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This essay is part of What to Eat on a Burning Planetlucky play168 or lp99, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply. Read more about this project in a note from Eliza Barclay, Opinion’s climate editor.

From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay.

But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system — disrupted in recent years by the pandemic, conflict and, increasingly, climate change. What comes next? Almost certainly, more disruptions and more hazards, enough to remake the whole future of food.

The world as a whole is already facing what the Cornell agricultural economist Chris Barrett calls a “food polycrisis.” Over the past decade, he says, what had long been reliable global patterns of year-on-year improvements in hunger first stalled and then reversed. Rates of undernourishment have grown 21 percent since 2017. Agricultural yields are still growing, but not as quickly as they used to and not as quickly as demand is booming. Obesity has continued to rise, and the average micronutrient content of dozens of popular vegetables has continued to fall. The food system is contributing to the growing burden of diabetes and heart disease and to new spillovers of infectious diseases from animals to humans as well.

And then there are prices. Worldwide, wholesale food prices, adjusted for inflation, have grown about 50 percent since 1999, and those prices have also grown considerably more volatile, making not just markets but the whole agricultural Rube Goldberg network less reliable. Overall, American grocery prices have grown by almost 21 percent since President Biden took office, a phenomenon central to the widespread perception that the cost of living has exploded on his watch. Between 2020 and 2023, the wholesale price of olive oil tripled; the price of cocoa delivered to American ports jumped by even more in less than two years. The economist Isabella Weber has proposed maintaining the food equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve, to buffer against shortages and ease inevitable bursts of market chaos.

Price spikes are like seismographs for the food system, registering much larger drama elsewhere — and sometimes suggesting more tectonic changes underway as well. More than three-quarters of the population of Africa, which has already surpassed one billion, cannot today afford a healthy diet; this is where most of our global population growth is expected to happen this century, and there has been little agricultural productivity growth there for 20 years. Over the same time period, there hasn’t been much growth in the United States either.

How climate change could transform yields of two major crops

Projected change in corn and wheat yields in 2050, based on an upper-middle scenario for global warming.

Change in crop yield in 2050

–40%

or less

–20

0

+20

+40%

or more

Corn production in 2050

Drought conditions have already led Mexico to import a record amount

of corn in recent years. Climate change could further decrease its yields.

China is the world’s second-largest

producer of corn, but yields are projected to decrease across most of the country.

Wheat production in 2050

Pakistan, where wheat accounts for nearly two-thirds

of all calories

consumed, could

see sharp declines.

The U.S., one of the largest exporters of wheat, could see increased yields, especially in more northern latitudes.

Change in crop yield in 2050

–40%

or less

–20

0

+20

+40%

or more

Corn production in 2050

China is the world’s second-largest

producer of corn, but yields are projected to decrease across most of the country.

Drought conditions have already led Mexico to import a record amount of corn in recent years. Climate change could further decrease its yields.

Rising temperatures could make the highlands of Peru

a more productive area for corn.

Wheat production in 2050

The U.S., one of the largest exporters of wheat, could see increased yields, especially in more northern latitudes.

Pakistan, where wheat accounts for nearly two-thirds of all calories consumed, could see sharp declines.

Change in crop yield in 2050

–40%

or less

–20

0

+20

+40%

or more

Corn production in 2050

Drought conditions have already led Mexico to import a record amount

of corn in recent years. Climate change could further decrease its yields.

China is the world’s second-largest

producer of corn,

but yields are

projected to decrease across most of the country.

Wheat production in 2050

The U.S., one of the largest exporters of wheat, could see increased yields, especially in more northern latitudes.

Pakistan, where wheat accounts for nearly two-thirds

of all calories

consumed, could see sharp declines.

Sources: Jägermeyr et al. (2021) “Climate Impacts on Global Agriculture Emerge Earlier in New Generation of Climate and Crop Models,” Nature Food; World Bank; U.S.D.A.

Note: Yields shown are for the SSP370 middle-upper warming scenario and are compared with a 1983-2013 baseline.

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Graphic by Aileen Clarke

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