Oil shaped the 20th century. Food is shaping the 21st. Russia and Ukraine supplied nearly a third of global wheat exports before 2022. India banned rice exports in 2023. China stockpiles more than half the world's wheat and corn. The Strait of Hormuz carries the fertiliser that feeds half the planet. The global food import bill hit a record $2.2 trillion in 2025. Food is no longer agriculture. It is strategy.
Not investment advice. Data sourced from FAO Food Price Index 2026, BIS World Bank Food Security Update March 2026, CSIS Iran Conflict Analysis April 2026, IPES-Food The New Geopolitics of Food May 2026, and cited sources. All figures current as of June 2026.
Henry Kissinger's observation about food and power was made in the context of Cold War strategy — the United States as the world's dominant agricultural exporter, using food aid and food trade as instruments of foreign policy. What he described as a doctrine of national strategy has since become a doctrine of every major power simultaneously. And when every major power pursues food security as a strategic objective at the same time, the global trading system that was built on the assumption of open markets and comparative advantage begins to fracture.
The fracture has been visible since 2022. Russia's invasion of Ukraine removed nearly a third of global wheat exports from reliable supply chains overnight. India's decision to ban white rice exports in July 2023 — driven by concerns about domestic food inflation — sent global rice prices up approximately 75% in weeks, impoverishing consumers from West Africa to Southeast Asia who had no alternative supplier. China's decision to stockpile more than half the world's wheat and corn reserves — a policy of systematic procurement that has been building for a decade — means that when global grain prices rise, China has insulation that no other nation can match. Each of these decisions was rational from the perspective of national interest. Together, they constitute a breakdown of the international food trading system that has kept food prices broadly stable and increasingly accessible for sixty years.
Not just oil. The Strait carries the LNG that powers fertiliser production across Asia. When the Iran conflict disrupted Hormuz shipping in 2026, urea prices jumped 77% from December 2025 to March 2026. India's fertiliser manufacturers cut output. Southeast Asian urea prices rose 40%+. Brazil — the world's largest fertiliser importer — scrambled for alternatives. One strait. Every farmer on earth felt it.
The Black Sea Grain Initiative of July 2022 briefly stabilised export flows after Russia's invasion. Russia exited in 2023. Without reliable Ukrainian grain exports, countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa that had built their food security on Black Sea supply chains were left exposed. Some found alternatives. Many did not. The fragmentation of Black Sea trade routes is the single largest structural disruption to global food supply since the 1970s.
Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from late 2023 forced vessels onto the longer Cape of Good Hope route, adding 10–14 days and $1–3 million per voyage. For perishable food and time-sensitive agricultural inputs, the rerouting created genuine supply disruptions beyond just cost increases. Around 400,000 tonnes of Indian basmati rice were reportedly held up at ports in 2026. The Red Sea closure demonstrated that food trade is vulnerable to non-state armed actors as much as to state decisions.
China's response to US-China trade tensions has been to diversify its soybean supply — pushing Brazil to expand into the Cerrado, one of the world's most biodiverse savannas. The trade war between the US and China has thus directly caused deforestation in South America, driven up local food prices for Brazilian smallholders, and increased China's long-term food supply security at the expense of global biodiversity. Food geopolitics has environmental consequences that extend far beyond the geopolitical actors themselves.
The most underappreciated vulnerability in the global food system is not grain supply — it is fertiliser supply. Modern agriculture depends on nitrogen fertilisers (made from natural gas), phosphate fertilisers (mined, dominated by Morocco and China), and potash (mined, dominated by Russia, Canada, and Belarus). The Green Revolution that tripled food production from 1960 to 2020 was built on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. Remove the fertiliser and you remove the food. It is that simple.
The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately 13% of global fertiliser trade. When the Iran conflict disrupted shipping in early 2026, the consequences cascaded immediately. Urea prices rose 77% from December 2025 to March 2026. The USDA estimated that by the third week of March, one tonne of urea cost the equivalent of 126 bushels of corn for US farmers — up from 75 bushels in December 2025. Indian fertiliser manufacturers cut urea output as high LNG prices raised production costs. Southeast Asian granular urea prices jumped over 40%. Brazil — which imported 49.11 million metric tonnes of fertiliser in 2025, making it the world's largest importer — scrambled for alternatives.
The UN World Food Programme's modelling is stark: assuming the Iran conflict keeps oil prices above $100 per barrel through the rest of 2026, the number of people facing acute hunger could increase by 45 million. Not from a failure of crop science. Not from drought or flood. From a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf that disrupts the natural gas supply that powers the factories that make the fertiliser that grows the food that feeds the people. The fragility of this chain — the distance between a maritime chokepoint and a hungry child — is the defining vulnerability of the 21st century food system.
Food price inflation has remained more than 35% above 2019 levels since 2020. In the first quarter of 2026, food price inflation exceeded 5% in approximately 50 countries. In 57% of countries, food inflation outpaced general inflation. The people who eat last are paying the most.
When global rice prices surged 75% between 2007 and 2008, wholesale rice prices in India rose by just 14% — shielded by India's public stockholding programme, which buys grain directly from farmers and distributes it to nearly two-thirds of the population at subsidised prices. India had a record foodgrain harvest for 2025/26, and its substantial buffer stocks limited domestic price increases even as global markets spiked.
The India model — strategic public reserves combined with price stabilisation mechanisms — is the most proven intervention for protecting domestic populations from global food price shocks. The WTO's Agreement on Agriculture creates tension with this model (treating public stockholding as a trade subsidy), but the geopolitical pressure to expand strategic reserves has overridden WTO constraints for most major food producers. The solution that works is also the one that undermines the open trading system — the central tension of food geopolitics in 2026.
ASEAN's ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve (APTERR) is a regional collective reserve mechanism — member states commit rice reserves that can be accessed by any member facing food security stress. The WTO December 2025 Trade Dialogues called for expanding similar mechanisms globally. The African Union is developing continental food reserve protocols. The Gulf Cooperation Council has accelerated food reserve building since 2022.
Regional collective reserves reduce dependence on global spot markets during crises and create political solidarity around food security. The model works best when the member states have complementary food production systems — different crops, different growing seasons, different exposure to climate risk. ASEAN is well-positioned for this given the diversity of its agricultural systems. The challenge: building reserves requires capital that food-insecure countries often don't have — which is where development finance, climate adaptation funding, and food security bonds intersect.
The fertiliser vulnerability is a solvable engineering problem. Green hydrogen — produced from renewable electricity through electrolysis — can replace natural gas as the feedstock for ammonia and urea production. This is the same green hydrogen thesis as Letter 92, applied to food security. Morocco is positioning itself as a global green fertiliser hub, leveraging its solar resources and its dominance in phosphate mining to produce green ammonia fertiliser at competitive cost.
The US has launched a $250 million investment programme in domestic fertiliser production. Brazil has announced a national fertiliser strategy. The EU has granted state aid exemptions for domestic fertiliser producers. Every major agricultural economy is working toward domestic fertiliser production independence — the fertiliser equivalent of energy security. The timeline is 5–10 years for meaningful production scale. The interim period is the vulnerability window.
The most elegant solution to food insecurity is producing more food per unit of land, water, and fertiliser — reducing the inputs required while maintaining or expanding output. Precision agriculture — GPS-guided machinery, satellite crop monitoring, AI-powered irrigation, drone-based spraying, soil health sensors — is achieving exactly this. India's record foodgrain harvest for 2025/26 was explicitly attributed to "favorable weather and modern farming practices."
The yield gap — the difference between current farm yields and what is technically achievable with best practices — represents the largest untapped food production potential on earth. In sub-Saharan Africa, wheat yields average 2.5 tonnes per hectare; the technical potential with modern inputs and practices is 6–8 tonnes. Closing that gap does not require new land, new water, or new fertiliser. It requires knowledge transfer, capital access, and market infrastructure. AgTech — Bayer Crop Science, John Deere Precision Ag, Indigo Agriculture, Pivot Bio — is building exactly this.
The WTO's December 2025 declaration that "trade in food is a moral obligation" is politically significant but legally non-binding. What would actually prevent the cascade of export restrictions that turns a regional shortage into a global crisis — as happened with rice in 2023 — is a binding international agreement preventing countries from restricting food exports during declared food security emergencies.
No such agreement exists. None is close to existing. Every major food exporter — India, the US, Australia, Canada, Brazil — reserves the right to restrict exports in what it defines as a domestic emergency. The countries most harmed by these restrictions (net food importers in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia) have no effective recourse. The WTO Agriculture Agreement has been under renegotiation since 2001 without conclusion. The political economy is brutal: food export restrictions are domestically popular in producing countries and internationally catastrophic — the exact combination that makes reform hardest to achieve.
Climate change is the slow-motion crisis underneath all the acute ones. The acute shocks — Russia's invasion, India's export ban, Hormuz disruptions — dominate the headlines. Behind them, quietly and relentlessly, climate change is restructuring the geography of agricultural production. The wheat belt is moving north. Monsoon patterns are shifting. Extreme heat events are destroying crops in regions that have never experienced them. The IPCC projects that without adaptation, climate change could reduce global crop yields by 2–6% per decade — against a backdrop of rising population and demand. The acute crises are survivable with the food system that exists today. Climate change threatens to undermine the food system itself.
The concentration of the agrifood industry is the structural risk that geopolitical shocks exploit. The reduction of leading seed and agrochemical companies from six to four through mega-mergers since 2008 means that global food production is increasingly dependent on the innovation, pricing decisions, and supply chain management of four companies: Bayer-Monsanto, Corteva, Syngenta-ChemChina, and BASF. The concentration in grain trading is equally stark: four companies — ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus (the ABCD group) — control approximately 70–90% of global grain trade. When geopolitical shocks hit, these concentrated actors have both the market power to absorb impact and the market power to pass it on to consumers who cannot absorb it.
The human cost is real, present, and accelerating — and it is not distributed equally. Food price inflation remained more than 35% above 2019 levels throughout the period from 2020 to 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, food inflation exceeded 5% in approximately 50 countries. In 57% of countries, food price inflation outpaced general inflation — meaning the food cost burden is rising fastest as a proportion of income for the people who spend the highest proportion of their income on food. The World Bank found that between May and August 2025, food price inflation exceeded 5% in roughly half of all low-income countries, compared to only one in five high-income countries. The food security crisis is not a global crisis equally distributed. It is a crisis concentrated in the countries and communities least responsible for its causes and least equipped to manage its consequences.
Long-horizon thinking on capital, technology, and the forces shaping the next decade of wealth creation. Written from first principles. Not consensus. Not noise.