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Matt Ridley is a science writer and a former member of the House of Lords
It has been a long, hot, dry summer in Britain and western Europe, resulting in the worst harvest for many years. My own northern farm, with its moisture-retaining clay soils and a little more summer rain than further south, has produced an average harvest, but for many British wheat farmers it has been a brutal season while apple growers are in despair and cattle are already consuming their winter rations of hay and silage.
Bad news for producers, but what effect will it have on consumers? In past centuries such a dry year would cause mass starvation. The poorest would wander the country lanes in search of sustenance or support, dying in their thousands. Today? Britain’s bad harvest will barely register in the international price of wheat and therefore in the domestic price of bread and chicken. Famine is not an option.
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Europe’s poor harvest will have a bit more impact but not much. As of 20 August the International Grains Council is forecasting that total production of grains will drop by just 3 per cent in 2026-27, compared with the previous year, to 2,416 million tonnes – but that is “still the second largest on record”. Poor harvests in Europe are being offset by good harvests in Russia and America while conditions have been good for plantings in Argentina.
And therein lies the difference between today and the past: trade, trade, trade. Yes, we have improved crop genetics, fixed nitrogen from the air and mechanised farming so as to produce vastly more food from each acre, but it is the sumptuous liquidity of global trade that renders local starvation all but impossible today. A country can see wild swings in food production; a world cannot.
Today a quarter of all calories consumed by human beings globally are imported from other countries. Far from making our food supply more precarious this greatly reduces the risk of shortages. For the wheat crop to fail occasionally in Britain is likely; in Britain and France together less likely; in Britain, France, Ukraine, Russia and Kansas, rare; in all of the above and China, India, Argentina and Australia too – vanishingly improbable. For rice, wheat, maize and soy to fail all at once everywhere is, barring an encounter with a really big meteorite, just not going to happen.
It is one of the unsung benefits of trade that it cushions us in this remarkable way. Shortages of goods, materials, food and fuel do happen but trade automatically flattens the peaks and fills the troughs. A ship on the high seas taking grain from France to Africa turns round; another ship en route from Australia to India re-routes to Africa; a third one planning to go from Argentina to America heads for Europe instead. Gluts and dearths are both eased.
In 1693-4, between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the entire population of France died after terrible harvests, albeit caused by two cold, wet summers rather than by droughts. In Britain, where the weather was not quite so bad, there was hunger and food price inflation but no widespread famine. That is to say, a little 20-mile stretch of sea (and a war) was enough in those days to prevent British wheat saving French lives.
In Budapest a “rock of starvation” has surfaced this year as the Danube drops. In the past – in 1616, 1718, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868 and 1947 – that rock’s emergence presaged hunger as drought shrank the harvest and stopped the water mills. Not today: Hungary is not going to go hungry. Incredibly, despite the quadrupling of the population in a century, famine, once a regular scourge of the world, has all but gone extinct. Only in countries cut off from world trade, like North Korea, do famines still sometimes happen.
Ah but surely the looming super El Nino of 2026-2027 will test my trade optimism to its limits? Every few years the warm water that normally piles up in the western Pacific, pushed by easterly trade winds, spills back east all the way to Peru, warming the world’s air for a year or two and triggering drought in Australia, India, Brazil and parts of Africa. This year’s El Nino may break the record set in 1877-8, when the eastern Pacific warmed by about three degrees Centigrade. And 1877-8 was a time of terrible famine. Between 12 million and 30 million Indians died; between 20 million and 30 million Chinese, two million in Brazil.
El Nino is a cyclical phenomenon, apparently not related to greenhouse warming, which is why it could be so bad in the much cooler conditions of 1877. The World Meteorological Organisation sees “no evidence” that climate change increases the intensity or frequency of El Ninos. “The severe and widespread 1876–78 drought in multiple grain-producing regions of the world was induced by natural [sea-surface temperature] variability,” wrote Deepti Singh and colleagues in 2018.
But that was before the huge expansion of world trade. Today, the global effects of El Nino tend to balance out. A 2014 paper found that El Nino years are generally good for soybean production but bad for maize. Regional effects could be large but the global effect is small: soybean production up by +2.1 to +5.4 per cent in El Nino years and maize, rice and wheat down by −4.3 to +0.8 per cent.
The more integrated the world is, the safer it is. The great theme of human development over hundreds of thousands of years has been to move away from self-sufficiency towards interdependence. As individuals and as nations, we become more and more specialised in what we produce so that we can become more and more diversified in what we consume. This is not just a good insurance policy: through the alchemy of trade, I can convert the wheat harvested on my farm into mangos from India, avocados from Mexico or software from China. That secures my safety and improves my wellbeing.
Adam Smith, as usual, was there first. “Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements.”
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