Capitalist chaos is driving global food system to collapse

A farmer in Morogoro, Tanzania, shows the effects of drought on her maize crop (Photo: Flikr/ Anne Wangalachi/CIMMYT.)

Human survival may be at risk as the global food system fractures. That’s the chilling finding of a new report from Anglia Ruskin University and the Faculty of Actuaries.

It found that biodiversity loss, climate breakdown and the impacts of war around the world are piling pressure on food security.

Hugh Montgomery, chair of intensive care medicine at University College London, commented on the report’s findings. He warned the effects will be “completely catastrophic” unless we take “radical action now”.

He added, “I’m worried about human survival now and when I talk about human survival, I don’t mean about future generations.”

Water scarcity and soil degradation are already reducing crop yields, raising prices and impacting the availability of food, the report found.

For example, deforestation in the Amazon—driven by industrial scale agriculture and mineral extraction—reduces rainfall that is essential for stable crop yields.

This is made worse by rising temperatures. In 2024 the Amazon faced exceptional droughts that impacted the lives of millions of people.

And the report warned that marine ecosystems are being pushed to the point where fish populations could collapse. The causes are overfishing, pollution and climate change.

In Britain, farmers have already lost billions due to droughts and floods over the past few years, which are getting more intense due to climate breakdown. And inflation is driving up the cost of food. 

War and conflict will put further pressure on supply chains. The report’s lead author Sandy Trust added that conflict in the Gulf region poses “a significantly greater risk to global food security” than the 2022 energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Global food systems are reliant on fossil fuels to power farm machinery and they have become more widely used to pump water for irrigation.

Agriculture is also increasingly reliant on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz puts a strain on all of this. It reduces the supply of fuel and also the key ingredients for fertilisers such as urea, sulphur and ammonia.

In Palestine and Lebanon, Israel’s occupation is having a direct impact on people’s ability to feed themselves. The Israeli assault on Gaza has led to the collapse of the fishing industry and has left huge swathes of agricultural land under the rubble.

The report’s authors say that nature is the critical foundation of society and the economy.

They are right to recognise how dependent human civilisation is on its relationship to the natural world. When a system driven by profit disrupts this relationship, it undermines the foundation of our society.

As Aled Jones, another of the report’s lead authors, says, “Our current economy is set up to deliver efficiency, profit and thereby a just-in-time system that both drives this threat and provides little to no resilience against it.”

The report finds that “civil unrest” over the food crisis could be possible in Britain over the next few decades. It recognises that a squeeze on the supply of food can lead to political upheavals, as it did around the world during the food price crisis of 2008.

If there is mass migration into Britain triggered by the collapse of ecosystems, governments could slam the door shut on people trying to move—the Labour government already does this. But a Reform UK one would be even worse.

Will civil unrest mean violence directed at the most vulnerable or will people’s anger be directed against the bosses and the profiteers? This in part depends on the actions of organised socialists now.