control Plan trigger conditions and harvest closure protocols.

42. Barbosa, J. & Tenreiro, R. (2011). Effect of high-pressure processing and irradiation on Vibrio parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus in oysters. Journal of Applied Microbiology.

43. Nye, J.A. et al. (2009). Changing spatial distribution of fish stocks in relation to climate and population size on the Northeast United States continental shelf. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 393, 111–129.

44. Himes-Cornell, A. & Hoelting, K. (2015). Resilience strategies in the face of short-and long-term change: out-migration and fisheries regulation in Alaskan fishing communities. Ecology and Society, 20(2). Florida community data from NOAA Sea Grant Florida (2024).

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. USDA Southeast Climate Hub (2024). Saltwater Intrusion: A Growing Threat to Coastal Agriculture. 43 states facing some level of saltwater aquifer intrusion.

48. USDA NRCS (2024). Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. Federal Register, 89 FR 11421. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs-initiatives/acep-agricultural-conservation-easement-program

49. Farmland Information Center (2024). ACEP-WRE for Landowners. American Farmland Trust, Washington DC.

50. Ibid.

51. Torio, D.D. & Chmura, G.L. (2013). Assessing coastal squeeze of tidal wetlands. Journal of Coastal Research, 29(5), 1049–1061. Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability (2022). Assisted Marsh Migration: Coastal Habitats in a Changing Climate. Duke University.

52. Miller, C. (2023). Resilient Coastal Landscapes. USDA NRCS Cape May Plant Materials Center. Presentation to USETINC Annual Conference.

53. Gittman, R.K. et al. (2016). Ecological consequences of shoreline hardening: a meta-analysis. BioScience, 66(9), 763–773.

54. Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (2023). Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. CPRA, Baton Rouge LA.

55. Barton, A. et al. (2015). Impacts of coastal acidification on the Pacific Northwest shellfish industry and adaptation strategies implemented in response. Oceanography, 28(2), 146–159. Hales, B. et al. (2017). Quantification of underway pCO2 designed for high sampling rates. Marine Chemistry, 185, 51–59.

56. NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (2024). Can Meadows of Underwater Grasses Help Mitigate the Harmful Effects of Ocean Acidification on Eastern Oysters? NCCOS, Silver Spring MD.

57. Jacobs, J.M. et al. (2015). Increased sea level and salinity as drivers of estuarine pathogen risk. Environmental Health Perspectives. University of Florida satellite Vibrio model.

58. Himes-Cornell, A. & Hoelting, K. (2015). Resilience strategies in the face of short- and long-term change. Ecology and Society.

59. Tully, K.L. et al. (2019); Elsey-Quirk et al. (2022). 19,000+ acres documented in Nature Sustainability Delmarva mapping study.

60. NOAA Fisheries (2022/2023). Bristol Bay Red King Crab Commercial Season Closure Notices. Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Hunger is rising. After decades of slow but steady progress, the number of people facing food insecurity has surged. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 2.3 billion people faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2024. More and more people are facing a hunger crisis particularly since 1/3 of the world’s fertilizer is being held up due to the war in Iran and crops are being planted now which need that fertilizer.^[1] The drivers are multiple, but one has become impossible to ignore: climate change is systematically undermining the world’s ability to grow, distribute, and afford food.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (2022) identifies food security as one of the most critical and immediate risks of a warming planet. It finds that climate change has already reduced global agricultural productivity growth by roughly 21% since 1961, with the losses concentrated in low- and middle-income tropical countries — precisely where food insecurity is already highest.^[2] For staple crops, the trajectory is alarming: maize yields are projected to fall by up to 24% under high-emissions scenarios; wheat and rice face comparable losses. For every 1°C rise in global average temperatures, food production declines by the caloric equivalent of forcing one person in every household on earth to skip a meal every week.^[3]

These are not distant projections. They are unfolding now. The prolonged drought that gripped the Horn of Africa from 2021 to 2023 — described by meteorologists as the worst in 40 years and made significantly more likely by human-caused climate change^[4] — pushed 22 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia into acute food insecurity.^[5] In the Central American Dry Corridor, multi-year droughts have destroyed consecutive harvests, driving malnutrition, stunting, and mass displacement. In 2024, extreme heat and El Niño conditions devastated West African cocoa harvests and Vietnam’s coffee crop, sending global commodity prices surging — with none of the gains flowing to the farmers who grew them.

“For every 1°C rise in temperature, a poor smallholder farmer loses more than half their income. For a billionaire investor, the same degree of warming represents a new profit opportunity.”

The Crop Collapse: Science on the Front Line

The relationship between warming temperatures and crop failure is now one of the most robustly documented findings in climate science. A landmark 2025 study published in Nature modelling global production across all major crops confirmed that current trajectories will produce significant and widespread yield declines across cropping regions by mid-century, with the greatest impacts concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America.^[6]

Pastoralism — the livelihood of more than 75% of the global population in the world’s dryland regions — is equally exposed. The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019) documents falling pasture productivity, damage to animal reproductive function, and accelerating biodiversity loss as rainfall patterns shift and temperatures rise.^[7] For the estimated 200 million pastoralists worldwide, these are not abstract risks — they are the destruction of livelihoods that have no equivalent substitute.

The majority of cropping regions have now experienced both rapid warming and atmospheric drying, affecting an area home to one fifth of the global population.^[8] Yield progress for barley, wheat, and maize — the crops on which global food security most depends — has slowed significantly as a direct result of climate stress. The world is running a food security deficit even before accounting for the full consequences of future warming.

Smallholder Farmers: The People Who Feed the World Are Going Hungry

Smallholder farmers produce over a third of the world’s food, and approximately 2.5 billion people — including the vast majority of the world’s most food-insecure populations — depend on small-scale farming, herding, and fishing for their survival.^[9] These are the people most exposed to climate change and least equipped to adapt to it.

The economic consequences are stark. A study from Kansas found that for every 1°C of warming, net farm income fell by 66%.^[10] Research from India documents a 17–21% decrease in farm revenue per degree of warming.^[11] A broader analysis finds that a 1°C increase in average temperatures is associated with a 53% decrease in the farm incomes of poor rural households globally. These losses are not recovered in good years — they accumulate, compounding across seasons, pushing households into debt, into hunger, and ultimately into migration.

Women farmers, who make up 43% of the global agricultural labour force, bear a disproportionate share of this burden.^[12] A study in France found women are overrepresented in the crops most vulnerable to climate variability, yet more likely than men to adopt sustainable practices — managing a third of organic farms while comprising less than a third of permanent agricultural workers.^[13] In Bangladesh, climate disasters directly destroy the small livestock, homestead gardens, and informal trading that women rely on for income and nutrition, with limited access to land, credit, or social protection making recovery extremely difficult.^[14]

Climateflation: How a Warming World Is Making Food Unaffordable

Even where food remains available, it is becoming unaffordable. A phenomenon researchers have begun calling ‘climateflation’ — food price inflation driven by climate-related supply disruptions — is now a documented and measurable economic force. A 2024 study published in Nature Climate Change found that global temperature increases projected for 2035 will add between 0.92 and 3.23 percentage points to annual food price inflation.^[15] Food prices in Europe are forecast to rise by up to 50% due to global warming over coming decades.^[16]

These headline figures translate differently across the income spectrum. In Nigeria, a person allocates nearly 60% of their household budget to food; in the United States, the figure is less than 7%. When food prices rise, the poorest households have nowhere to absorb the shock — they eat less, they eat worse, they pull children from school, they take on debt.^[17] In the United States itself, the lowest income group already spends a third of its budget on food; climate-driven price rises will hit them hardest even in the world’s wealthiest economy.

A team of experts convened by the European Climate Research Institute (ERL) in 2025 investigated climate-linked food price spikes across 18 countries between 2022 and 2024, documenting how heat, drought, and extreme precipitation events each generated measurable and sustained price increases for staple commodities.^[18] In every case studied, the price increases persisted long after the climate event had passed: between September and October 2023, the FAO’s global food price index fell by 11.5%, yet domestic food prices across low- and lower-middle-income countries continued to rise, with the poorest country group recording price increases of 30%.^[19]

Who Profits When Food Systems Fail

The costs of climate-driven food crises are not distributed evenly across the supply chain. While smallholder farmers lose incomes and low-income consumers skip meals, the corporations that dominate the global food system have used climate-related supply disruptions as cover for extraordinary profit-taking.

The four corporations — Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus — that together control an estimated 70–90% of global grain trade saw their profits surge following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the associated global food price spike. Cargill’s profits rose by 23% in 2022 compared to 2021; ADM recorded its highest profits in its history.^[20] Ten hedge funds made an estimated $1.9 billion in profits ahead of the food price spike, through speculative positions on food commodities.^[21]

Climate shocks have become a mechanism for further concentration of profit at the top of food supply chains. In 2024, extreme weather and El Niño conditions destroyed West African cocoa harvests, sending prices up 231% year on year — with none of that increase reaching the cocoa farmers who had lost their crops.^[22]Drought in Brazil and Vietnam drove coffee prices up 55% by August 2024, while the trading companies that serve as middlemen in the supply chain captured the margin.^[23] The avian influenza outbreak — a climate-sensitive zoonotic risk — killed over 120 million hens, tripling retail egg prices in the US, while major producer Cal-Maine reported $509 million in a single quarter: more than triple its previous year’s results.^[24]

Cargill — one of the world’s largest food traders — now counts 12 family members as billionaires, up from eight before the pandemic.^[25] The food industry’s billionaires are enriching themselves from the same climate crisis that is starving the farmers who grow their commodities and pricing out the consumers who buy their products.

“Climate change is not just destroying harvests — it is restructuring who controls the food system and who goes hungry as a result.”

The Politics of Hunger: Inequality, Power, and the Failure to Act

The link between climate change and hunger is not a natural disaster — it is a political one. The countries that are most food-insecure today contributed least to the emissions that are destroying their agricultural systems. The people going hungry in the Dry Corridor of Central America, in the dryland communities of the Sahel, and on the flood-prone deltas of Bangladesh did not cause the climate crisis. The people who did — the billionaire investors in fossil fuel companies, the executives who lobbied against climate regulation, the owners of the private jets — are insulated from its food consequences by their wealth.

Between 1850 and 2015, the countries of the Global North, representing just 14% of the world’s population, were responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary.^[26] Analysis combining the Stockholm Environment Institute’s emissions inequality data with climate attribution science finds that the richest 1% of humanity contributed 26 times more to extreme weather events than the average person — including the droughts, floods, and heat extremes that are now driving food system collapse.^[27]

The Corporate Capture of Agricultural Systems

The food crisis is not simply a story of weather — it is also a story of market power. A small number of agro-industrial corporations have come to control critical nodes of the global food system. Four firms — Syngenta Group, Bayer, BASF, and Corteva — now control half the world’s commercial seed supply and more than half the global pesticides market.^[28] These same corporations are marketing climate-related crop failures as an opportunity to sell ‘climate-smart’ technologies — new seeds, new inputs, new contracts — that deepen farmer dependency on corporate supply chains rather than building genuine resilience.

Large-scale agribusinesses in the US and EU receive billions in public subsidies that allow them to sell imported staple crops — wheat, rice, corn, soy — at prices below what local farmers can compete with.^[29] This structural unfairness is compounded by climate vulnerability: smallholder farmers in the Global South face the double burden of competing with subsidised industrial agriculture and absorbing the climate shocks that industrial agriculture’s emissions have caused.

Roughly 21–37% of global greenhouse gas emissions originate from the food system itself, from farming and land use to storage, transport, processing, retail, and consumption.^[30] The industrial model that dominates global food production is both a major driver of the climate crisis and the primary beneficiary of the instability that crisis creates. This is not a market failure — it is the market functioning exactly as designed, concentrating gain at the top while socialising cost and risk onto those at the bottom.

What Must Change: From Crisis to Justice

The evidence demands a response proportionate to the scale of the crisis. Techno-managerial fixes — new seed varieties, precision agriculture, carbon markets — are not sufficient, and in many cases actively entrench the corporate power structures that are making the crisis worse. The path from climate-driven hunger to food security runs through structural change: in land rights, in trade rules, in corporate accountability, and in who controls the food system.

Governments must move away from industrial monoculture agriculture and invest in climate-resilient smallholder food systems. This means protecting farmers’ access to arable land, community seed banks, and agricultural inputs; funding agroecological research and practice; and reforming trade rules that allow rich-country subsidy regimes to undercut farmers in climate-vulnerable nations.^[31]

Women’s role in transforming food systems must be recognised and resourced. Policy biases and structural barriers that restrict women’s access to land, credit, agricultural inputs, and markets must be dismantled.^[32]The rights of Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, and smallholder farming communities to manage their lands and integrate into national adaptation plans must be protected and funded through accessible climate finance — not through the loan-based instruments that have already placed low-income nations under crippling debt burdens.

And the corporations and billionaires who have profited from the food system’s failures — and whose emissions have helped create the conditions for those failures — must be made to pay. Windfall profit taxes on food corporations that price-gouge during climate-driven supply shocks; wealth taxes on the billionaires whose investment emissions contribute disproportionately to the warming that is destroying harvests; and mandatory corporate accountability for emissions across agricultural supply chains are all tools available to governments willing to use them.

The 2025 Report of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality concluded that all governments must set timebound, realistic targets to reduce economic inequality.^[33] No target matters more urgently, or is more directly linked to food security, than closing the vast gap between those who caused the climate crisis and those who are going hungry because of it.

Endnotes

1. FAO (2024). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.

2. IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Chapter 5: Food, Fibre, and Other Ecosystem Products.

3. Authors’ calculations based on global crop production modelling. Nature (2025). Crop yield projections under climate change scenarios across major staple crops.

4. World Weather Attribution (2023). Human-induced climate change increased drought severity scoring in the 2020–2023 Horn of Africa drought. WWA Collaborative Report.

5. OCHA (2023). Horn of Africa Drought: Humanitarian Situation Report. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

6. Various authors (2025). Global crop production under current and projected climate trajectories. Nature.

7. IPCC (2019). Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), Chapter 5: Food Security.

8. PNAS (2025). Rapid warming and atmospheric drying across global cropping regions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

9. van der Lee, J. et al. (2021). Smallholder farmers and global food supply. World Development; FAO (2023). Family Farming and Food Security.

10. Environmental Defense Fund (2024). Extreme Heat and Farm Income: Evidence from Kansas.

11. Chandrasekaran, V. et al. (2024). Climate Change and Farm Revenue in India. Cogent Economics & Finance, 14(2).

12. FAO (2023). The State of Food and Agriculture: Revealing the True Cost of Food. Rome.

13. Oxfam France (2023). Genre et agriculture: les femmes en première ligne du changement climatique. Paris.

14. Oxfam (2026). Loss and Damage and Unpaid Care in Bangladesh. To be published.

15. Kotz, M. et al. (2024). Global warming and food inflation: projections to 2035. Nature Climate Change.

16. Ibid.

17. USDA Economic Research Service (2023). Food Expenditure as a Share of Household Budget by Country. Processed by Our World in Data.

18. Kotz, M. et al. (2025). Climate-driven food price shocks: case studies from 18 countries, 2022–2024. Environmental Research Letters.

19. Network Ideas (2024). Why do domestic food prices keep rising when global prices fall? Synthesis of FAO price data, 2023–2024.

20. The Guardian (2022, August 23). Record profits for grain firms as food crisis prompts calls for windfall tax.

21. Lighthouse Reports (2022). Exposed: The Hedge Funds Cashing In on the Food Price Spike. Investigative journalism report.

22. Euronews Business (2024, March 28). Cocoa prices rise to fresh records: will we run out of chocolate?

23. FAO (2024). Adverse climatic conditions drive coffee prices to highest level in years. FAO Newsroom.

24. Washington Post (2025, April 8). Egg prices, profit increase at Cal-Maine as avian flu reshapes supply.

25. Oxfam UK (2022). Food and energy billionaires pocket £453 billion windfall as cost of living crisis pushes millions into poverty. Press release.

26. Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4, e399–e404.

27. Stuart-Smith, R. et al. (2025). Attributing climate extremes to consumption emissions of the richest. Nature Climate Change.

28. ETC Group (2022). Food Barons 2022: Crisis Profiteering, Digitalization and Shifting Power. ETC Group Report.

29. Slow Food International (2024). Facts about food trade and supply that sound fake but aren’t. Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity.

30. IPCC (2022). Climate Change and Land: Food system emissions. Special Report on Climate Change and Land, Summary for Policymakers.

31. Oxfam International (2025). Fixing Our Food: Debunking 10 Myths About the Global Food System and What Drives Hunger. Oxfam Briefing Paper.

32. UN Women / FAO (2023). Closing the Gender Gap in Agriculture: Policy Priorities for Climate-Resilient Food Systems.

33. G20 South Africa (2025). Report of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality. IPD Columbia University.

As of this week, 51.35% of the United States that is and than 61% of the contiguous Lower 48 is currently under drought conditions. One hundred and fifty-three million Americans are living inside the perimeter of a slow-moving disaster. Not a hurricane that arrives with wind and fury and then slowly recedes. Not a flood that crests, causes water damage and then slowly seeps away. A drought arrives quietly, invisibly, in the gap between the rain that fell and the rain that did not. It announces itself not in the sky but in the soil, in the cracked clay of an Oklahoma wheat field, in the depleted column of an aquifer under the High Plains, in the skeletal silence of a Nebraska rangeland where there should be cattle but.

The drought that has gripped the United States since 2024 is not a weather event. It is a regime change.

Photo credit: ID 365236816 © Azaria Design | Dreamstime.com

In the two years ending May 2026, the American agricultural sector has absorbed losses that no single metric can fully capture. The national cattle herd has fallen to 86.2 million head, the smallest since herd in America since 1951, the year Harry Truman was President, and the Korean War was less than a year old. The U.S. wheat crop is on track to be the smallest since 1972. Florida’s citrus industry, which once yielded 225 million boxes of oranges a season, but due to disease brought on by climate change is projected to produce 12 million a 95% collapse in a single generation. The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates total net agricultural losses will exceed $50 billion over the three years ending in 2026.

These are not abstractions. They are the preconditions of hunger. they will first be felt in higher grocery bills by American families, and simultaneously be felt most acutely by the 47 million Americans who were already food insecure before the drought cracked open the first acre of crop land.

A Map of Catastrophe

To understand the geography of this drought is to understand why it has proven so devastating. This is not a regional drought. It is a national one, with particular intensity in the breadbaskets and range lands that feed the rest of us.

The Southern Plains including Texas and Oklahoma have now endured six consecutive years of drought stress. Six years of watching the sky and watching the forecasts and watching the yields come in below the cost of production. This is not a run of bad luck. It is a permanent alteration of the agricultural calculus for dryland farming in one of the most productive wheat-growing regions on earth.

The High Plains, and Nebraska in particular, tell a parallel story. By mid-2026, 88% of Nebraska was classified as being in drought. Nebraska’s Sandhills region is the beating heart of the American cow-calf industry. In the spring of 2026, record-breaking wildfires tore through those Sandhills, destroying the grazing infrastructure on which an entire livestock economy depends.

The Southeast, not historically synonymous with drought, recorded moisture levels in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina at their lowest since 1895, followed by a historic February freeze that compressed disaster into a single brutal season. The brutal frost caused by the generational storm was unlike the typical freeze events that Florida growers have faced in a generation. Temperatures fell below 30°F throughout the state from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2, which was lower than some records dating back to 1909. Further complicating matters were the cold temperatures arriving right after record-high temperatures, he says, adding that the state experienced a nearly 50-degree temperature swing in 48 hours. According to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, production losses reached approximately 90% of the crop, resulting in an estimated $78.5 million in damages.

The mechanism of destruction for this national drought is not only the absence of rain. It is what climatologists call “evaporative demand.” As temperatures rise, even the rain that does fall is extracted back from the soil and from plant tissue more quickly than before. “Flash droughts,” which is a rapid onset or intensification of drought conditions, developing over a few days to weeks rather than months. It is characterized by quickly depleting soil moisture, often driven by lower-than-normal precipitation combined with high temperatures, high winds, and low humidity, which cause excessive evaporation. [1, 2, 3] Flas droughts are becoming more common. They arrive too fast for crop insurance adjusters, too fast for disaster declarations, and far too fast for federal aid to catch up. By the time the paperwork is filed, the crop is gone.

The Wheat That Wasn’t

There is a number that sits at the center of the 2026 grain crisis, and it deserves to be repeated until it lands with the weight it carries: 1.561 billion bushels is the U.S. total wheat production forecast for 2026. It is the smallest wheat harvest in 54 years. It represents the compounding of years of climatological assault on the Hard Red Winter wheat belt that stretches across Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and that produces the flour in the bread on your table and in the aid packages bound for Yemen and Sudan.

In the Southern Plains, the Hard Red Winter crop has been devastated. Production is pegged at 515 million bushels that represents a 36% drop from 2025 in a single season. In Texas and Oklahoma, nearly 32% of planted acres will not be harvested at all. Crop scouts in northern Kansas reported average yields of 38.3 bushels per acre, against a prior-year average of 50.5. Those missing 12 bushels per acre are not a rounding error. They are the difference between a farm that makes money and one that doesn’t. They are the grain that does not reach the global market. And in a global food system where U.S. wheat is a reference price, their absence is felt from Cairo to Kampala.

The season-average farm price for wheat is projected to jump to $6.50 per bushel — a 30% increase from 2025. Higher prices, in theory, benefit farmers. In practice, they benefit farmers who have a crop to sell. For the third of producers who will harvest nothing from their winter wheat fields this year, the higher price is irrelevant.

The drought hasn’t just destroyed this year’s harvest. It has destroyed the confidence on which rebuilding the next crop depends.

The Cattle That Were Sold

The livestock story is, in some ways, the most structurally significant chapter of the drought’s consequences because the decisions being made today in ranching country will determine the supply and cost of American beef not just this year but through at least 2028.

When drought destroys rangeland, ranchers face an immediate and brutal choice: purchase expensive supplemental feed to keep their herds alive or sell the animals, including the breeding cows whose calves would have been next year’s and the year after’s supply. Over the last two years, in ranch after ranch across the Southern Plains and the Southeast, producers chose to sell of their herds including the breeding cows.

The beef cow herd now stands at 27.6 million head, its lowest point since 1961. The total cattle inventory 86.2 million head is the smallest herd in America since the Eisenhower administration. And here is the critical structural point: cattle herds take years to rebuild. A heifer kept today won’t produce her first calf for two years. That calf won’t reach market weight for another year and a half. The liquidation decisions being made today because of this drought will constrain beef supply and keep prices elevated through the end of this decade.

A metric called the Female Slaughter Ratio tells the story in a single number. When the ratio rises above 48%, it means producers are still in liquidation mode. In the first quarter of 2026, that ratio stood at 49.9%. Even with steers selling at over $240 per hundredweight which is a record price, ranchers in the Southern Plains are still unwilling to bet on a heifer whose survival depends on rain that may not come so they are slaughtering the future of cattle herds.

The consequences ripple outward. Major meatpackers like Tyson Foods, after years of record profits, are now scrambling to source the limited livestock that is available. Tyson closed its facility in Lexington, Nebraska which is a clear signal that the industry expects the cattle supply shortage to persist. Walmart has seen the writing on the walls and has begun building its own processing infrastructure to guarantee a supply of beef for its stores in a market where the guarantee of readily available beef cattle has evaporated.

Ground beef is no longer a staple. It is becoming a luxury.

Florida’s Last Orange

Orange juice from Florida used to be a breakfast staple. Now, it’s starting to look more like champagne, a luxury item for special occasions. As climate change intensifies, Florida’s orange market is caught in the turmoil. Since the 1990s, the state’s orange production has fallen 92.5%, dropping from 244 million boxes to just 12.15 million boxes by this year. The decline has many asking: How did a once-dominant powerhouse for the fruit end up here?

Thirty years ago, Florida’s orange groves produced 225 million boxes of fruit a season. The forecast for 2026 is 12 million boxes. That is not a typo. Climate change has brought a 95% collapse in citrus production across a single generation of growers, driven by the convergence of drought, disease, freeze events, and the slow attrition of agricultural land to development.

The February 2026 freeze that arrived on top of the worst drought in 25 years cost the Florida citrus industry $700 million in immediate damages. It cost the broader Florida agricultural sector over $3.1 billion: $1.15 billion in sugarcane losses, $307 million in strawberry losses, $78 million in blueberries, and $240 million in greenhouse and nursery crops. Ninety percent of Florida’s 2026 blueberry crop was lost in a single event.

Florida is typically known for its hot, steamy, sunny climate with frequent thunderstorms, but as climate change continues, its conditions become hotter and steamier, and its storms are more frequent and severe, harshly impacting the state’s national fruit. The frequency of such intense conditions has made the fruit vulnerable to citrus greening disease: a bacterial disease spread by tiny, sap-sucking insects called psyllids (pronounced sill-ids).

The growers who remain are a dwindling cohort, of aging, financially exhausted producers who are spending $43,000 to $45,000 per acre to build screen houses that protect their trees from the psyllid insect that carries citrus greening disease. These structures are not hurricane-proof. They require constant maintenance. They are not a solution. They are a way of not giving up, which is a different thing.

Climate change did not cause citrus greening disease, it is caused by a bacterium spread by the invasive Asian citrus psyllid. However, warming temperatures and more severe weather caused by climate change have significantly worsened the crisis, accelerating the spread of the disease and devastating Florida’s citrus groves. [1, 2, 3] The combination of this incurable disease and climate-exacerbated natural disasters has brought the Florida citrus industry to historic lows. Several key factors define how climate change impacts the epidemic: [1, 2]

· Faster Insect Breeding: Warmer temperatures create a more hospitable environment for the Asian citrus psyllid. The heat accelerates their breeding cycles, enabling them to multiply and spread the bacteria at a much faster rate.

· Increased Vulnerability: Hotter and more extreme weather patterns weaken the trees’ natural defenses, leaving them highly susceptible to infection.

· Extreme Weather Compound: Climate change has amplified the frequency and intensity of hurricanes in Florida. Repeated storms—such as Ian and Milton—have physically destroyed orchards, flooded fields, and further stressed surviving trees. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

·

An example of citrus greening on oranges

During warmer weather months, the insects feed on young citrus shoots and leaves, injecting bacteria that cause citrus greening disease (HLB). The disease causes trees to produce bitter, small, misshapen fruit that appear about 2-3 years after contamination, making it significantly difficult to detect. The insect thrives under warm conditions. Historically, freezing temperatures in winter would kill HLB. As Florida is having more and more milder winters, psyllids are enabled to continue reproducing and feeding on the plant all winter long. Frequent severe storms and hurricanes only exacerbate the problem, carrying the insects into new groves and regions just to spread the disease more. Since first hitting in 2005 and the presence of back-to-back hurricanes from 2021 to 2024, the disease has spread to every citrus-growing county in Florida, putting the orange belt on the brink.

In Ruskin, Florida, this past year brought nearly a month’s worth of extra days above 90°F, with average temperatures running more than 2 degrees hotter than normal. Cold snaps, which once helped keep pests like psyllids in check—have completely disappeared. The chart below shows how climate risk has spiked alongside these hotter, steamier conditions, creating the perfect environment for citrus greening to spread.

·

Figure 1. Climate risk in Florida groves is climbing fast. The chart shows the percentage of days rated “high-risk” (red) through 2025–26. Spikes in spring

The Florida citrus collapse is a warning of what happens when climate stress exceeds the limits of adaptation. The drought didn’t create the fragility. It revealed it.

The Cost That Doesn’t Stop

The farm margin crisis of 2026 is a story told in two directions simultaneously: commodity prices rising, and input costs rising faster.

The disruption of trade through the Strait of Hormuz which is a chokepoint for an estimated 30% of global fertilizer shipments sent nitrogen prices soaring in early 2026. See Fertilizer Famine [hyperlink] Urea prices jumped 47% in a single month following the start of the conflict, the largest single-month percentage increase in the commodity’s history. A full run of a single tractor now costs an additional $350 per day in fuel. For the farmer who could not lock in fertilizer contracts before the season, the exposure is total.

The per-acre production cost for corn has reached $890. For rice, $1,336. For cotton, $965. These numbers, matched against projected commodity prices and realistic drought-affected yields, produce something that should disturb anyone who eats: most of American agriculture is currently unprofitable. The AFBF estimates net losses exceeding $50 billion across the sector. The latest agricultural census showed the loss of 140,000 farms between 2017 and 2022 and this is a trend every analyst expects to accelerate.

In the lowest income 1/5 of American households, food already consumed nearly 30% of total expenditure before the drought began. Every percentage point of food price inflation is a meal that doesn’t get made, a bill that doesn’t get paid, a child who goes to school without breakfast. Beef prices are projected to rise 6.3% in 2026. Fresh vegetables 4.8%.Sugar and sweets, 8.1%. The drought that started in the fields ends up on the grocery receipt.

The Time for Half-Measures Is Over

The federal government has taken some steps. The American Relief Act of 2025 delivered $30.78 billion in farm relief, and the Supplemental Disaster Relief Program has put $6.7 billion into the hands of producers with existing insurance records. An extension of the 2018 Farm Bill has kept core programs from lapsing entirely. These actions represent a floor, only a minimum response to a maximum crisis. These small actions are not a solution to the huge problems that climate change is causing to American agriculture.

The 2026 Farm Bill is the single most important legislative tool available to address this crisis but remains stalled in the Senate, held hostage to partisan battles over SNAP funding, climate provisions, and budget offsets. Every month it sits unfinished is another month that uninsured and specialty crop producers wait for Stage 2 disaster relief. Another month that the High Plains Aquifer drains without a funded federal strategy to slow it. Another month that 153 million Americans living in drought-affected regions face rising food prices without an adequate safety net beneath them.

The data demands a reckoning. The Southern Plains have been in continuous drought stress for six years. The cattle herd will not rebuild before 2028. Florida’s citrus industry will not recover in any meaningful sense at all. The AFBF estimates net agricultural losses exceeding $50 billion. And in the lowest-income American households, food already consumed nearly 30% of total expenditure before the drought began, before beef prices rose 6.3%, fresh vegetables 4.8%, and sugar and sweets 8.1%.

What is required now is not incremental adjustment. It is dramatic, sustained, and coordinated action on four fronts.

First, Congress must pass a strong 2026 Farm Bill – now! A bill that funds Stage 2 disaster relief for uninsured and specialty crop producers, invests aggressively in water infrastructure for the communities most dependent on the High Plains Aquifer, and backs the science-proven agricultural adaptations including drought-resistant crops, precision irrigation, diversified rotations, actions that can actually build long-term resilience. The partisan paralysis over this legislation is not a political inconvenience. It is costing farmers their land, their herds, and their futures. It is costing America its position as one of the major sources of food for the country and the world.

Second, the Trump Administration must give up its vision of drill-baby-drill” and confront climate change as the agricultural emergency it is. Continuing to prop up the fossil fuel industry while climate-induced disasters strip America’s farmers and ranchers of their livelihoods is not an energy policy - it is a surrender of the American food system the natural disasters and diseases brought on by climate change. The droughts, the floods, the unpredictable seasons destroying crops from the Oklahoma Panhandle to the Florida groves are not anomalies. They are the predicted, documented consequences of a warming climate. Ignoring that is not a political position. It is a dereliction of duty to every farmer, rancher, and hungry poor and working class family in this country.

Third, SNAP and nutrition programs must be protected and expanded, not cut. When food prices rise this fast and this broadly, SNAP is not a discretionary program, it is the primary buffer between food price volatility and mass hunger among the working poor, the elderly, veterans, and children. Reducing SNAP eligibility or benefits in the middle of an agricultural crisis that is driving food prices to record levels would be a moral and economic catastrophe. It would be condemning millions of Americans to hunger, choosing between eating, taking their medicine, and a decent life. Congress must recognize that the same crisis hitting farmers at the farm gate is hitting families at the checkout counter and at the kitchen table, and that both require massive and immediate federal protection.

Fourth, the pace and scale of disaster relief must match the pace and scale of disaster. Payments arriving two or more years after losses have occurred are not relief, they are condolences. Farmers cannot carry two years of debt waiting for federal assistance while also being asked to purchase new insurance as a condition of receiving it. The complexity of county-level calculations cannot be allowed to delay aid indefinitely for the producers who need it most. The insurance has to be restructured so that it protects small and mid-sized farms and diversified agriculture as well as Big Agricultures monocrops.

American agriculture is not simply an economic sector. It is the foundation of national food security, rural community, and the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people who depend on affordable, available food. The rancher in the Oklahoma Panhandle selling his breeding stock, the citrus grower in central Florida spending $44,000 an acre to protect the last of his trees, the single mother in a low-income household watching her grocery bill climb every week and no longer being able to feed her children - none of them chose this crisis. But all of them are paying for it. Government at both the federal and state levels has both the authority and the obligation to respond to this crisis at the scale the evidence demands.

The last two years were not an anomaly. They were a preview. The question is whether Congress and the Trump Administration have any decency, and whether they will act on that reality with the urgency it demands or whether they will continue take billions from the fossil fuel industry and their lobbyists and fail to manage a collapse of America’s agriculture that was, and remains, preventable. We must act to make sure that the needed change occurs and both federal and state governments recognize the crisis and take action!

At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide.¹ Through that sliver of water passes roughly 20% of the world’s traded petroleum² and, less discussed but no less consequential, a vast share of the ammonia, urea, and phosphate that farmers from Iowa to India use as fertilizer to grow the staple crops that feed the world.³ On February 28, 2026, effective closure of the Strait triggered what analysts are now calling a systemic shock to global food supply chains.⁴ The ships stopped moving. The fertilizer stopped flowing. The consequences are beginning to be not a distant abstraction, but they are reflected in higher prices at American grocery stores, emptier shelves at food pantries, and spreading hunger across poor and working-class communities in the Western world and vast swaths of the developing world.

The countries of the Persian Gulf region, including Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are among the world’s largest exporters of nitrogen-based fertilizers, particularly ammonia and urea.⁵ These are not luxury exports. They are the foundational chemistry of modern agriculture. Without sufficient nitrogen fertilizer, corn yields fall, wheat yields fall, rice yields fall, and potato yields fall.⁶ The global food system that feeds eight billion people⁷ is now dependent on supply chains that run through a war zone!

The United States is not immune. American farmers purchase significant volumes of imported fertilizer, and even domestically produced fertilizers are priced against global benchmarks that have now spiked to levels not seen since the acute disruptions of 2022.⁸ In the weeks following the closure, urea prices rose more than 60% on spot markets.⁹Diammonium phosphate (DAP) is the primary phosphate fertilizer used in US corn and soybean production similarly increased in price.¹⁰ For the 3.4 million farm operators¹¹ already navigating the aftermath of climate-driven losses and the smallest US cattle herd since 1951,¹² this is not a market fluctuation. It is an existential threat to the economics of growing food.

“American farmers are being forced to absorb a geopolitical shock they did not cause, on top of a climate crisis they did not create. The poor and working class families who depend on affordable food bear the cost of both.”

The Fertilizer Pipeline and What Happens When It Breaks

The green revolution that transformed global food production in the twentieth century rests on three pillars: improved seed varieties, irrigation, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.¹³ That third pillar known as the Haber-Bosch process of fixing atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia is now responsible for feeding roughly half of humanity.¹⁴ Remove it, or sharply constrain it, and yields collapse and with them, food security declines and hunger rises.¹⁵

The Persian Gulf states have built some of the world’s most competitive fertilizer industries, leveraging cheap natural gas which is the feedstock for ammonia production to produce and export nitrogen fertilizers at scale.¹⁶ Qatar is one of the world’s largest urea exporters.¹⁷ Saudi Arabia’s SABIC is a major global ammonia supplier.¹⁸ Iran, before and alongside sanctions, was a significant fertilizer producer.¹⁹ The Strait of Hormuz is not merely the exit for their oil. It is the exit for the nutrients that grow the world’s crops.

With the Strait effectively closed since late February 2026, those supply chains have been disrupted. Ships insured by Lloyd’s and other major underwriters have been unable to obtain war risk coverage for transits through the Gulf.²⁰Fertilizer cargoes contracted for spring 2026 delivery which is critical for the Spring planting season across the Northern Hemisphere are still sitting in Gulf ports, waiting for a resolution of the war that has not come.²¹ Spring is when farmers apply the bulk of their nitrogen fertilizer. A shortage now means higher prices, thinner applications, substituted inputs, or no applications of fertilizers at all. Each of these outcomes translates, with approximately a one-season lag, into reduced yields and less food for the world.²²

A Market Already Under Strain

The USDA’s 2025 Farm Income Forecast showed net farm income falling by $30 billion from its 2022 peak,²³ driven by climate-related production losses and rising input costs that were already compounding before the Strait closure. American farmers are not entering this crisis with financial cushion. Total farm debt reached a record $535 billion in 2024,²⁴ and the debt-to-asset ratio for smaller operations is at its highest level since the farm crisis of the 1980s.²⁵

Corn and soybean producers in the Midwest face the prospect of either paying dramatically higher prices for spring fertilizer applications or reducing application rates and accepting lower yields. USDA economists estimate that for every 10% rise in nitrogen fertilizer prices sustained through planting season, the Corn Belt net farm incomes fall by approximately 4 - 7%, depending on a farm’s input-to-revenue ratio.²⁶

Wheat farmers in Kansas and Oklahoma who apply fertilizer in the fall for winter wheat were partially exposed to pre-crisis pricing but those who purchased on the spot market rather than from a pre-existing contract, face the full weight of the spike in the cost of fertilizer. Spring wheat growers in the Northern Plains are entirely exposed. The Southern Plains, already in the grip of accelerating long term drought with more than 60% of this part of the country was classified as in severe or extreme drought at the start of the 2025 planting season.²⁷ These farmers are now contending with a crisis of rising costs of fertilizer and fuel layered on top of a climate driven moisture crisis.

Specialty crop producers in California face a compounded problem. California grows more than a third of the nation’s vegetables and nearly three-quarters of its fruits and nuts.²⁸ A state whose agricultural heartland is already caught between flood and drought now faces the full fertilizer input price shock on top of ongoing weather-driven losses.

Geopolitiflation: What the Hormuz Shock Does to American Food Prices

American consumers were already paying a 6.8% annual grocery inflation rate for the 12 months to June 2025,²⁹ driven in large part by climate-driven supply disruptions and the aftermath of the worst avian influenza outbreak in US history, which killed more than 120 million laying hens between 2022 and early 2025.³⁰ Consumers are now facing a second wave of food price pressure with geopolitical origins. Where 2024 and 2025’s food inflation was primarily driven by weather and disease, the 2026 wave is caused by the fertilizer-to-yield-to-price transmission chain.

The transmission works like this. Higher fertilizer prices raise farmers’ production costs immediately. In the medium term, over one to two growing seasons, reduced fertilizer applications translate into lower yields. Lower yields mean tighter supply. Tighter supply means higher commodity prices. Higher commodity prices mean higher retail prices for bread, corn products, cooking oils, and the meat of animals raised on grain feed. This chain does not move at the speed of a tweet. It moves at the speed of a growing season. But it moves, reliably and historically, to the consumer’s grocery bill.³¹

Corn is the foundation of the American food system in ways that are often invisible. It is the feed grain that underpins beef, pork, and poultry production. It provides the base for high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens countless processed foods. It is the feedstock for ethanol.³² A sustained corn supply shock, triggered by a fertilizer shortage of the scale implied by the Strait closure, will ripple through nearly every category of the American grocery store.

Wheat, the basis of bread and pasta, is similarly exposed. The US is a major wheat producer and exporter, but global wheat prices set the reference point for domestic prices.³³ When global wheat prices rise because India or North Africa faces fertilizer-driven yield shortfalls, American bread prices follow, not because American wheat is scarce, but because American grain traders participate in global markets and export their wheat if they can get higher prices.

“In the United States, the lowest income 1/5 of the population already spends nearly a third of its budget on food. Every percentage point of food price inflation driven by a geopolitical crisis, they played no part in creating, is a meal skipped, a bill unpaid, a child going to school hungry.”

The Potato Problem

Potatoes deserve special attention in any accounting of the Hormuz fertilizer shock but potato production is rarely received discussed. The potato is one of the most nitrogen-hungry crops in commercial agriculture. A productive potato field requires between 150 and 250 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare per season,³⁴ making it significantly more fertilizer-intensive than wheat and comparable to the most demanding corn production systems. For potato growers in Idaho, Washington, Wisconsin, and Maine, the states that together account for the majority of US commercial potato production³⁵ a sustained nitrogen price spike translates quickly into a choice between absorbing a sharp cost increase or accepting meaningfully lower yields.

The global stakes are higher still. The potato is the world’s fourth-largest food crop by production volume, after sugarcane, corn, and wheat,³⁶ and a primary calorie source for hundreds of millions of people across Eastern Europe, the Andes, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. India, the world’s second-largest potato producer, grows over 50 million metric tons annually,³⁷ and relies heavily on urea and DAP applications for the high-yielding varieties that have expanded potato cultivation across the subcontinent. A fertilizer price spike that forces Indian smallholder potato farmers to reduce applications by even 20–30% would produce yield losses that translate directly into caloric shortfalls for some of the world’s most food-insecure populations.

In the United States, the downstream effects reach beyond the farm gate. The processed potato industry that makes frozen French fries, potato chips, and dehydrated potato products generates more than $20 billion in annual sales³⁸ and depends on reliable volumes of consistent-quality potatoes. A harvest reduction in Idaho or the Columbia Basin triggers supply chain disruptions that flow through to fast food chains, food service distributors, and supermarket shelves within a single season.

Who Bears the Weight: Food Insecurity in America’s Hormuz Moment

The United States entered 2026 with 47.4 million people, approximately13.5% of the population already living in food-insecure households,³⁹ a sharp increase from the decade-low of 10.2% recorded in 2021.⁴⁰ Preliminary data from Feeding America’s nationwide network reported record demand at food pantries in major cities including Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Chicago through 2025.⁴¹ More than one in eight people in the richest country in the history of humanity does not know where their next meal is coming from. The Hormuz shock is arriving into a food security landscape already at crisis levels.

The populations most exposed are those with the least capacity to absorb any shock at all. Black, Latino, and Indigenous households experience food insecurity at rates of 22%, 20%, and over 25% respectively which is more than double the white household rate of 9%.⁴² Rural communities in the Southern Plains, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta have the highest rates of food insecurity and the weakest food retail infrastructure.⁴³ They are the communities that first will feel the pinch, and will feel it most deeply, and for the longest period of time.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the buffer that stands between geopolitical food price shocks and mass hunger in America. It is a buffer that is currently under legislative assault. Proposed cuts under consideration in the 119th Congress would eliminate SNAP benefits for up to 8 million people,⁴⁴ according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. These cuts were debated before the Strait of Hormuz closed. They are being debated now in the Senate, as fertilizer prices spike and farm income projections darken.

The Global Dimension: From the Gulf to the Global South

Countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, and Bangladesh were already classified as facing acute food insecurity by the World Food Programme before February 2026.⁴⁵ The fertilizer shock threatens to turn food insecurity into famine in the most food insecure populations.

When a smallholder farmer in Malawi or Bangladesh cannot afford fertilizer, yield losses of 40–60% are documented outcomes.⁴⁶ The World Food Programme estimated before the crisis that 333 million people worldwide faced acute food insecurity.⁴⁷ The Strait of Hormuz closure, coming on top of already-elevated food prices, elevated debt, and climate-driven harvest failures, is a forcing mechanism which will increase the number of people experiencing severe food insecurity that the World Food Programme has been warning about for years.

The United States was the world’s largest donor to the World Food Programme.⁴⁸ But in April 2025, the Trump Administration notified the World Food Programme that it was terminating funding for emergency programs in over a dozen countries,⁴⁹ with the WFP characterizing the cuts as a “death sentence” for millions. The State Department subsequently reversed cuts for several nations including Syria and Somalia,⁵⁰ but maintained cancellations for others. By May 2026, US humanitarian aid had fallen dramatically, from roughly $14 billion to $3.7 billion between 2024 and 2025, a collapse described by Refugees International as a “generational funding collapse.”⁵¹ A U.S. harvest diminished by fertilizer shortfalls is a harvest with less surplus available for humanitarian export aid. The Hormuz shock is simultaneously a US domestic food security story and a global humanitarian crisis. Both stories begin at the same chokepoint.

“The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide. The hunger that flows from its closure has no borders.”

What Must Change: Policy Proportionate to the Crisis

The U.S. federal government must reverse course and immediately move to protect and expand SNAP and other nutrition assistance programs in the national safety net to meet the food price volatility that is accelerating, and the increasing populations of Americans who will be most impacted who have no other buffer. In the United States, the lowest 1/5 of the population already spends approximately 30% of its budget on food,⁴⁶ meaning every percentage point of food price inflation carries outsized consequences for families with the least financial resilience. Cutting nutrition support during a supply chain crisis is not fiscal responsibility – it will cause widespread hunger in America. It is a transfer of the costs of geopolitical risk onto the most food-insecure Americans.

Agricultural policy must pivot toward supply chain resilience. The US currently imports approximately 90% of its potash and 40–55% of its nitrogen fertilizer,⁴⁷ Making domestic fertilizer production and strategic input reserves a national security imperative and not merely an agricultural preference is imperative. Every year that passes without diversified domestic fertilizer capacity is another year of exposure to the next Gulf crisis.

Investment in agroecological alternatives such as nitrogen-fixing cover crops, soil health practices, and diversified rotations is another national security investment that America must start making. Research has demonstrated that integrated soil-crop management systems can reduce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer requirements by 30–50% while maintaining yields in well-managed systems.⁴⁸

The United States contributed approximately $1.7 billion to the World Food Programme in fiscal year 2024, roughly 40% of the agency’s total funding.⁴⁹ Research consistently shows that food insecurity drives political instability, and political instability creates the conditions for the kind of regional conflict that closes straits and severs supply chains. Protecting food aid funding is not charity. It is a strategic military necessity, preventing future civil unrest and regional conflicts.

“The food bank queue is growing. The farm income in America is deteriorating. The fertilizer ship has been sitting in a Gulf port it cannot leave for nearly four months at a critical time for Spring planting in the Northern Hemisphere. All of these are consequences of the same failure: a global food system built for a world of stable supply chains that no longer exists.”

A 21-Mile Warning

The United States has long told itself a story about its agricultural abundance. That story was already being rewritten, season by failing season, by a climate and climate change that do not respect this national mythology. The Strait of Hormuz crisis adds another author to that rewrite: the reality of global supply chains, geopolitical fragility, and a food system whose apparent abundance rests on logistics that can be severed by conflict in a waterway most Americans could not find on a map.

The 47.4 million Americans already food-insecure before February 2026⁵⁰ did not cause the crisis in the Gulf. The farmers of Kansas and Iowa paying 60% more for fertilizer this spring⁵¹ did not cause it. The families in Malawi and Bangladesh who may not eat enough this year because they cannot afford the fertilizer to grow enough food did not cause it. But they are paying for it in skipped meals, in mounting debt, in the quiet emergency that food insecurity always is, and that geopolitical crises have a particular capacity to deepen.

The question is whether an American Administration seemingly only intent on enriching the millionaire and billionaire class can respond at the scale the pending hunger crisis demands with supply chain resilience, nutritional protection for those who need it most, meaningful support for the farms most exposed, and the international leadership that the global food system requires. Congress and the Trump Administration must find their way back from protecting concentrated wealth of the top 1% to protecting ordinary people who cannot afford to feed themselves and their families. The 21-mile strait has delivered its warning. The choice of whether to heed the warning of pending food shortages belongs, as it always does, to those in power and whether they understand the desperation and political chaos that profound hunger can engender.

Endnotes

1. US Energy Information Administration (2024). World Oil Transit Chokepoints: Strait of Hormuz. EIA, Washington DC. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints

2. US Energy Information Administration (2024). World Oil Transit Chokepoints: Strait of Hormuz. EIA, Washington DC. Approximately 21 million barrels per day transited in 2023, representing ~20–21% of global petroleum liquids trade.

3. International Fertilizer Association (2024). Fertilizer Flows: Global Trade in Nitrogen, Phosphate, and Potash. IFA, Paris. Persian Gulf states account for approximately 15–20% of globally traded nitrogen fertilizer.

4. International Fertilizer Association (2026). Global Fertilizer Supply Chain Impact Assessment: Strait of Hormuz Closure, March 2026. IFA, Paris.

5. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2023). World Fertilizer Trends and Outlook to 2026. FAO, Rome. Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE collectively rank among the top ten global fertilizer exporters.

6. Tilman, D. et al. (2002). Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices. Nature, 418, 671–677. Liebig, J. (foundational work on nitrogen limitation in plant growth). For yield response curves to nitrogen application rates, see: Scharf, P.C. & Lory, J.A. (2009). Calibrating reflectance measurements to predict optimal side dress nitrogen rate for corn. Agronomy Journal, 101(3), 615–625.

7. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2023). World Population Prospects 2022. UN DESA, New York. Global population reached 8 billion in November 2022.

8. USDA Economic Research Service (2025). Fertilizer Use and Price. ERS, Washington DC. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/fertilizer-use-and-price/. The US imports approximately 40–55% of its nitrogen fertilizer needs, primarily as urea and UAN (urea-ammonium nitrate).

9. Reuters (2026, March 14). Urea prices surge 60% as Gulf fertilizer exports stall on Hormuz closure. Spot urea prices on the New Orleans barge market and Tampa granular market tracked by Green Markets/Bloomberg.

10. USDA Economic Research Service (2026). Fertilizer Price Monitoring Report, April 2026. DAP (diammonium phosphate) is the dominant phosphate fertilizer in US corn and soybean production, accounting for approximately 40% of phosphate fertilizer applications.

11. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2024). 2022 Census of Agriculture: Farm Operator Data. USDA NASS, Washington DC. The 2022 Census recorded approximately 3.4 million farm operators across 2.0 million farms.

12. USDA NASS (2025). Cattle: January 2025 Inventory. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. The US cattle herd fell to approximately 86.7 million head, the lowest since 1951.

13. Evenson, R.E. & Gollin, D. (2003). Assessing the impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000. Science, 300(5620), 758–762.

14. Erisman, J.W. et al. (2008). How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience, 1, 636–639. The authors estimate the Haber-Bosch process supports the nutrition of approximately 48% of the global population.

15. International Energy Agency (2023). Ammonia Technology Roadmap: Towards More Sustainable Nitrogen Fertiliser Production. IEA, Paris. Natural gas accounts for 70–80% of ammonia production costs; Gulf states benefit from among the world’s lowest natural gas feedstock prices.

16. Fertilizer Canada / International Fertilizer Association (2024). Global Urea Trade Data. Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO) and Qatar Chemical and Petrochemical Marketing and Distribution Company (Muntajat) rank among the world’s top five urea exporters.

17. Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) (2023). Annual Report 2023. Riyadh. SABIC is a major producer of ammonia, urea, and related nitrogen products for export.

18. US Geological Survey (2024). Mineral Commodity Summaries: Nitrogen (Fixed) — Ammonia. USGS, Reston VA. Iran was a significant nitrogen fertilizer exporter prior to and alongside sanctions; production capacity estimated at 6–8 million metric tons per year of ammonia.

19. Lloyd’s of London (2026). War Risk Insurance Exclusion Zone: Persian Gulf Update, March 2026. The Joint War Committee designated the Persian Gulf as a Listed Area following the Strait closure, effectively requiring separate war risk coverage at prohibitive rates for most commercial operators.

20. International Fertilizer Association (2026). Global Fertilizer Supply Chain Impact Assessment, March 2026. IFA, Paris.

21. Dobermann, A. & Cassman, K.G. (2002). Plant nutrient management for enhanced productivity in intensive grain production systems of the United States and Asia. Plant and Soil, 247, 153–175. Yield response to nitrogen application reduction is approximately linear at suboptimal application rates, with a 30–40% reduction in application associated with a 15–25% reduction in yield under typical Corn Belt conditions.

22. USDA Economic Research Service (2025). Farm Income and Wealth Statistics: Net Farm Income Forecasts. ERS, Washington DC. Net farm income peaked at approximately $182 billion in 2022 and was forecast at approximately $140–150 billion in 2025.

23. USDA Economic Research Service (2026). Fertilizer Price-Yield Transmission Analysis: 2026 Planting Season Scenarios. ERS, Washington DC. Estimates reflect the range across farm sizes and crop mixes; larger farms with more contracted inputs show smaller percentage income impacts.

24. USDA Drought Monitor (2025). Drought conditions across the continental United States, April 2025. University of Nebraska–Lincoln / USDA / NOAA. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu

25. California Department of Food and Agriculture (2024). California Agricultural Statistics Review 2023–24. CDFA, Sacramento. California accounts for approximately 35% of US vegetables and 65–75% of US tree nuts, fruits, and berries by value.

26. USDA Economic Research Service (2025). Food Price Outlook, 2025: CPI for All Food. ERS, Washington DC. The 12-month food-at-home (grocery) inflation rate for June 2025 was recorded at 6.8%, above the 20-year average of approximately 2.5%.

27. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (2025). Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Detections in Commercial and Backyard Flocks. USDA APHIS. Cumulative flock losses exceeded 120 million birds between early 2022 and March 2025.

28. Headey, D. & Fan, S. (2010). Reflections on the global food crisis: how did it happen? How has it hurt? And how can we prevent the next one? IFPRI Research Monograph 165. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC. Documents the fertilizer-price-to-food-price transmission mechanism historically.

29. USDA Economic Research Service (2024). Feed Grains Database. ERS, Washington DC. Approximately 36% of US corn production is used for animal feed, 35% for ethanol, and 11% for high-fructose corn syrup and other food products.

30. Kastner, T. et al. (2012). Global changes in diets and the consequences for land requirements for food. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(18), 6868–6872. US wheat prices track the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) benchmark, which integrates global supply and demand including export markets.

31. USDA Economic Research Service (2024). Food Security in the United States: Key Statistics and Graphics. Based on the December 2023 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement. 47.4 million people in 18.0 million food-insecure households; 13.5% of US households.

32. Coleman-Jensen, A. et al. (2022). Household Food Security in the United States in 2021. USDA ERS Report ERR-309. Washington DC. The 2021 household food insecurity rate of 10.2% was the lowest recorded since the survey began tracking in 1995.

33. Feeding America (2025). The State of Hunger in America 2025. Feeding America Research Team. Based on data from the Feeding America network of 200 food banks serving 60,000+ food pantries.

34. USDA ERS (2024). Food Security in the United States: Definitions of Hunger and Food Security. Tabulations by race/ethnicity from the 2023 CPS Food Security Supplement. White non-Hispanic household food insecurity rate: 9.1%; Black non-Hispanic: 22.4%; Hispanic: 19.9%; American Indian/Alaska Native: 26%+.

35. Nord, M. & Coleman-Jensen, A. (2010). Food insecurity in households with children: Prevalence, severity, and household characteristics. USDA ERS Economic Information Bulletin EIB-56. Rural food insecurity rates consistently 2–4 percentage points higher than urban rates in SNAP-eligible counties across Southern Plains and Appalachian regions.

36. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2025). Proposed SNAP Cuts Would Harm Millions of People Facing Hardship. CBPP, Washington DC. Analysis of proposed work-requirement expansions and benefit restructuring under the 119th Congress.

37. World Food Programme (2025). Global Report on Food Crises 2025. WFP, Rome. Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, and Bangladesh all classified in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) or above; Yemen and Sudan had populations in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency).

38. Vanlauwe, B. et al. (2011). Agronomic use efficiency of N fertilizer in maize-based systems in sub-Saharan Africa within the context of integrated soil fertility management. Plant and Soil, 339, 35–50. Yield gaps between fertilized and unfertilized smallholder plots of 40–60% are consistently documented across sub-Saharan African and South Asian smallholder systems.

39. Murphy, S. et al. (2012). Cereal Secrets: The World’s Largest Grain Traders and Global Agriculture. Oxfam Research Reports. Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus (‘ABCD’ traders) collectively handle the majority of global grain trade. For profit performance in 2024–25, see individual company annual reports.

40. Cargill Inc. (2025). Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report. Cargill Inc., Minneapolis MN. Revenue reported at $177.4 billion for fiscal year ending May 2025.

41. International Fertilizer Association (2026). Fertilizer Market Snapshot: Post-Hormuz Closure Supply Reorientation. IFA, Paris. Fertilizer demand shifted rapidly to Russian, Moroccan, and Canadian suppliers following Gulf supply disruption.

42. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024). World Fertilizer Trends and Outlook. FAO, Rome. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of nitrogen fertilizers, the second-largest exporter of potash, and the third-largest exporter of phosphate fertilizers.

43. Environmental Working Group (2025). Crop Insurance: Who Benefits? Federal Subsidy Flows and Industry Lobbying. EWG, Washington DC.

44. USDA Risk Management Agency (2025). Summary of Business: 2024 Crop Year. USDA RMA, Washington DC. Total program liabilities reached $17.3 billion in 2024; inflation-adjusted 2010 expenditure was approximately $8 billion.

45. USDA RMA (2025). Summary of Business: 2024 Crop Year, by Farm Size. Large commercial operations (>$1M gross sales) received approximately 65% of indemnity payments while representing less than 5% of all insured farms.

46. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024). Consumer Expenditure Survey 2023. BLS, Washington DC. Lowest income quintile (under ~$22,000 annual household income) allocated approximately 29–32% of total expenditures to food.

47. US Geological Survey (2024). Mineral Commodity Summaries: Potash; Nitrogen (Fixed). USGS, Reston VA. The US imports approximately 90% of its potash from Canada and Belarus/Russia and 40–55% of its nitrogen fertilizer requirements.

48. Cui, Z. et al. (2018). Pursuing sustainable productivity with millions of smallholder farmers. Nature, 555, 363–366. Documents 30–50% reductions in fertilizer application with maintained or improved yields under optimized integrated soil-crop management in Chinese smallholder systems; results are directionally applicable to US contexts.

49. World Food Programme (2024). WFP Annual Report 2023: Donor Contributions. WFP, Rome. US government contributions to WFP totaled approximately $1.73 billion in calendar year 2023, representing approximately 40% of total WFP contributions.

50. USDA Economic Research Service (2024). Food Security in the United States: Key Statistics and Graphics. See endnote 31.

51. Reuters (2026, March 14). Urea prices surge 60% as Gulf fertilizer exports stall on Hormuz closure. See endnote 9. The 60% figure refers to spot urea prices; contracted prices vary; farmers purchasing on spot or at expiring contracts face the full increase.

The United States feeds the world. Its vast plains of corn and wheat, its orchards of California almonds and Georgia peaches, its Gulf Coast shrimping fleets and Midwestern cattle ranches have long underpinned global food systems. Yet in 2025, something has shifted, not quietly, but in wildfires, floods, record heat domes, and billion-dollar disaster declarations. American farmers are fighting a war against the weather, and they are losing.

Photo credit: 3centista

The USDA’s 2025 Farm Income Forecast tells the story in numbers. Net farm income fell by $30 billion from its 2022 peak, driven in large part by climate-related production losses, rising input costs amplified by weather-damaged supply chains, and the compounding unpredictability of growing seasons warped by a warming atmosphere.[1] The American Farm Bureau Federation reported in early 2025 that nearly one in four farm operations had experienced a “significant weather-related loss” in the prior 12 months - the highest rate of loss in the survey’s 30-year history.[2]

These are not abstract statistics. They are the debt ledgers of wheat farmers in Kansas watching their fields crack open in drought; the ruined tomato rows of Florida growers hit by back-to-back storms; the apple orchards of Washington State that lost entire harvests to a spring freeze following an unusually warm February, the kind of sequence that climate scientists call a “false spring,” which is now occurring with far greater frequency as temperatures climb erratically.[3] For the 3.4 million farm operators who work the land across the United States, the climate crisis is not a future risk to be modelled. It is last year’s loss, this year’s loan, and next year’s gamble.[4]

“American farmers are absorbing climate shocks that were caused overwhelmingly by the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels by industry and the wealthy - while Washington isn’t even discussing whether the climate crisis is real.”

The Geography of Loss

Climate change does not hit American agriculture uniformly, rather it hits according to a geography of existing vulnerability, rewriting which regions can grow what, and for how long. In 2025, four overlapping crises define the landscape.

The Southern Plains and Southwest are in the grip of accelerating aridification. Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico recorded their lowest winter wheat yields in a decade in the 2024 - 25 season, following a stretch of below-average precipitation and above-average temperatures that have stretched across 18 consecutive months. The USDA’s drought monitor classified more than 60% of the Southern Plains as in “severe” or “extreme” drought at the start of the 2025 planting season.[5] Cattle ranchers across the region are being squeezed by the avian flu-driven rise in feed costs and the failure of pasture grasses are now being forced to early herd liquidations that echo the crisis years of 2011–12. The USDA estimates the US cattle herd fell to its lowest level since 1951 in early 2025.[6]

California’s agricultural heartland is caught between flood and drought in an increasingly violent oscillation. The “atmospheric rivers” that battered the state in January 2023 were followed by drought conditions by spring 2024, only to be succeeded by a series of damaging late-season heat events in summer 2025 that devastated the state’s world-leading almond, pistachio, and tomato crops. California grows more than a third of the nation’s vegetables and nearly three-quarters of its fruits and nuts which makes its climate instability a national food security issue, not simply a regional one.[7]

The Midwest and Great Plains corn belt is experiencing shorter effective growing windows as spring arrives earlier, triggering early planting that is then exposed to late-season frost and summer heat events that intensify at exactly the stage when corn and soybean crops are most vulnerable to heat stress. A 2025 study in Nature Food found that extreme heat days, when temperatures exceeding 35°C (95°F), have increased by an average of 11 days per growing season across the Corn Belt since 2000, with a measurable and statistically significant reduction in crop yields as a result.[8]

The Gulf Coast and Southeast are contending with a lengthening hurricane season, saltwater intrusion into coastal farmland from sea level rise, and unprecedented flooding events. In 2024, Hurricane Helene, one of the most damaging storms in Appalachian history, devastated farms across western North Carolina and Tennessee, wiping out apple orchards, vegetable operations, and livestock facilities that had no flood insurance because they sat above the historical flood plain.[9] FEMA and USDA disaster declarations covered only a fraction of losses. The farmers who rebuilt are now facing the same exposure again.

Climateflation Comes Home: Food Prices, Hunger, and the American Table

Food insecurity does not begin at the farm gate. It ends at the kitchen table, or more precisely, at the moment a family opens the refrigerator and finds it emptier than it should be. In the United States in 2025, that moment is arriving with increasing frequency, and climate change is one of its architects.

The USDA’s Economic Research Service reported in late 2024 that 47.4 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2023 (the most recent year of full survey data) representing 13.5% of the population and a sharp increase from the decade-low of 10.2% recorded in 2021.[10] Preliminary data from Feeding America’s nationwide network of food banks suggests the figure has continued to climb in 2024 and 2025, with demand at food pantries reaching record highs in major cities including Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Chicago.[11]

The mechanism linking climate change to domestic hunger runs through prices. The same heat extremes, droughts, and storms that are destroying American harvests are also generating what researchers call “climaflation,” that is food price inflation with climate disruption as its engine. This is not a theoretical future risk. It is the bill American consumers are already paying.

Egg prices are the most visible case study. The avian influenza outbreak was a zoonotic disease that spreads more readily under the warmer, wetter conditions associated with climate change. The outbreak killed more than 120 million laying hens in the United States between 2022 and early 2025, producing the most severe egg supply shock in American history. Retail egg prices peaked at more than $9 per dozen in January 2025 that is more than triple the pre-outbreak average. The largest US egg producer, Cal-Maine Foods, took advantage of the disaster and reported net income of $509 million in a single quarter, more than triple its prior-year results. At the same time. food bank directors reported that families were asking specifically for eggs, once a staple of low-income diets, that had become unaffordable due to the outbreak.[12]

Produce prices followed a similar pattern. California vegetable shortfalls pushed retail lettuce prices up 34% year-on-year by mid-2025; Florida tomato losses from storm damage drove tomato prices to their highest real-terms level in two decades.[13] Beef prices that were already high due to the smallest US cattle herd in 74 years, reached record highs at the supermarket counter, with 80% lean ground beef averaging over $8 per pound in major markets.[14] The USDA’s food price inflation tracker recorded overall grocery inflation of 6.8% for the 12 months to June 2025, with the categories most affected by climate events: eggs, fresh produce, and meat running significantly higher than this average.[15]

“In the United States, the lowest income quintile already spends nearly a third of its budget on food. Every percentage point of food price inflation is a meal skipped, a bill unpaid, a child going to school hungry.”

Who Bears the Weight

Food price inflation is not felt equally. A family in the top income quintile spending 5% of its budget on food barely notices a 7% price rise. A family in the bottom quintile spending 30% of its budget on food notices it at every meal.

The populations most exposed to climate-driven food insecurity in the United States are also those with the least capacity to absorb it. Black, Latino and Indigenous households experience food insecurity at rates of 22%, 20% and >25% respectively, more than double the white household rate of 9%.[16] Rural communities in the Southern Plains, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta, regions most directly affected by climate-driven agricultural losses, have the highest rates of food insecurity and the weakest food retail infrastructure. Native American reservations, many of which sit in regions of extreme drought, record food insecurity rates that exceed 25% in some communities.[17]

The farmers who supply the food system are themselves food insecure at striking rates. A 2024 survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition found that 36% of beginning farmers reported food insecurity in the prior year, a figure that rose to 48% among farmers of color.[18] These are the people growing America’s food, navigating a climate that is becoming hostile to agriculture, carrying debt loads from equipment and land costs that climate losses make increasingly difficult to service. The family farm which is a romantic fixture of American national identity is disappearing: the number of farms in the United States has fallen by more than 100,000 since 2017, with the losses concentrated in small and mid-sized operations that cannot absorb the scale of climate-driven losses that larger agribusinesses can.[19]

Who Profits When American Harvests Fail

As with the global food system, the domestic crisis has created winners as well as losers and the winners are not the farmers or the families going hungry.

The four corporations that dominate global grain trading, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. All of these companies reported exaggerated profits in 2024 and 2025, as climate-driven supply volatility created profitable arbitrage opportunities. Cargill reported revenues of over $177 billion in fiscal year 2025, even as the farm-level incomes of the growers it purchases from declined.[20] The crop insurance industry that is heavily subsidized by the federal government, with premiums paid by taxpayers and profits privatized by insurance companies collected record premium volumes as climate risk drove mandatory coverage uptake, while simultaneously lobbying against the USDA reforms that would have reduced payments to the largest farm operations.[21]

The federal crop insurance program spent a record $17.3 billion in 2024, more than double its 2010 level in inflation-adjusted terms, with the majority of those payments flowing to large commercial operations, not the small and beginning farmers who are most financially exposed to climate losses.[22] This is a structural transfer: public money absorbs the climate risk of industrial agriculture while the profits of those same operations remain private.

What Must Change: From Crisis Management to Climate Justice

The intertwining of climate change, farm income collapse, and food insecurity is not a natural disaster. It is a political choice, the accumulated result of decades of under-investment in climate adaptation, agricultural policy that has favored large industrial operations over smallholders, and a food safety net whose design predates the era of climate-driven food inflation.

The Farm Bill is the omnibus legislation that governs US agricultural and nutrition policy and is renewed every five years. The Farm Bill was held up in Congress and is still awaiting reauthorization after a fractious political process that pitted commodity crop subsidies against nutrition program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding. Advocates for food-insecure families warned that proposed cuts to the SNAP program will remove a critical buffer precisely as climate inflation was making food less affordable for low-income households. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that proposed SNAP cuts would eliminate benefits for up to 8 million people.[23]

What is required is not tinkering at the margins. The climate and hunger crises demand policy proportionate to its scale. The federal government must redirect agricultural subsidies from the largest commodity operations toward the small and mid-sized farms that grow diversified food for domestic consumption and that are most in need of climate adaptation support. It must expand and protect nutrition support programs as a direct response to climate-driven food price inflation. It must invest in agroecological research and farmer-led adaptation such as cover cropping, soil health, water efficiency, all techniques that reduces vulnerability to weather extremes rather than merely insuring against them after the fact.[24]

And it must be honest about cause and consequence. The United States, with less than 5% of the world’s population, has contributed roughly 25% of cumulative global CO₂ emissions since industrialization.[25] The farmers of Kansas and the families lining up at Houston food banks did not cause the climate crisis in proportion to their suffering from it. The corporations and billionaires whose emissions and political influence have delayed climate action for decades bear a debt to the food system. They have helped to destabilize the food system and now windfall profit taxes, emissions accountability, and genuine investment in resilient food systems must be implemented begin to rebuild the American food system and safety net.

“The family farm is disappearing. The food pantry queue is growing. Both are consequences of the same failure: a political system that has allowed the costs of the climate crisis to be borne by those who caused it least.”

The United States has long told itself a story about its agricultural abundance, a story of inexhaustible plains, technological mastery, and the family farmer as the backbone of the republic. That story is being rewritten, season by failing season, by a climate that does not respect national mythology. The question is whether American politics can tell a different story, one of justice, adaptation, and a food system rebuilt to last before the old one ends entirely.

Endnotes

1. USDA Economic Research Service (2025). Farm Income and Wealth Statistics: Net Farm Income Forecasts. Washington DC.

2. American Farm Bureau Federation (2025). Annual Climate and Weather Impact Survey. AFBF Research Division.

3. Ault, T.R. et al. (2025). False spring frequency and agricultural frost exposure under continued warming. Nature Climate Change.

4. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2024). 2022 Census of Agriculture. Washington DC.

5. USDA Drought Monitor (2025). Drought conditions across the continental United States, April 2025. University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

6. USDA NASS (2025). Cattle: January 2025 Inventory. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.

7. California Department of Food and Agriculture (2024). California Agricultural Statistics Review 2023–24. Sacramento.

8. Schlenker, W. & Lobell, D.B. (2025). Extreme heat days in the US Corn Belt and yield consequences: 2000–2024 trends. Nature Food.

9. USDA Farm Service Agency (2025). Hurricane Helene Agricultural Loss Assessment: Appalachian Region. Washington DC.

10. USDA Economic Research Service (2024). Food Security in the United States: Key Statistics and Graphics. Using data from the December 2023 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement.

11. Feeding America (2025). The State of Senior Hunger in America 2025. Feeding America Research Team.

12. Washington Post (2025, April 8). Egg prices, profit increase at Cal-Maine as avian flu reshapes supply.

13. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (2025). National Retail Report: Fresh Fruit and Vegetables, June 2025.

14. USDA Economic Research Service (2025). Beef and Cattle Outlook, May 2025. Washington DC.

15. USDA Economic Research Service (2025). Food Price Outlook, 2025. Washington DC.

16. USDA ERS (2024). Food Security in the United States: Definitions of Hunger and Food Security. Tabulations by race/ethnicity.

17. Jernigan, V.B.B. et al. (2024). Food insecurity in Native American communities: Intersection of climate risk and structural inequality. American Journal of Public Health, 114(3).

18. National Young Farmers Coalition (2024). Building a Future with Farmers: 2024 Survey Report. Hudson, NY.

19. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2024). 2022 Census of Agriculture: Highlights on Farm Numbers. Washington DC.

20. Cargill Inc. (2025). Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report. Minneapolis, MN.

21. Environmental Working Group (2025). Crop Insurance: Who Benefits? Federal Subsidy Flows and Industry Lobbying. EWG Report.

22. USDA Risk Management Agency (2025). Summary of Business: 2024 Crop Year. Washington DC.

23. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2025). Proposed SNAP Cuts Would Harm Millions of People Facing Hardship. CBPP Analysis.

24. Food Policy Action (2025). Building a Climate-Resilient Farm Bill: Policy Recommendations for the 119th Congress.

25. Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4, e399–e404.

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MAY 8, 2026

318M PEOPLE FACING INCREASE IN ACUTE HUNGER BY 2026

5X PROJECTED RISE IN CLIMATE-DRIVEN CRISES SINCE 2020

77% INCREASE IN WHEAT YIELD LOSS FROM HEAT BY 2090

PART ONE

A. Grain of Warning

Merrill Nielsen has been farming in north-central Kansas for fifty years. His great-grandfather established the family’s 2,500-acre operation in 1871, and through every drought, every freeze, every bad year the Plains can offer, the farm has survived. This spring, Nielsen watched his wheat crop fail entirely. A crop insurance adjuster told him his fields would yield, at best, two bushels per acre - against the normal upper-40s to mid-50s. His text to a reporter was four words: “Crop will be terminated.”

The weather that killed Nielsen’s crop followed a pattern that is becoming horribly familiar across the American heartland. An abnormally warm and dry winter gave way to wild temperature swings — days pushing 70 to 80°F, nights plunging into the teens — during the critical winter-to-spring transition. Nielsen describes his wheat as not knowing “whether or not to have its Bermuda shorts and sunglasses on and bake in the sun… or to have its winter coat on.” It is a farmer’s joke, but it describes something lethal. The volatility destroyed the crop’s ability to regulate itself, and the harvest was lost before summer even arrived.

The Guardian’s May 2026 report from Kansas is not simply a farming story. It is a dispatch from the front line of a collision between two of the defining crises of our era — climate breakdown and hunger. That collision is no longer a future scenario to be modelled and debated. It is happening, season by season, in fields that feed billions of people.

“Heat stress at flowering emerges as a serious threat to global wheat yields under climate change — substantially increasing the vulnerability of wheat.”

CLIMATIC CHANGE, ROTHAMSTED RESEARCH, JANUARY 2026

Nielsen is not alone. Across Kansas and Oklahoma, which had their second-warmest year on record from March 2025 to March 2026, the 2026 winter wheat crop is one of the poorest in recent memory. March temperatures ran 10 to 11°F above normal. USDA crop condition reports rated 44% of Kansas wheat and 49% of Oklahoma wheat in very poor to poor condition. Romulo Lollato, the wheat and forages professor at Kansas State University, estimates state output may come in at 200-220 million bushels. This is far below the 10-year average of 317 million. Gregg Ibendahl, also at Kansas State, puts total US wheat production down 15% from last year. US wheat acreage is on track to be its lowest since 1919.

Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central, is direct about the cause. The extreme March heat “would be rare or almost virtually impossible at that time of the year in the central Plains, without an influence of climate change.” This was not a statistical oddity, it was the climate crisis made visible in a Kansas wheat field.

Wheat is the world’s third-largest crop and one of the most politically and nutritionally consequential grains on the planet. Roughly two billion people depend on it as a primary calorie source. Bread, pasta, flatbread, noodles, the foods that anchor diets from Lahore to Lagos, from Kyiv to Kansas City, all trace back to a single amber grain that is, it turns out, uniquely fragile at the moment of reproduction.

Research published in January 2026 by scientists at Rothamsted Research in the UK, using state-of-the-art climate projections and crop models, found that while drought has historically been the dominant threat to wheat at flowering, the balance is shifting. Heat stress losses are projected to rise by 32% by 2050 and by 77% by 2090 under high-emission scenarios. Drought losses, by contrast, are expected to decrease modestly as warming shifts rainfall patterns, but this is cold comfort when heat becomes the new executioner. The cumulative effect is a crop increasingly under siege from both sides.

Ben Palen, a fifth-generation farmer near Lawrence, Kansas, who works 15,000 acres and expects to yield only about 30% of his normal crop, put it plainly: “Climate change is an increasing concern… because you try to plan as best you can with your management decisions, but it was a wild card, when you got that cold for two nights in a row at just exactly the worst time for the wheat.” He has noticed rainfall becoming less consistent, making it ever harder to manage around the changes. Vance Ehmke, farming 11,000 acres in south-west Kansas, saw 90°F temperatures in early January followed by a hard freeze. “We’re so far behind that it’s not even funny,” he said after a late-April rain brought marginal relief.

This is the narrow, agronomic end of a story that widens, as we will see, into questions about geopolitics, poverty, colonial history, and what it means to be hungry in a world that produces, in theory, enough food for everyone.

PART TWO

The Numbers That Should Shame Us

Before examining the mechanisms of climate-driven food insecurity, it is worth sitting for a moment with the scale of what is already happening. The 2026 Global Report on Food Crises was published jointly by the United Nations, the European Union, and dozens of partner agencies, found that 266 million people across 47 countries experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025. Acute food insecurity is an acute, crisis-level hunger, with nearly 3 billion people are unable to afford a healthy diet. That figure represents nearly a quarter of the population assessed and is close to double the share recorded in 2016. Hunger, the report concluded, is no longer a series of short-term emergencies. It has become a structural and consistent problem.

The World Food Programme’s 2026 Global Outlook puts the figure of people facing crisis-level hunger or worse even higher, at 318 million which is double pre-pandemic levels. Two famines were confirmed in 2025: in Gaza and in parts of Sudan. It is the first time in recorded history that famine has been declared in two countries simultaneously. A famine is a widespread scarcity of food^[1][2]caused by several possible factors, including, but not limited to: war, climate change caused natural disasters, crop failure, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality(deaths).

WHAT THE DATA SHOWS

266 million people in 47 countries faced acute food insecurity in 2025, per the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises.

35.5 million children were acutely malnourished in 2025, including nearly 10 million suffering life-threatening severe acute malnutrition.

Climate shocks now affect 87.5 million people across 16 countries, which is up from 15.7 million in just 15 countries in 2020, roughly a five-fold increase in affected population in five years.

Funding for humanitarian food response has fallen to levels last seen nearly a decade ago, even as the crisis deepens.

Conflict remains the single largest driver of these numbers, accounting for roughly 69% of acute hunger. But climate shocks such as droughts, floods, erratic rains, and extreme heat have grown with remarkable speed as a co-driver. According to the 2026 Food Crises report, weather extremes grew from affecting 15.7 million people in 15 countries in 2020 to affecting 87.5 million people in 16 countries by 2025. That is a roughly five-fold increase in the affected population in just five years.

The children bear the heaviest burden. In 2025, 35.5 million children were acutely malnourished across 23 nutrition crisis countries. Nearly 10 million of them were suffering severe acute malnutrition, a condition so extreme that it dramatically raises the risk of death even from otherwise minor childhood illnesses. These are not abstractions. They are children who will not reach their potential height, whose cognitive development will be permanently stunted, who may not survive infancy.

Somalia provides one of the starkest recent illustrations. After four consecutive seasons of failed rains that were a product of climate variability compounded by the La Niña weather pattern, the Somali federal government declared a national drought emergency in November 2025. By early 2026, nearly 5.9 million people were projected to face severe food insecurity, that is almost a quarter of the country’s population.

PART THREE

The Chain from Field to Famine

To understand how a heatwave in France or a drought in the American Midwest becomes hunger in Mogadishu or Kabul, it is necessary to trace the chain of consequence that links climate events to empty plates. That chain has many links, and each one is a point of vulnerability.

The first link is the crop itself. As the Rothamsted Research data makes clear, extreme heat at the moment of flowering even if it lasts only a few days can devastate an entire season’s yield. Wheat pollen dies rapidly above 35°C. Grain filling stops. A farm that would have produced a thousand tons yields two hundred. Multiply that across a region, and you have a supply shock.

Drought and extreme heat together are projected to cause net decreases in US wheat and maize production of 6–8% under high-emission scenarios by 2100.

EARTH’S FUTURE JOURNAL, 2025

American research published in the journal Earth’s Future in 2025 added another dimension to the picture: the problem is not just yield per hectare, but the “harvestable fraction” meaning the ratio of land actually harvested to land planted. Heat and drought do not merely reduce productivity on fields that survive; they wipe out entire fields, persuading farmers not to harvest at all because the crop is not worth the cost of running the machinery. Under high-emission projections through 2100, net US wheat and maize production could fall by 6 - 8% from these combined effects alone.

CROP FAILURE: Extreme heat or drought destroys yields at critical growth stages. Harvestable area shrinks. Farmers absorb losses directly.

SUPPLY SHOCK: Regional and global grain stocks tighten. Commodity prices spike on futures markets within days of a harvest report.

PRICE TRANSMISSION: Elevated global prices flow through to local markets. In import-dependent countries, bread and flour prices rise faster than incomes.

DEMAND DESTRUCTION: Poor households, who spend 50–70% of income on food, cut meals first. Children and women bear disproportionate impacts of the decrease in food.

ACUTE CRISIS: Malnutrition rises. In fragile states, food stress intersects with conflict, displacement, and collapse of basic services.

The second link is trade. Most of the world’s staple grain supply is traded through a handful of commodity markets in Chicago, London, and Paris where price swings in one country’s harvest can instantly reshape what a baker in Cairo pays for flour. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, felt this acutely after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted Black Sea grain supplies in 2022. The lesson of that episode was that global food systems are deeply interconnected and shockingly fragile has not been learned quickly enough.

The third link is poverty. A wealthy household facing higher bread prices buys cheaper bread. A household in Ethiopia or Afghanistan or Haiti, where food already consumes the majority of income, faces an immediate crisis. It is the cruelest arithmetic of the food system: those who did least to cause climate change are positioned most directly in the path of its hunger consequences.

PART FOUR

Who Bears the Weight

Climate change is not democratically distributed. Its agricultural consequences fall with a grim specificity on the places and people least equipped to absorb them. This is not accidental, rather it reflects patterns of historical development, geographic accident, and the enduring structures of global economic inequality.

Sub-Saharan Africa provides the sharpest illustration. The continent’s agricultural systems are among the most exposed in the world to climate volatility: smallholder farmers working rain-fed plots with few inputs, little access to irrigation, and no insurance against catastrophic loss. At the same time, Africa as a whole has contributed only a marginal share of the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions that are now raising temperatures across its farmlands. The injustice of this, that those emitting little are suffering the most, sits at the heart of every serious conversation about climate and food.

South Asia faces its own version of the same exposure. Pakistan, a country acutely vulnerable to both extreme heat and seasonal flooding, saw the 2025 monsoon follow devastating droughts with catastrophic floods that wiped out crops and displaced millions. In Myanmar, which was newly classified as a very severe nutrition crisis in 2026, both insufficient and erratic rainfall have combined with political collapse to push food systems to the brink.

The farmer

Smallholder farmers, who produce roughly 70% of the food consumed in developing countries, face the most direct exposure. A failed harvest means not just a loss of income but of the household’s food supply. With little access to credit or insurance, a single climate shock can be permanently impoverishing.

The urban poor

City dwellers who spend the largest share of income on food absorb crop failures through price rises. In import-dependent cities across the Middle East and North Africa, a global grain price spike can double the cost of bread within weeks, triggering social instability alongside malnutrition.

Children in the Horn of Africa, women in the Sahel, landless agricultural workers in South Asia, these are the populations whose faces belong on the front page when we report a heatwave over European wheat fields. The distance between a farm in France and a malnourished child in Yemen is shorter, through the commodity chain, than we are comfortable acknowledging.

And yet the people most likely to be reported upon in stories like the Guardian’s are farmers in wealthy countries - farmers who, while genuinely experiencing real losses and genuine distress, have access to crop insurance, government support programs, alternative income sources, and food systems robust enough to absorb shocks that would be catastrophic elsewhere. This is not an argument against reporting on those farmers. It is an argument for the journalism — and the policy attention — to then follow the chain to its most devastating ends.

PART FIVE

A Fork in the Road: What Can Still Be Done

The picture sketched in the preceding pages is dark and it will remain dark for as long as emissions continue rising and adaptation funding remains inadequate.

But it is not a picture without exits. The choices made in the next decade, both in agriculture and in energy systems, will determine whether the collision between climate and hunger becomes a catastrophe or a managed, if painful, transition.

The most fundamental intervention is also the most obvious, and the most persistently avoided: cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the warming. Every fraction of a degree of warming avoided represents crop yields preserved, droughts shortened, growing seasons protected. Agricultural researchers at Rothamsted were explicit in their conclusions: developing wheat cultivars tolerant to both drought and heat during flowering is critical, but it buys time, not indefinite immunity. The window for stabilization is still open but narrowing.

“Acute food insecurity today is not just widespread — it is also persistent and recurring.”

FAO DIRECTOR-GENERAL QU DONGYU, APRIL 2026

In parallel, the architecture of global food systems needs redesign. The hyper-concentration of grain production in a small number of exporting nations and the hyper-dependence of import-reliant countries on those few sources creates fragility that climate shocks mercilessly exploit. Regional food reserves, diversified trade relationships, investment in domestic production in food-importing nations, and genuine technology transfer to smallholder farmers in vulnerable regions are all parts of a more resilient alternative.

The funding picture is alarming in both directions. On one hand, the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises noted that humanitarian and development financing for food and nutrition responses has fallen to levels last seen nearly a decade ago even as the crisis has grown to record proportions. The richest nations are, in effect, spending less on the consequences of their emissions even as those consequences intensify. On the other hand, research investment in heat- and drought-tolerant crop varieties is accelerating, offering the possibility that agriculture can adapt faster than temperatures rise - if the political will and the money follow.

WHAT RESILIENCE LOOKS LIKE

Breed seeds for heat tolerance. New wheat cultivars capable of producing viable grain even during brief heatwaves at flowering are urgently needed and scientifically within reach.

Diversify staples. Over-reliance on wheat, rice, and maize makes food systems brittle. Investing in drought-tolerant crops like sorghum, millet, and cassava expands the buffer.

Fund adaptation where it matters most. The smallholder farmers of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia need irrigation, insurance, and agronomic support and not just emergency relief after harvests fail.

Reform food aid financing. Global humanitarian food funding has fallen even as need has risen. Reversing this requires political commitment from the nations most responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the climate crisis.

Close the data gaps. The number of countries able to produce reliable food security assessments has dropped to a decade low. Without data, responses to food security disasters are blind.

What the Guardian’s report from May 2026 on wheat farmers ultimately illustrates and what every such report illustrates, if we let it, is the deeply human texture of a crisis that statistics alone cannot convey. A farmer watching a field of wheat turn brown is losing a livelihood, a year’s work, a sense of control over a future that increasingly feels beyond control. Multiply that moment by millions of farmers, in dozens of countries, year after year, and you have a civilizational shift underway in humanity’s relationship with the land that feeds it.

The question is not whether climate change will continue to reshape food systems. It will. The question is whether the world’s institutions, governments, and citizens will choose to take the agricultural crisis seriously enough, early enough, to prevent it from becoming a permanent feature of life for hundreds of millions of people who had nothing to do with causing it.

✦ ✦ ✦

Data in this essay draws on the 2026 WFP Global Outlook, the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises (FAO/WFP), research published in Climatic Change by Rothamsted Research (January 2026), a 2025 study in Earth’s Future on US crop production under climate stress, the 2025 Global Hunger Index, and Action Against Hunger’s 2026 Global Hunger Hotspots report.

Climate & Society Review · Published May 2026 ·

Climate change is no longer a future threat to human settlement. It is an active, accelerating driver of forced displacement today. Floods, storms, droughts, rising seas, and extreme heat are uprooting hundreds of millions of people, and the numbers are growing sharply every year.^[1] The populations bearing the greatest burden are overwhelmingly the world’s poorest even though they are the communities that contributed least to the emissions causing the crisis; but they are living in the regions most physically exposed to its consequences and with the fewest resources to adapt or relocate.

What makes climate migration a distinct equity crisis rather than simply a humanitarian one is the combination of scale, acceleration, and near-total legal invisibility. The people displaced by climate hazards today have no recognized status in international law, no guaranteed right to protection, no enforceable claim to assistance and no status to enter another country if that is where they need to go.^[2] They are displaced by a crisis they did not cause, into a legal and political framework that does not acknowledge their existence. Understanding the gap between the scale of displacement and the inadequacy of the response is essential to any serious account of how climate change is exacerbating global inequity.

The Crisis is Already Underway

Measuring climate migration precisely is inherently difficult as the forces of climate intersect with poverty, conflict, and economic fragility, and people rarely move for a single reason. But the data that does exist points to a crisis of enormous and worsening scale.^[3] Since systematic global tracking began in 2008, the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) has reported 359 million internal displacements due to weather-related hazards, an average of 22.4 million per year.^[4] That is the equivalent of the entire population of Australia being forced from their homes every single year.

The trajectory is unmistakable. In 2022, disaster displacements reached 32.6 million, which was a record, representing a 41% increase above the annual average of the previous decade.^[5] In 2023, 26.4 million disaster displacements were recorded.^[6] In 2024, that figure surged to 45.8 million new disaster displacements, nearly double the decade’s annual average and a new yearly record by a wide margin.^[7] It bears emphasis that these figures count displacement events, not unique individuals: the same person may be displaced multiple times, and the overwhelming majority of these movements are internal displacements meaning people fleeing within their own country’s borders, not crossing into another country.

Who Is Being Displaced

The burden of climate displacement is profoundly unequal. The regions that have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions are suffering most from the consequences.^[1] In 2023, the five countries recording the highest numbers of new internal displacements from disasters were China (4.7 million), Türkiye (4.1 million), the Philippines (2.6 million), Somalia (2 million), and Bangladesh (1.8 million).^[6] South and East Asia account for the majority of global displacement totals historically, driven by large populations in flood- and cyclone-prone zones. displacements in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, is growing rapidly causing this area to become a displacement hotspot. Slow-onset desertification and drought compound the sudden-onset effects of increasingly intense storms causing crops to fail and forcing people off their traditional lands.

The inequity extends beyond geography to class. Climate displacement is not an equal-opportunity crisis within affected countries. The poorest households, those in informal settlements on flood-prone land, subsistence farmers with no savings buffer, renters with no land rights, and communities marginalized from political representation, face the highest displacement risk and the lowest capacity to recover.^[8] Wealth plays an enormous role: rich cities in hot or flood-prone regions can sustain habitability through infrastructure for far longer than poor rural communities facing equivalent or lesser climate stress.^[9] The Climate pressures that push some to move trap others in place. People in areas hit hard by climate change and its natural disasters who are too poor, too elderly, or too vulnerable to bear the cost and danger of relocation are often the most physically exposed and have no place or ability to go and no help to get out of their situation. As conditions worsen, the capacity to adapt in place will diminish for a growing share of the world’s population.

For some nations, climate migration is not a risk to manage, it is an existential threat to national survival. Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marianas and the Marshall Islands are projected to become uninhabitable due to sea level rise, saltwater intrusion into freshwater supplies, and increasingly intense storm surges. Entire nations face eventual relocation a category of displacement with no precedent in modern international law and no established mechanism for managing it. [Ref: 10]

Compounding Hazards

Climate displacement is driven by several interconnected forces that increasingly compound one another, making each successive shock harder to recover from and raising the baseline level of vulnerability against which the next event strikes.

1. Extreme Weather Events

Floods, storms, cyclones, and wildfires are the dominant cause of displacement today, responsible for 99.5% of documented weather-related displacement events in 2024.^[7] They destroy homes, infrastructure, and livelihoods rapidly and at massive scale, forcing sudden evacuation. The frequency and intensity of these events is increasing directly as a result of climate change.^[11] Each event that displaces a community without enabling full recovery leaves that community more vulnerable to the next.

2. Rising Sea Levels

Coastal flooding and saltwater intrusion are making low-lying land permanently uninhabitable and contaminating freshwater supplies. The threat is slow in onset but irreversible in effect, bearing down on some of the world’s most densely populated places like the river deltas of Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Nile, and the Mekong as well as hundreds of coastal cities around the world.^[12]Unlike sudden-onset disasters, sea level rise does not trigger emergency response systems. It erodes habitability gradually, invisibly, and without generating the international attention that follows a cyclone or flood.

3. Drought, Water Scarcity, and Agricultural Collapse

In 2023, drought displacement was substantial across the Horn of Africa, with the worst drought in 40 years triggering 2.1 million people to move in the region alone.^[5] Prolonged drought destroys agricultural livelihoods and depletes drinking water, as seen across the Horn of Africa, Central America’s Dry Corridor of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, and the Middle East. Water scarcity currently affects over two billion people who do not have ready access to safe potable water.^[13] By 2050, more than half of the world’s population is projected to live in water-stressed areas.^[14] As crop yields fail due to changed rainfall patterns, heat stress, and soil degradation, farming communities lose the livelihoods that anchor them to a place. Agricultural collapse is among the most powerful slow-onset drivers of displacement, and its effects fall almost exclusively on the Global South.

4. Extreme Heat and the Approaching Survival Threshold

Up to 2.8 billion people are projected to be exposed to dangerous heatwaves by 2090 under a high-warming scenario, according to the International Organization for Migration.^[15] Parts of South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Sub-Saharan Africa are already briefly exceeding the physiological survival threshold: a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, at which even a healthy person in shade with unlimited water cannot cool their body through perspiration.^[16] Once regions regularly exceed this threshold, outdoor activity becomes life-threatening and, without costly infrastructure unavailable to most of the world’s poor, the land becomes effectively uninhabitable.^[17] This is not a distant scenario for the most exposed communities. It is a trajectory already underway in many parts of the world and starting to be seen regularly in others.

Climate Migration in the Future

If current emissions trajectories continue, the World Bank estimates between 44 million and 216 million people will migrate internally due to climate change by 2050.^[9] Some researchers consider this a massive underestimate, for example a 2024 peer-reviewed analysis in the journal Sustainability concluded the figure could reach 500 million people migrating annually once sudden-onset disasters and compounding slow-onset factors are fully included.^[18] The regional projections for 2050 are stark: Sub-Saharan Africa could see up to 86 million internal climate migrants; East Asia and the Pacific up to 49 million; South Asia up to 40 million; North Africa up to 19 million; Latin America up to 17 million.^[9]

The longer-term picture is more severe still. Under high-emissions scenarios, the land surface currently experiencing conditions too hot for sustained human habitation could expand from 0.8% of Earth’s surface today to 19% by 2070, potentially affecting 30% of the global population.^[19] Large swaths of northern South America, central Africa, India, and northern Australia are projected to become too hot for sustained human habitation. The human climate niche, meaning the “Goldilocks” band of temperature and rainfall conditions under which human civilization has historically thrived will shift dramatically northward, concentrating viable habitat in regions that are today mostly in the Global North.

2024 was the first calendar year on record to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The long-term multi-decadal average is now projected to breach 2.0°C, the highest threshold under the Paris Agreement in the early-to-mid 2030s, or even earlier if current warming rates continue. [Ref: 20] On current policy trajectories, the world is heading for approximately 2.6°C to >3°C of warming by 2100. [Ref: 21] By 2050, without significant climate action, an estimated 200 million people will require humanitarian assistance annually due to climate effects alone. [Ref: 22]

The Legal Gap: Displaced Into Invisibility

Perhaps the starkest dimension of the climate migration crisis is the near-total absence of legal protection for those climate change displaces. The 1951 Refugee Convention which is the cornerstone of international protection for forced migrants, applies only to people fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, or political opinion.^[2] Climate hazard is explicitly not recognized as a valid basis for refugee status as it was not a concern in 1951. This means that the hundreds of millions of people displaced by floods, drought, sea level rise, and extreme heat have no formal international legal status, no guaranteed right to protection in another country, and no enforceable claim to assistance from the international community.

This is not a technicality. It has direct consequences for the people it excludes. A family in the Maldives whose home has been inundated by rising seas, a Somali pastoralist whose livestock and water sources have been destroyed by successive droughts, a Bangladeshi farmer whose delta land is now permanently below the tideline all do not qualify for refugee protection under current international law. They are, in the words of the UN Human Rights Council, the world’s forgotten victims: displaced by a crisis they did not cause, excluded from the legal frameworks that were built precisely to protect people from forces beyond their control.^[23]

The political dimension compounds the legal one. Climate migration has become deeply entangled with the broader politics of immigration in wealthy countries, where the primary policy impulse is to restrict movement rather than extend protection.^[24]Europe’s reluctance to develop legal frameworks for climate-displaced persons, the United States’ contested policies toward Central American climate migrants, and the absence of any binding international instrument on climate displacement all reflect a structural failure of the global governance system to keep pace with the reality it is supposed to manage. The communities who need protection most have the least political power to demand it in their own countries, and in the international forums where the rules governing their situation are made.

Displacement is the Face of Climate Inequity

Climate migration is not a side effect of climate change. It is one of its most direct and most unjust expressions. The people being displaced today and the hundreds of millions projected to be displaced in the decades ahead are overwhelmingly those who bear the least responsibility for the emissions that have destabilized the climate. They have the fewest resources to adapt, but currently receive the least protection from the international systems theoretically designed to help them. In this sense, climate migration is not merely a humanitarian emergency, it is a precise measure of how climate change is reproducing and accelerating global inequity at the largest scale in human history.

Addressing it requires action on three fronts simultaneously. It requires reducing the emissions that are generating displacement in the first place and holding the world’s largest emitters to account. It requires dramatically scaling investment in adaptation and resilience in the most exposed communities which means finance flows that match the scale of the problem and not just the political convenience of donors. Further, it requires building the legal and institutional frameworks that recognize climate-displaced people as what they are: people forced from their homes by a crisis not of their making, entitled to protection, dignity, and the right to determine their own futures.

Bibliography

The following sources are cited in-text by bracketed superscript number. All sources are publicly accessible.

[1] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). “Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025 (GRID 2025).” IDMC / Norwegian Refugee Council, 2025. https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2025/

[2] UNHCR. “Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1951/1967. https://www.unhcr.org/1951-refugee-convention.html

[3] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). “Internal displacement in 2024: Monitoring the crisis, measuring progress.” IDMC, 2024. https://story.internal-displacement.org/internal-displacement-in-2024-monitoring-the-crisis-measuring-progress/

[4] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). “Internal displacement in 2024: Monitoring the crisis, measuring progress — 359 million weather-related displacements since 2008.” IDMC, 2024. https://story.internal-displacement.org/internal-displacement-in-2024-monitoring-the-crisis-measuring-progress/

[5] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). “Global Report on Internal Displacement 2023 (GRID 2023): Internal Displacement and Food Security.” IDMC / Norwegian Refugee Council, 2023. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-report-internal-displacement-2023-grid-2023-internal-displacement-and-food-security

[6] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). “Global Report on Internal Displacement 2024 (GRID 2024).” IDMC / Norwegian Refugee Council, 2024. https://disasterdisplacement.org/resource/grid-2024/

[7] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). “Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025 (GRID 2025) — 45.8 million disaster displacements in 2024.” IDMC / Norwegian Refugee Council, 2025. https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2025/

[8] Clement, V. et al.. “Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration.” World Bank Group, 2021.https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/540941631203608570/pdf/Overview.pdf

[9] World Bank. “Climate Change Could Force 216 Million People to Migrate Within Their Own Countries by 2050 (Groundswell Report press release).” World Bank, 2021. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/09/13/climate-change-could-force-216-million-people-to-migrate-within-their-own-countries-by-2050

[10] IPCC. “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — Chapter 15: Small Islands.” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-15/

[11] IPCC. “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (AR6 Working Group I).” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

[12] IPCC. “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — Chapter 10: Asia (sea level rise and delta cities).” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-10/

[13] United Nations. “Water — at the center of the climate crisis.” United Nations Climate Action, 2023. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/water

[14] Burek, P. et al.. “Reassessing the projections of the World Water Development Report — By 2050, more than half of the global population will live in areas facing water scarcity.” npj Clean Water / Nature, 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0039-9

[15] International Organization for Migration (IOM) Global Data Institute. “Up to 2.8 Billion People Possibly Exposed to Heatwaves Worldwide by 2090: New IOM Analysis.” IOM, 2023. https://www.iom.int/news/28-billion-people-possibly-exposed-heatwaves-worldwide-2090-new-iom-analysis

[16] Raymond, C., Matthews, T. & Horton, R.M.. “The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance.” Science Advances, Vol. 6 No. 19, 2020. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1838

[17] Sherwood, S.C. & Huber, M.. “An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(21), 2010. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0913352107

[18] Pottier, A.. “International Climate Migrant Policy and Estimates of Climate Migration.” Sustainability, 16(23), 2024. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/23/10287

[19] Xu, C., Kohler, T.A., Lenton, T.M., Svenning, J.-C. & Scheffer, M.. “Future of the human climate niche.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(21), 11350–11355, 2020. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910114117

[20] Haarsma, R. et al.. “A year above 1.5°C signals that Earth is most probably within the 20-year period that will reach the Paris Agreement limit.” Nature Climate Change, 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02246-9

[21] Climate Action Tracker. “Warming Projections Global Update — November 2025.” Climate Analytics and NewClimate Institute, 2025. https://climateactiontracker.org/publications/warming-projections-global-update-2025/

[22] ICRC. “When Rain Turns to Dust: Understanding and Responding to the Combined Impact of Armed Conflicts and the Climate and Environment Crisis on People’s Lives.” International Committee of the Red Cross, 2020. https://www.icrc.org/en/publication/when-rain-turns-dust

[23] UN Human Rights Council. “Addressing the impacts of climate change on the full and effective enjoyment of human rights (Resolution 41/21).” United Nations Human Rights Council, 2019. https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g19/248/56/pdf/g1924856.pdf

[24] UNHCR. “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2023.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2024. https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends-report-2023

Hunger is rising. After decades of slow but steady progress, the number of people facing food insecurity has surged. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 2.3 billion people faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2024. More and more people are facing a hunger crisis particularly since 1/3 of the world’s fertilizer is being held up due to the war in Iran and crops are being planted now which need that fertilizer.^[1] The drivers are multiple, but one has become impossible to ignore: climate change is systematically undermining the world’s ability to grow, distribute, and afford food.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (2022) identifies food security as one of the most critical and immediate risks of a warming planet. It finds that climate change has already reduced global agricultural productivity growth by roughly 21% since 1961, with the losses concentrated in low- and middle-income tropical countries — precisely where food insecurity is already highest.^[2] For staple crops, the trajectory is alarming: maize yields are projected to fall by up to 24% under high-emissions scenarios; wheat and rice face comparable losses. For every 1°C rise in global average temperatures, food production declines by the caloric equivalent of forcing one person in every household on earth to skip a meal every week.^[3]

These are not distant projections. They are unfolding now. The prolonged drought that gripped the Horn of Africa from 2021 to 2023 — described by meteorologists as the worst in 40 years and made significantly more likely by human-caused climate change^[4] — pushed 22 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia into acute food insecurity.^[5] In the Central American Dry Corridor, multi-year droughts have destroyed consecutive harvests, driving malnutrition, stunting, and mass displacement. In 2024, extreme heat and El Niño conditions devastated West African cocoa harvests and Vietnam’s coffee crop, sending global commodity prices surging — with none of the gains flowing to the farmers who grew them.

“For every 1°C rise in temperature, a poor smallholder farmer loses more than half their income. For a billionaire investor, the same degree of warming represents a new profit opportunity.”

The Crop Collapse: Science on the Front Line

The relationship between warming temperatures and crop failure is now one of the most robustly documented findings in climate science. A landmark 2025 study published in Nature modelling global production across all major crops confirmed that current trajectories will produce significant and widespread yield declines across cropping regions by mid-century, with the greatest impacts concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America.^[6]

Pastoralism — the livelihood of more than 75% of the global population in the world’s dryland regions — is equally exposed. The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019) documents falling pasture productivity, damage to animal reproductive function, and accelerating biodiversity loss as rainfall patterns shift and temperatures rise.^[7] For the estimated 200 million pastoralists worldwide, these are not abstract risks — they are the destruction of livelihoods that have no equivalent substitute.

The majority of cropping regions have now experienced both rapid warming and atmospheric drying, affecting an area home to one fifth of the global population.^[8] Yield progress for barley, wheat, and maize — the crops on which global food security most depends — has slowed significantly as a direct result of climate stress. The world is running a food security deficit even before accounting for the full consequences of future warming.

Smallholder Farmers: The People Who Feed the World Are Going Hungry

Smallholder farmers produce over a third of the world’s food, and approximately 2.5 billion people — including the vast majority of the world’s most food-insecure populations — depend on small-scale farming, herding, and fishing for their survival.^[9] These are the people most exposed to climate change and least equipped to adapt to it.

The economic consequences are stark. A study from Kansas found that for every 1°C of warming, net farm income fell by 66%.^[10] Research from India documents a 17–21% decrease in farm revenue per degree of warming.^[11] A broader analysis finds that a 1°C increase in average temperatures is associated with a 53% decrease in the farm incomes of poor rural households globally. These losses are not recovered in good years — they accumulate, compounding across seasons, pushing households into debt, into hunger, and ultimately into migration.

Women farmers, who make up 43% of the global agricultural labour force, bear a disproportionate share of this burden.^[12] A study in France found women are overrepresented in the crops most vulnerable to climate variability, yet more likely than men to adopt sustainable practices — managing a third of organic farms while comprising less than a third of permanent agricultural workers.^[13] In Bangladesh, climate disasters directly destroy the small livestock, homestead gardens, and informal trading that women rely on for income and nutrition, with limited access to land, credit, or social protection making recovery extremely difficult.^[14]

Climateflation: How a Warming World Is Making Food Unaffordable

Even where food remains available, it is becoming unaffordable. A phenomenon researchers have begun calling ‘climateflation’ — food price inflation driven by climate-related supply disruptions — is now a documented and measurable economic force. A 2024 study published in Nature Climate Change found that global temperature increases projected for 2035 will add between 0.92 and 3.23 percentage points to annual food price inflation.^[15] Food prices in Europe are forecast to rise by up to 50% due to global warming over coming decades.^[16]

These headline figures translate differently across the income spectrum. In Nigeria, a person allocates nearly 60% of their household budget to food; in the United States, the figure is less than 7%. When food prices rise, the poorest households have nowhere to absorb the shock — they eat less, they eat worse, they pull children from school, they take on debt.^[17] In the United States itself, the lowest income group already spends a third of its budget on food; climate-driven price rises will hit them hardest even in the world’s wealthiest economy.

A team of experts convened by the European Climate Research Institute (ERL) in 2025 investigated climate-linked food price spikes across 18 countries between 2022 and 2024, documenting how heat, drought, and extreme precipitation events each generated measurable and sustained price increases for staple commodities.^[18] In every case studied, the price increases persisted long after the climate event had passed: between September and October 2023, the FAO’s global food price index fell by 11.5%, yet domestic food prices across low- and lower-middle-income countries continued to rise, with the poorest country group recording price increases of 30%.^[19]

Who Profits When Food Systems Fail

The costs of climate-driven food crises are not distributed evenly across the supply chain. While smallholder farmers lose incomes and low-income consumers skip meals, the corporations that dominate the global food system have used climate-related supply disruptions as cover for extraordinary profit-taking.

The four corporations — Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus — that together control an estimated 70–90% of global grain trade saw their profits surge following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the associated global food price spike. Cargill’s profits rose by 23% in 2022 compared to 2021; ADM recorded its highest profits in its history.^[20] Ten hedge funds made an estimated $1.9 billion in profits ahead of the food price spike, through speculative positions on food commodities.^[21]

Climate shocks have become a mechanism for further concentration of profit at the top of food supply chains. In 2024, extreme weather and El Niño conditions destroyed West African cocoa harvests, sending prices up 231% year on year — with none of that increase reaching the cocoa farmers who had lost their crops.^[22]Drought in Brazil and Vietnam drove coffee prices up 55% by August 2024, while the trading companies that serve as middlemen in the supply chain captured the margin.^[23] The avian influenza outbreak — a climate-sensitive zoonotic risk — killed over 120 million hens, tripling retail egg prices in the US, while major producer Cal-Maine reported $509 million in a single quarter: more than triple its previous year’s results.^[24]

Cargill — one of the world’s largest food traders — now counts 12 family members as billionaires, up from eight before the pandemic.^[25] The food industry’s billionaires are enriching themselves from the same climate crisis that is starving the farmers who grow their commodities and pricing out the consumers who buy their products.

“Climate change is not just destroying harvests — it is restructuring who controls the food system and who goes hungry as a result.”

The Politics of Hunger: Inequality, Power, and the Failure to Act

The link between climate change and hunger is not a natural disaster — it is a political one. The countries that are most food-insecure today contributed least to the emissions that are destroying their agricultural systems. The people going hungry in the Dry Corridor of Central America, in the dryland communities of the Sahel, and on the flood-prone deltas of Bangladesh did not cause the climate crisis. The people who did — the billionaire investors in fossil fuel companies, the executives who lobbied against climate regulation, the owners of the private jets — are insulated from its food consequences by their wealth.

Between 1850 and 2015, the countries of the Global North, representing just 14% of the world’s population, were responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary.^[26] Analysis combining the Stockholm Environment Institute’s emissions inequality data with climate attribution science finds that the richest 1% of humanity contributed 26 times more to extreme weather events than the average person — including the droughts, floods, and heat extremes that are now driving food system collapse.^[27]

The Corporate Capture of Agricultural Systems

The food crisis is not simply a story of weather — it is also a story of market power. A small number of agro-industrial corporations have come to control critical nodes of the global food system. Four firms — Syngenta Group, Bayer, BASF, and Corteva — now control half the world’s commercial seed supply and more than half the global pesticides market.^[28] These same corporations are marketing climate-related crop failures as an opportunity to sell ‘climate-smart’ technologies — new seeds, new inputs, new contracts — that deepen farmer dependency on corporate supply chains rather than building genuine resilience.

Large-scale agribusinesses in the US and EU receive billions in public subsidies that allow them to sell imported staple crops — wheat, rice, corn, soy — at prices below what local farmers can compete with.^[29] This structural unfairness is compounded by climate vulnerability: smallholder farmers in the Global South face the double burden of competing with subsidised industrial agriculture and absorbing the climate shocks that industrial agriculture’s emissions have caused.

Roughly 21–37% of global greenhouse gas emissions originate from the food system itself, from farming and land use to storage, transport, processing, retail, and consumption.^[30] The industrial model that dominates global food production is both a major driver of the climate crisis and the primary beneficiary of the instability that crisis creates. This is not a market failure — it is the market functioning exactly as designed, concentrating gain at the top while socialising cost and risk onto those at the bottom.

What Must Change: From Crisis to Justice

The evidence demands a response proportionate to the scale of the crisis. Techno-managerial fixes — new seed varieties, precision agriculture, carbon markets — are not sufficient, and in many cases actively entrench the corporate power structures that are making the crisis worse. The path from climate-driven hunger to food security runs through structural change: in land rights, in trade rules, in corporate accountability, and in who controls the food system.

Governments must move away from industrial monoculture agriculture and invest in climate-resilient smallholder food systems. This means protecting farmers’ access to arable land, community seed banks, and agricultural inputs; funding agroecological research and practice; and reforming trade rules that allow rich-country subsidy regimes to undercut farmers in climate-vulnerable nations.^[31]

Women’s role in transforming food systems must be recognised and resourced. Policy biases and structural barriers that restrict women’s access to land, credit, agricultural inputs, and markets must be dismantled.^[32]The rights of Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, and smallholder farming communities to manage their lands and integrate into national adaptation plans must be protected and funded through accessible climate finance — not through the loan-based instruments that have already placed low-income nations under crippling debt burdens.

And the corporations and billionaires who have profited from the food system’s failures — and whose emissions have helped create the conditions for those failures — must be made to pay. Windfall profit taxes on food corporations that price-gouge during climate-driven supply shocks; wealth taxes on the billionaires whose investment emissions contribute disproportionately to the warming that is destroying harvests; and mandatory corporate accountability for emissions across agricultural supply chains are all tools available to governments willing to use them.

The 2025 Report of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality concluded that all governments must set timebound, realistic targets to reduce economic inequality.^[33] No target matters more urgently, or is more directly linked to food security, than closing the vast gap between those who caused the climate crisis and those who are going hungry because of it.

Endnotes

1. FAO (2024). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.

2. IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Chapter 5: Food, Fibre, and Other Ecosystem Products.

3. Authors’ calculations based on global crop production modelling. Nature (2025). Crop yield projections under climate change scenarios across major staple crops.

4. World Weather Attribution (2023). Human-induced climate change increased drought severity scoring in the 2020–2023 Horn of Africa drought. WWA Collaborative Report.

5. OCHA (2023). Horn of Africa Drought: Humanitarian Situation Report. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

6. Various authors (2025). Global crop production under current and projected climate trajectories. Nature.

7. IPCC (2019). Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), Chapter 5: Food Security.

8. PNAS (2025). Rapid warming and atmospheric drying across global cropping regions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

9. van der Lee, J. et al. (2021). Smallholder farmers and global food supply. World Development; FAO (2023). Family Farming and Food Security.

10. Environmental Defense Fund (2024). Extreme Heat and Farm Income: Evidence from Kansas.

11. Chandrasekaran, V. et al. (2024). Climate Change and Farm Revenue in India. Cogent Economics & Finance, 14(2).

12. FAO (2023). The State of Food and Agriculture: Revealing the True Cost of Food. Rome.

13. Oxfam France (2023). Genre et agriculture: les femmes en première ligne du changement climatique. Paris.

14. Oxfam (2026). Loss and Damage and Unpaid Care in Bangladesh. To be published.

15. Kotz, M. et al. (2024). Global warming and food inflation: projections to 2035. Nature Climate Change.

16. Ibid.

17. USDA Economic Research Service (2023). Food Expenditure as a Share of Household Budget by Country. Processed by Our World in Data.

18. Kotz, M. et al. (2025). Climate-driven food price shocks: case studies from 18 countries, 2022–2024. Environmental Research Letters.

19. Network Ideas (2024). Why do domestic food prices keep rising when global prices fall? Synthesis of FAO price data, 2023–2024.

20. The Guardian (2022, August 23). Record profits for grain firms as food crisis prompts calls for windfall tax.

21. Lighthouse Reports (2022). Exposed: The Hedge Funds Cashing In on the Food Price Spike. Investigative journalism report.

22. Euronews Business (2024, March 28). Cocoa prices rise to fresh records: will we run out of chocolate?

23. FAO (2024). Adverse climatic conditions drive coffee prices to highest level in years. FAO Newsroom.

24. Washington Post (2025, April 8). Egg prices, profit increase at Cal-Maine as avian flu reshapes supply.

25. Oxfam UK (2022). Food and energy billionaires pocket £453 billion windfall as cost of living crisis pushes millions into poverty. Press release.

26. Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4, e399–e404.

27. Stuart-Smith, R. et al. (2025). Attributing climate extremes to consumption emissions of the richest. Nature Climate Change.

28. ETC Group (2022). Food Barons 2022: Crisis Profiteering, Digitalization and Shifting Power. ETC Group Report.

29. Slow Food International (2024). Facts about food trade and supply that sound fake but aren’t. Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity.

30. IPCC (2022). Climate Change and Land: Food system emissions. Special Report on Climate Change and Land, Summary for Policymakers.

31. Oxfam International (2025). Fixing Our Food: Debunking 10 Myths About the Global Food System and What Drives Hunger. Oxfam Briefing Paper.

32. UN Women / FAO (2023). Closing the Gender Gap in Agriculture: Policy Priorities for Climate-Resilient Food Systems.

33. G20 South Africa (2025). Report of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality. IPD Columbia University.

Answering the questions that you have and making you aware of where climate change is now, where climate is going and how climate is causing hunger and climate refugees here and around the world. Climate change is real, it is here now and is only going to get worse if we do nothing.

Photo credit: NASA