Beyond Scarcity: The Global Polycrisis and Food Security

The recent State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI 2026) draws striking attention away from food shortages to issues of food access, affordability and system performance. The SOFI 2026’s emphasis on the cost of a healthy diet, value-chain inefficiencies, logistics, processing and affordability suggests that food security debates are moving beyond production toward the functioning of complex agrifood systems.

The defining food security challenge of the current global polycrisis is not merely producing enough food. It is governing increasingly complex systems through which food, finance, energy, information and geopolitical risks interact. The central feature is not the frequency of shocks, although this is a fact, but the increasing tendency of unrelated shocks to produce similar food security outcomes. The current geopolitical moment reveals the complex nature of food security itself.

The SOFI 2026 records a surprising three-year trend of reducing numbers of hungry people globally, except that in Africa these numbers are slightly higher than 2025. Considering the number of recent and current crises and the number of countries experiencing conflict, extreme and more frequent weather events, significant disruptions in food, fodder and fuel trade can be observed. Yet what is widely reported as a cost-of-living crisis and an era of persistent food price inflation is driven less by a lack of global food availability but rather by lack of access to food supplies. The most significant threats for the future lie in the uncertainties of conflict (in terms of intensity, scale of engagement and duration) and rapidly growing populations in certain areas.

We have seen in recent times that even a small disruption in an interconnected system can create disproportionately large affordability impacts, reaching across the world. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that even the most remote rural areas are vulnerable to food system disruptions. As our dependence on global trade continues to grow - not only for food itself but also for the components that support every stage of the value chain, from agricultural inputs to the computer chips that power distribution logistics - disruptions occurring anywhere in the global trade system can have far-reaching consequences.

Disruptions without barriers

In a 2022 article, my co-authors and I set out how climate change, COVID-19 and conflict (the three Cs) interact on five mediators (“five Fs”) upon which food systems depend: the geopolitics of our global food, fertilizer, finance, fodder and fuel systems. We pointed out that: "Our global food supply system is fragile and vulnerable to the impacts of each driver or mediator. However, all can interact to amplify the downstream effects on people, their health, and diets. ... In a vicious feedback loop, undernutrition affects the ability to produce food, and lack of food availability can lead to conflict (and vice versa), while environmental climate change can cause both". We concluded that: "In future, the geopolitics of food production, sourcing and supply could put more pressure on the global south, potentially having a negative effect on local people’s livelihoods and food security". While the prediction that geopolitics would play a more significant role in future was accurate, we underestimated the geographical reach of these geopolitical challenges.

Climate change has moved from being a future threat to a present reality. Heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms increasingly affect agricultural productivity, infrastructure, labour productivity and food distribution systems. The question is no longer whether climate change affects food security, but how societies adapt quickly enough to keep pace with accelerating impacts.

Conflict remains one of the strongest predictors of acute food insecurity. Recent food crises in Djibouti, Gaza, Haiti, Sudan, South Sudan, and elsewhere demonstrate how violence disrupts production, destroys livelihoods, displaces populations and prevents humanitarian access. Global assessments continue to identify conflict as the leading driver of acute hunger.

COVID-19 may no longer dominate headlines, but its after-effects endure. The pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in supply chains, weakened public finances, increased debt burdens and reduced resilience among poor households. Many of these vulnerabilities have become embedded in economic and governance systems. The lessons learned have not been forgotten and niggle in the back of our minds as new waves of foot and mouth disease, avian influenza, swine flu and Hantavirus remind us of how quickly pandemics can spread and how ill-prepared we still are despite all COVID-19 taught us about the complexity of our interconnected food and health systems.

Definition of food security is evolving

Food security is an ever-evolving understanding of the centrality of food and nutrients to our survival and human dignity. With each new global crisis, the definition is refined, sharpened, expanded and so is our understanding of the complexity involved in ensuring that all people at all times have access to safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

As we discovered with COVID-19 actions, every public policy choice has opportunities, threats and trade-offs that can affect food security and nutrition for communities directly and indirectly through various channels. If we replace the ‘C’ for COVID-19 in the initial three Cs with Complexity, we integrate the lessons we have learnt from COVID-19 around unintended consequences of policy decisions (for example, confining people to their homes meant they could not access food aid distribution points if required), signalling the interconnectedness of systems. The three Cs then become (see figure 1):

• Climate Change - generating physical shocks.
• Conflict - generating disruption and fragmentation.
• Complexity - generating amplification and unintended consequences.

Figure 1: The polycrisis effects on food security.

Following the 2014 Rome Declaration on Nutrition, food insecurity focus shifted to include the broader definition of obesity and overweight as malnutrition and food insecurity outcomes. This attention has given rise to the increasing interest in dietary-related diseases and the influence of food environments on purchasing behaviour and nutritional intakes. Food environments are the spaces where people purchase food and the availability of fresh, health foods compared to unhealthy fast-food outlets. The rise of obesity and overweight is, however, not confined to more affluent countries, as shown in the 2026 Global Nutrition Report. Obesity and undernourishment coexist, in certain regions, in the same household and indeed, at the individual level, with obesity associated with micronutrient deficiencies.

Each iteration of the definition of food security has been informed by lessons from history. Three distinct eras in food security thinking emerge:

• The scarcity era – can we produce enough food?
• The access era – Can people obtain enough food?
• The polycrisis era – Can societies maintain access to healthy diets amid cascading and interacting shocks?

While numerous crises currently coexist, they do not necessarily stack up to drive food insecurity and malnutrition. A polycrisis is not necessarily the accumulation of crises (for example Iran, Ukraine, COVID, Hormuz, tariffs, droughts, AI, etc.). What we are witnessing is the amplification of crises through interconnected systems. Food insecurity problems arise not always from scarcity, but from the interaction of complexity, uncertainty and human responses to them. Suddenly food insecurity, energy insecurity, national insecurity, supply-chain insecurity, water insecurity and cyber insecurity are being discussed in the same room.

The era of systemic insecurity

We are living within a condition of systemic insecurity in which climate change, conflict and complexity continually interact through food, fertilizer, finance, fodder and fuel systems. The question is no longer whether another shock will occur, but how those systems will respond when it does.

Complexity creates amplification of food system disruptions. For example: a climate shock leads to market concerns that trigger precautionary trade measures. These measures lead to investor uncertainty, raise transport costs and ultimately lead to higher consumer prices. The effect on diets may ultimately be larger than expected after the initial shock itself. As consumers are generally price-sensitive, purchase behaviour may change, leading to market shifts in a variety of products and directly affecting the food security status of individuals. If higher prices endure, consumption patterns may change – for better or for worse.

Therefore, the challenge is not simply producing enough food; it is managing the growing complexity of the systems that make healthy food accessible, affordable and reliable. If the question is no longer whether another shock will occur, but how food systems will respond when it does, then policy responses must adapt accordingly. Governments should ensure adequate food stocks to buffer disruptions caused by climate change, conflict or pandemics. However, food security strategies must also diversify beyond stockpiling, incorporating a broader range of measures, including supply-chain diversification, climate adaptation initiatives, improved food-system monitoring and investments in resilient agricultural infrastructure, that anticipate shocks from multiple sources, reduce uncertainty, strengthen stability and build long-term resilience.

Sheryl L. Hendriks is a food security and food systems governance specialist. She is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria and Research Associate with the Adbul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.