Food Security Blindspots
What Our Agricultural Models Miss About Long-Term Stability
TL;DR
The world grows enough calories to feed everyone, yet modern food security hangs on a brittle scaffold of fossil fuels, monocultures, and degraded soils. Recent shocks from pandemics to wars show how easily food abundance can vanish. Climate change will bite, but the deeper risk is the quiet collapse of the living systems beneath our fields. Without soil health, diversity, and local resilience, famine isn’t a relic of the past. This queue of risk is forming just out of sight.
In the summer of 1985, I was a postgraduate student spending long hours in the laboratory and on trips to chalky grasslands. My research focused on whether woodlice populations showed signs of density-dependent population regulation. Can a relative of shrimps that lives in compost control its numbers?
The academic buzz among ecologists at the time was the theory that populations could regulate their numbers in response to resource constraints. I was running around to find out whether they could, and they did. When woodlice compete for food, they grow less, have fewer but bigger offspring, and this reflects in stable populations, more or less. You can imagine my enthusiasm when the research was published in prestigious academic journals.
Hassall M., Dangerfield J.M. (1990) Density-dependent processes in the population dynamics of Armadillidium vulgare (Isopoda: Oniscidae). Journal of Animal Ecology 59: 941-958
Dangerfield J.M., Hassall M. (1992) Phenotypic variation in the breeding phenology of the woodlouse Armadillidium vulgare. Oecologia 89: 140-146
While this was happening, a defining global moment in music and humanitarian activism occurred. Live Aid happened. Conceived by musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure as a response to the ongoing famine in Ethiopia, which had been widely broadcast through harrowing news reports since 1984. A monumental event was held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. It was one of the first truly global satellite broadcasts, reaching an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion viewers across more than 150 countries.
The concert featured some of the most iconic names in rock and pop music at the time, including Queen, U2, David Bowie, Elton John, The Who, and Paul McCartney in London, as well as acts such as Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Madonna, and Mick Jagger in Philadelphia. Queen’s performance, in particular, is often hailed as one of the greatest live shows in rock history.
The event combined the spectacle of entertainment with a sense of urgent moral purpose, generating around £150 million (in today’s money) for famine relief and setting a new benchmark for celebrity-led activism. It demonstrated how mass media could be harnessed for charitable causes on a scale never before seen.
It also sparked in me—and presumably in many others—the notion that famine was a real phenomenon. There were people less fortunate than I in lands far away who lacked access to sufficient food.
These people were hungry, their children were hungry, and starvation was an everyday reality. As a nascent population ecologist, I knew what this meant. When resources are limited, density-dependent mechanisms begin with poor juvenile survival, slow development, and slower reproduction and, after the children die, end with adult starvation.
Easy to see and study in woodlice, but much harder to accept in human populations.
What’s better than avoiding these implications by bathing in popular culture and still feeling like the starving will benefit?
It didn’t take long for the 1983–1985 Ethiopian famine to end and the catastrophe to be forgotten. However, in the four decades since, famines—formally defined as crises with extreme food scarcity leading to widespread malnutrition and excess mortality—have continued, with more than 30 significant famines globally, primarily driven by conflict, climate extremes, economic instability, and governance failures.
Prominent examples include the Somalia famine of 1991–92, caused by civil war and state collapse; the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s which was worsened by state isolation and economic mismanagement; the South Sudan famine of 2017, declared in Unity State due to conflict and restricted humanitarian access; and the ongoing Yemen crisis, where years of war and blockade have pushed millions to the brink.
Other regions severely affected by famine include Sudan, Nigeria (especially the northeast due to the Boko Haram conflict), Syria, Afghanistan, parts of the Sahel, and now Gaza.
In many other cases, famine was either declared or narrowly averted thanks to humanitarian intervention.
Global inequality, displacement from climate change, and deliberate obstruction of aid continue to make famine a real threat for tens of millions. It remains a persistent and acute political and ethical failure.
Significantly, while the frequency of declared famines has decreased, thanks to improved monitoring and crisis interventions, the scale of food insecurity is growing, with 2024 data showing over 250 million people worldwide facing acute hunger.
I doubt I could list these famine events or the statistics for the hungry without looking them up. After Live Aid made me aware, famine did not persist in my consciousness even though I spent a decade living in Africa, probably because I never went hungry.
Even when researching for The Mindful Sceptic Guide to Food Security, where I went beyond supermarket shelves into the complex, precarious systems that feed humanity, I didn’t mention famine. Instead, I examined how soil health, geopolitics, and human behaviour intertwine to create vulnerabilities and opportunities, ensuring everyone has reliable access to nutritious food in a changing world.
My tacit assumption has always been that it was not a food problem. I did not see any reason to question the first premise for this essay…
Global food production currently provides enough calories to adequately feed everyone.
I was right not to question the global food system’s capacity to generate calories, as evidence suggests this premise holds.
The world produces approximately 5,935 kilocalories per person per day from crops and livestock that humans could consume, with an additional 3,812 kcal of vegetable matter produced for animal consumption. This production capacity significantly exceeds basic human requirements. The actual food available for human consumption (after accounting for waste, losses, animal feed, and industrial uses) is called the per capita energy from food and has continued to increase over time, reaching 2,978 kcal/person/day in 2021.
This per-person energy production from food exceeds basic needs by a significant margin.
Whilst the minimum dietary energy requirement (MDER) varies by country, the FAO suggests that the average minimum is approximately 2,000 kcal per adult, ranging from 1,600 to 3,000 calories per day, depending on a person’s age, size, height, lifestyle, and activity level. So, an average daily production of close to 3,000 kilocalories exceeds the minimum requirement by a third.
Of course, averages mask significant disparities.
North America had 3,752 kcal/person/day available in 2016-18, whilst Sub-Saharan Africa had only 2,386 kcal/person/day during the same period. While calorie availability in Southern Asia rose by 6% over a decade, in Sub-Saharan Africa it almost stagnated, increasing by only 0.6%.
Go a little closer still, and within countries, food distribution follows economic inequality. For example, estimates from research in Mexico suggest that the bottom 25% of the population by income consumed approximately 1,657 kcal/day, while the top 25% consumed 2,727 kcal/day. Diet composition also varies significantly, with the poor obtaining a much higher percentage of calories from cereals (63.8%) than the wealthy (43.9%).
Food security nuances aside, global food production generates enough calories to adequately feed everyone.
We are not short of food.
However, we are short of slack in the system that keeps it flowing. The Second Law of Thermodynamics quietly guarantees that slack evaporates over time because energy disperses, and systems drift toward disorder unless actively maintained. In food systems, that slack isn’t a luxury; it’s the buffer that slows collapse when shocks arrive.
And so, with approximately 5,935 kilocalories of human-edible crops produced per person per day and 2,978 kcal available after accounting for losses and other uses, current production exceeds the typical minimum requirement of around 2,000 kcal per day.
The premise, therefore, holds with respect to global production capacity. Enough calories are grown to feed everyone.
Apologies for the repetition, but this blind spot is big enough to hide a semi-trailer. Whatever motivated Sir Bob Geldof to take action against a famine in Africa in the 1980s shouldn’t happen today. There is enough food produced.
This is true because modern farming converts fossil fuels into food through energy-intensive fertilisers, mechanisation, and global supply chains. Over half of the worldwide population of 8 billion, increasing by 8,000 people an hour, is fed sufficient calories through an energy-intensive and technology-rich food system. The rest of humanity feeds itself by growing food in smallholdings, some 500 million of them.
So are recent famines occasional aberrations or systemic risks? The answer depends on the relative vulnerability of the food system that delivers 3,000 kcals per day, which prompts the following premise…
Industrial agriculture’s dependence on fossil inputs creates systemic vulnerabilities to global food production
This premise is strongly supported by evidence. The principal vulnerabilities stem from volatility in input costs, climate change, monoculture production, the corporatisation of food, the energy transition, and soil health.
Each can destabilise the supply chain, in part or even bring it to a total collapse.
Fertiliser production relies heavily on natural gas for ammonia synthesis and on oil for pesticides, meaning that energy price spikes directly translate into food cost increases. For example, UK farmers faced an additional £760 million in costs during the 2021 energy crisis alone. Geopolitical tensions amplify these vulnerabilities, as we saw when Russia imposed fertiliser export restrictions, sending shockwaves through global agricultural markets. Moving agricultural produce from paddocks in the countryside to plates in the cities requires more than just transport. Along the food chain, petrochemicals support the production of plastics, preservatives, and chemical inputs. The apparent abundance in supermarket aisles depends on extractive processes facing physical limits and market turbulence. It’s easy to discuss food security in terms of yield and distribution while overlooking the fundamental energy dependencies that could rapidly unravel seemingly stable food systems.
Industrial agriculture contributes roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions through fertiliser production, machinery operation, and transportation. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers alone generate more greenhouse gases than commercial aviation while simultaneously degrading soil health and biodiversity. This emissions burden then returns as climate chaos through intensified droughts, floods, and heatwaves that further disrupt the very food production systems that created the problem.
Particularly concerning is how this self-reinforcing cycle could accelerate. Climate impacts reduce yields, prompting farmers to apply more fossil-intensive inputs to compensate, thereby increasing emissions and exacerbating climate destabilisation. This is more than an environmental concern for youngsters to march about because it is an existential threat to food security and another blind spot.
Fossil-fuel-based agricultural systems have enabled unprecedented agricultural specialisation. In the U.S., in states like Kansas, North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma, and Texas, which are key wheat producers, it’s not unusual for a single wheat field to exceed 400 hectares, with entire farms comprising multiple such fields. This enables the efficient use of large-scale combines, seed drills, and aerial spraying, which are crucial to maintaining profitability, given the relatively low market price per ton of wheat compared to other crops.
Cheap energy inputs also enable the cultivation of massive monocultures of corn, soy, and rice, which together with wheat now account for approximately 60% of global calories, resulting in a precarious lack of diversity. Monocultures require constant applications of fossil-derived pesticides because they lack the ecological resilience of diverse systems, essentially substituting biodiversity with petrochemicals. The vulnerability becomes particularly evident in disruptions. A novel pest or pathogen affecting just one of these staple crops could threaten global food security in ways unprecedented in human history.
Lack of crop and production diversity is another blind spot.
We have replaced ecological resilience with petrochemical consistency and called it progress. In complexity terms, we’ve traded adaptive webs for a single-thread lifeline. Petrochemical uniformity depletes low-entropy resources rapidly, accelerating disorder while eliminating the feedback loops that ecosystems rely on to mitigate disruption.
The fossil-food relationship persists partly through powerful institutional inertia and deliberate industry strategies to maintain dependency. Fossil fuel companies are actively expanding into agricultural petrochemicals as the energy transition threatens their core business. At the same time, agrochemical firms promote technological fixes like carbon capture and “blue ammonia” that greenwash rather than resolve fossil fuel dependence. These corporate strategies effectively delay transitions to more sustainable practices by promising easy solutions that maintain existing power structures and business models.
Transitioning food systems away from fossil dependencies is an obvious solution to these risks.
‘Green’ alternatives, such as electric tractors and fossil-free fertilisers, remain underdeveloped, while critical minerals needed for renewable technologies face scarcity and environmental concerns. The sheer energy intensity of industrial agriculture, which consumes approximately 15% of global fossil fuels through processing, refrigeration, packaging, and transport, makes decarbonisation particularly challenging.
The daunting reality is that, just to reduce systemic risk, the intensive food system that feeds most people in cities must undergo a fundamental redesign during the same period that climate impacts are intensifying.
For now, it is enough to know that industrial agriculture’s fossil fuel dependence creates interconnected risks from price shocks, climate degradation, monoculture fragility, corporate entrenchment, and stalled transitions. These vulnerabilities pose a significant threat to global food security, particularly as climate impacts intensify.
As I present them here, these risks may seem abstract, but they can quickly become realities that affect millions of lives. These vulnerabilities aren’t theoretical concerns for some distant future because they’re actively reshaping our present.
During Australia’s Millennium Drought, which lasted nearly 13 years, unprecedented dry conditions devastated agricultural output and threatened water security. Industrial production systems were particularly vulnerable due to their reliance on irrigation and fossil-powered infrastructure. Having walked through parched Australian farmland during this period, I witnessed firsthand how quickly century-old agricultural assumptions can unravel when climate patterns shift.
What strikes me as particularly concerning is how these disruptions are occurring while we’re still in the early stages of climate change, the impacts at just 1.2°C of warming, while current trajectories point toward far greater destabilisation.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war brutally exposed the brittleness of our globalised food networks, which depend on abundant, cheap, fossil-fuelled transportation. When pandemic restrictions and conflict disrupted shipping and trucking, we witnessed the surreal contradiction of food rotting in fields while supermarket shelves stood empty and hunger increased. Just-in-time supply chains, optimised for efficiency, are fragile.
They are vulnerable to shocks.
Efficiency is a fair-weather friend. From a complexity perspective, efficiency pares away the redundancies that act as entropy brakes. When the storm hits, only systems with diverse pathways and internal slack can slow the drift toward disorder long enough for societies to adapt.
And if all this wasn’t enough, there is another, even more critical risk, an even bigger blind spot than intensification with finite fossil energy. The headline statistic comes from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation… 40% of global soils are degraded.
I’ll just leave that one hanging in bold.
Lose the soil, and we lose the plot entirely. Remember that healthy soil is a concentrated order with billions of living agents cycling energy and matter in intricate loops. Strip that away, and entropy wins fast; the energy pathways collapse, and rebuilding them takes centuries in nature’s slow time.
All this deserves a book on its own, but for now, it gets the following premise…
Soil degradation represents a greater threat to food security than climate change
Soil degradation directly threatens agricultural productivity through erosion, salinisation, acidification, and loss of organic matter. The impacts are already severe and widespread. For example, Australia faces salinity affecting 1 million hectares of farmland, with 2.8–4.5 million more at risk, while Central Asia has experienced crop yield declines of 30% over three decades due to soil erosion and desertification.
The scale is staggering: 75% of South American soils are now degraded, resulting in $60 billion in annual agricultural losses. If current trends continue, projections suggest 95% of global soils could be degraded by 2050.
While climate change poses independent threats through shifting weather patterns and ocean acidification, many of its impacts on food systems are ultimately mediated through soil health.
And I chose that last word carefully because soil is alive. Healthy soil teems with a myriad of life forms, including bacteria, fungi, earthworms, nematodes, arthropods, and plant roots, each playing essential roles in nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, water filtration, and plant health. These organisms create a dynamic living system that underpins terrestrial ecosystems and food production. However, widespread land-use change, intensive agriculture, pollution (notably pesticides and heavy metals), deforestation, soil sealing by urbanisation, and climate change are leading to a measurable decline in soil biodiversity everywhere.
A teaspoon of living soil holds more solutions than a warehouse of fertiliser.
The consequences of soil biodiversity loss are profound. Without the organisms that aerate the soil, break down organic matter, and suppress diseases, soils become compacted, less fertile, and more prone to erosion. Reduced microbial diversity can weaken plant health, making crops more susceptible to pests and diseases while increasing the need for chemical inputs. Furthermore, the diminished biological integrity of soil impairs carbon sequestration processes, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the land’s capacity to adapt to climatic shifts. Such losses are often insidious and complex to detect until degradation becomes visible and challenging to reverse.
Soil degradation poses a more immediate and foundational threat to food security because it directly undermines the agricultural productivity bedrock of food systems.
However, it is not all doom and gloom. I can point you to evidence showing how it is possible to restore soil health through regenerative agriculture, reduced tillage, and organic amendments. Regeneration and restoration offer the dual benefit of boosting food production and sequestering carbon to mitigate climate change.
These aren’t blind spots, more like fumbling around in the depths of a cave a few hundred meters underground with no light.
There is a glimmer, though. A faint light in the distance encapsulated in the last premise…
Alternative agricultural approaches can increase resilience without reducing productivity
Degraded soil results in crop and livestock production losses because damaged soils lose their water retention capacity. For example, loss of organic matter can reduce the soil’s ability to hold water by up to 90%, significantly worsening vulnerability to drought.
And it takes centuries for degraded soil to naturally replenish.
Forming just 1 cm of topsoil from bedrock typically takes several hundred to over a thousand years, depending on climate and geology, and current human-driven erosion rates often outpace this many times over. Yet it is possible to restore soil function far more quickly. Regenerative and agroecological practices such as crop rotation, cover cropping, composting, and reduced tillage can rebuild organic matter, enhance microbial life, and reduce dependence on synthetic inputs.
These methods improve fertility, sequester carbon, and strengthen resilience to climate extremes. Where degradation is modest, such practices can restore much of a soil’s productivity within a few seasons or cropping cycles, with deeper recovery continuing over years.
Work with nature, and it will reorganise life from the ground up. Complex systems thrive by self-organisation. Allow the right flows of energy and diversity of actors, and they rebuild structure and function without central control. Regenerative agriculture plugs into this property, letting nature do the work that entropy has undone.
Conventional narratives often frame these practices as less productive or difficult to scale, yet growing evidence shows they can rival or even surpass conventional yields while sharply reducing reliance on fossil fuel–derived inputs. Fields managed regeneratively typically show richer soil structure, greater biodiversity, and improved water-holding capacity, evident even to the untrained eye.
Here is another doable option. Shortening supply chains and diversifying production builds resilience against the shocks we’ve seen in recent years. Local food systems with varied crops reduce reliance on global transport and fragile monocultures while keeping more value in communities.
Community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets are spreading worldwide, fostering direct producer–consumer ties and bypassing fossil-intensive distribution. I’ve seen how these models create not just alternative supply chains but new relationships to food itself, often reviving traditional practices that sustained communities long before fossil fuels made distance and specialisation seem advantageous. Critics dismiss localisation as inefficient nostalgia, but a mindful sceptic sees it as sophisticated risk management.
Integrating renewable energy into agricultural operations is one of the most promising paths to reduce fossil fuel dependence while maintaining productivity. Solar panels, wind turbines, and biogas digesters can power farm operations while often lowering long-term energy costs and creating additional income streams.
Many Australian farms now operate partially or fully on solar power, utilising renewable energy for irrigation, refrigeration, and machinery. Farmers take pride in achieving energy self-sufficiency as both an environmental choice and a business strategy that reduces their vulnerability to price volatility. The conventional narrative often frames renewable transition as prohibitively expensive for agriculture, but declining technology costs and innovative financing models are rapidly changing this equation. What’s particularly noteworthy is how this energy transition can reshape power dynamics in food systems, reducing farmers’ dependence on both fossil fuel suppliers and centralised energy infrastructure.
Here are some more real-world examples that demonstrate both the urgency of reducing fossil fuel dependencies and the practical pathways already emerging.
Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has demonstrated significant benefits across multiple metrics. CSA practices such as drought-resistant crops and precision farming have increased rice yields in Sri Lanka by 15% during dry seasons, while simultaneously reducing water use by 10–20% and fertiliser use by 27%. On the resilience front, improved water management techniques and early planting strategies have helped farmers adapt to erratic rainfall patterns, ensuring stable crop yields even during drought conditions.
Regenerative Agriculture has proven its effectiveness in both productivity and resilience. In Brazil, the Balbo Group achieved 20% higher sugarcane productivity using regenerative methods, including organic waste recycling and reduced soil compression. Studies by the Rodale Institute have consistently shown that regenerative farms outperform conventional operations during droughts, primarily because healthier soil systems retain water more effectively.
Agroforestry and Diversification approaches have transformed landscapes and livelihoods. Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration initiatives in West Africa have successfully restored 5 million hectares of previously degraded land, directly boosting food security for 2.5 million people. The integration of trees with traditional crops provides a natural buffer against extreme weather events and pest outbreaks, while simultaneously enhancing overall soil fertility and ecosystem health.
Precision and Sustainable Input Use create efficiencies that benefit both farmers and the environment. Soil testing and targeted fertilisation programs in Sri Lanka have reduced fertiliser use by 27% without affecting crop yields. This efficient resource utilisation not only lowers operational costs for farmers but also reduces their dependency on volatile external inputs, creating more stable and sustainable agricultural systems.
The alternative agricultural premise is strongly supported by evidence from diverse global case studies and research.
It can be done and is being done even within conventional food systems.
The regenerative solution might be contrary to the agenda of agricultural conglomerates and fossil fuel companies, and even to politicians frightened of the blame they will get if supermarket shelves are empty for even a second, but it makes logical sense to everyone else. It easily passes the pub test.
So here is the heresy.
In the Global North, we are blind to how precarious our food security has become.
Our blind spots of fossil fuel dependency, soil degradation, and monoculture vulnerability persist not as isolated failures but as interconnected consequences of how we’ve designed our agricultural systems.
The premise that global food production currently generates enough calories to feed everyone adequately technically holds true, yet masks the profound fragility built into that production. We remain collectively blind to these vulnerabilities until crisis strikes, not because evidence is lacking, but because our siloed thinking prevents us from seeing across system boundaries.
Seen thermodynamically, these policy errors express a deeper law. We’ve built systems that accelerate entropy while dismantling the complexity that could pace it. The result is fragility by design.
And this blindness persists for three critical reasons.
First, the very success of industrial agriculture in producing abundant calories creates the illusion of permanent security.
Second, the compartmentalisation of expertise, with energy experts rarely engaging soil scientists, and economists seldom consulting ecologists, fragments our understanding of these interconnected systems.
Third, powerful economic interests benefit from maintaining these blind spots, as addressing them would require fundamental restructuring of global agricultural business models.
A mindful sceptic approach allows us to transcend these limitations by questioning not just whether we produce enough food, but how we produce it and at what hidden costs. It requires intellectual humility to acknowledge that our modern food miracle rests on temporary subsidies of fossil energy and depleting soil capital. When we approach food security with this broader awareness, we begin to see that resilience requires diversity in crops, in production methods, and in supply networks.
Overcoming our collective blindness requires that we learn to see systems rather than symptoms, tracing connections between energy, soil, climate, and food that typically remain invisible. The security of our food future depends not merely on producing more calories, but on recognising the fundamental ecological relationships that make any food production possible. Systems thinking means seeing that energy, soil, climate, and food are all part of the same dissipative structure. That is an ordered flow held together temporarily against entropy’s pull. Without that frame, we’ll keep treating symptoms while the structure continues to erode.
This shift in perspective isn’t simply academic; it’s essential for anyone who expects to eat in the coming decades of increasing instability.
And what about that density-dependence?
When food is scarce, organisms will compete for it, with increasing intensity as the scarcity deepens. This begins as a bit of shoving and scurrying and ends with some individuals missing out. They survive for a while but get weaker and less able to compete as their calorie intake slows. They find it hard to reproduce, and eventually they stop growing and starve, especially youngsters.
This is woodlice, of course, but it could easily be people.