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Info Service on Sustainable Agriculture Penang, 14 May (Lean Ka-Min) – As geopolitical turmoil drives up food prices and intensifies hunger levels, governments need to reduce dependence on volatile global markets and strengthen domestic food systems. Market management measures such as public food reserves, marketing boards and production quotas can help countries achieve this and build resilient self-reliance in food supply, according to a global food policy think-tank. In its latest report The New Geopolitics of Food, released in May, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) states that such measures can stabilise prices, protect against supply disruptions and support local farmers. “Crisis after crisis exposes the risks of outsourcing food security to distant markets and fragile supply chains controlled by a handful of countries and companies. The way forward is resilient self-reliance – local food systems backed by fair trade. The tools to stabilise prices already exist, from food reserves to supply management, but governments are not using them at scale,” says IPES-Food expert Jennifer Clapp, professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Geopolitical shocks The report says the geopolitics of food are being reshaped by several factors, including a rise in armed conflict across the globe. The ongoing Iran crisis, for example, has already fuelled fears of spiking food and fertiliser prices. “Food has also been increasingly used as a weapon of war and coercion, both contributing to and deepening crises in the world’s ‘hunger hotspots’ as already observed in Palestine and Sudan,” laments the report. Away from the military battlefield, another type of warfare is being played out on the trade front. Steep tariff hikes imposed by the US aimed at reducing its trade deficit and extracting concessions from trading partners have hurt food and agricultural exporters while also prompting retaliatory tariffs from the likes of China, the report notes. Further, with some countries turning their backs on multilateralism and international cooperation, flows of food and development aid have dwindled – with deadly consequences in the neediest countries – and institutions of global governance find themselves hobbled. All this geopolitical turbulence has added to the strain on a global food system already buckling under climate disruption and the harms of industrial agriculture and corporate concentration. The cumulative volatility has seen food prices shoot up over the years: according to the report, “since 2020, global food price inflation has remained well above overall inflation rates, with food prices averaging more than 35% higher than in 2019”. Those feeling the most pain from the price spike are poor and net-food-importing developing countries, many of which are already deep in debt. The report states: “The global food import bill rose to a record $2.2 trillion in 2025, with the sharpest increases concentrated in developing countries already struggling to service debts to international creditors. For example, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) saw their food import bill rise from $41 billion in 2020 to $59.4 billion in 2024. Net Food Importing Developing Countries (NFIDCs) experienced a similar increase, from $108 billion to $155.9 billion over the 2020–2025 period. Higher debt loads and rising import costs are forcing many governments to make difficult trade-offs between paying for food, education, and healthcare or repaying debts.” Market management measures In light of the growing external volatility, IPES-Food advocates market management policies to fortify domestic food security. Measures to regulate, stabilise and strengthen domestic food and agricultural markets, the report notes, used to be common components in the policy arsenal of high- as well as low-income countries. However, they became increasingly frowned upon since the 1980s as neoliberal principles of deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation took hold. Today, with food systems roiled by uncertainty, a comeback could be on the cards. The report focuses on two kinds of market management measures: public food stockholding (PSH) and supply management mechanisms. Considered “arguably the longest-standing form of market management”, PSH, the report says, typically involves: “(i) the strategic procurement of food by a public entity; (ii) the storage and management of those stocks; and (iii) the release of stocks via mechanisms such as auctions or public food distribution programmes.” In emergency situations, the stocks provide safeguards for consumers against short-term food price shocks. PSH schemes can also stabilise domestic market prices for both consumers and producers between a set price floor and price ceiling: stocks are purchased when prices drop below the floor, and released when they surpass the ceiling. The report points to India’s PSH programme, “among the most comprehensive in the world”, as an example of a well-functioning system. It is managed by a national government agency, the Food Corporation of India (FCI), which purchases rice and wheat at minimum support prices from domestic farmers – mainly smallholders, as large-scale farmers and traders are excluded from the scheme. There were over 40,000 rice procurement centres and 20,000 wheat centres throughout the country by 2015–16. The grains procured are supplied by the FCI to the states at subsidised prices for distribution to low-income households. Under India’s public distribution system, the poorest households are eligible to purchase 35kg of grain per month, while households around the poverty line can access 5kg. “In total,” says the report, “an estimated 67% of the Indian population benefits from public food distribution, making it the world’s largest subsidised food distribution system.” Besides this distribution, the grains from the PSH system are also held as food security stocks to be released periodically in response to food shortages and price volatility. The report maintains that “India’s PSH programme played an important role in the country’s response to the market uncertainties of the 2007–2008 food price crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to buffer domestic markets during a period of global market volatility. For example, as global rice prices soared by 230% between 2005 and 2006 and by 75% between October 2007 and March 2008, wholesale rice prices in India increased by just 16% and 14% over the same periods. Additionally, price support through the PSH scheme supported farmers’ livelihoods by allowing them to sell directly to the FCI at guaranteed prices.” Beyond the national level, public food stockholding can also be implemented on a regional basis, as seen in the case of West Africa. A collaborative food storage programme established by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) “operates across four complementary levels: local community stocks overseen by producer organisations or decentralised authorities; national stocks managed by state governments, sometimes alongside financial partners; the Regional Food Security Reserve (RFSR) managed by ECOWAS; and collective mechanisms for mobilising international aid if no other solutions are feasible”. ECOWAS members, the report explains, contribute a share of their national stocks to the RFSR, which stores its grains in warehouses across the region. Local sourcing is prioritised: “87% of the stocks are produced in West Africa and procured directly from producer organisations rather than large conglomerates or private traders”. When the stocks are released, they are distributed freely or sold at reduced prices. The targeted recipients may be specific administrative or geographic areas, with landlocked, low-income and crisis-hit countries accorded priority access. “To date, the RFSR has provided over 55,000 metric tonnes of cereals through 19 interventions to six countries in the region (Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Ghana, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria),” the report states. In addition to PSH, supply management mechanisms can also be employed to boost domestic food systems. These mechanisms, explains the report, include “marketing boards, which have the exclusive authority to buy and sell a given commodity, and production quotas, which limit the quantity of food commodities that producers can sell in an effort to manage the overall market supply. By restricting supply and/or coordinating marketing, these systems help stabilise or even maintain commodity prices above market levels.” Use of supply management mechanisms to stabilise prices and safeguard farmer incomes can be seen in Canada and Norway. In Canada’s dairy, poultry and egg sectors, national oversight agencies and provincial marketing boards coordinate production levels and set quotas on the amounts producers can supply to the market. To protect prices, negotiations take place on minimum farmgate prices and on import controls aimed at averting undercutting by cheaper imports. Amid such measures, the report points out, “producer price volatility for unprocessed milk in Canada’s dairy sector has been lower than in the US, which lacks a comparable system” of supply management. In contrast, Germany saw greater volatility of milk prices following the phaseout of the European Union’s milk production quota scheme in 2015. While both the US and Germany experienced high milk price volatility during the 2007–08 food price crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, prices remained relatively stable in Canada. Meanwhile in Norway, farmer cooperatives play a key part in supply management. The dairy cooperative TINE and the meat and egg cooperative Nortura buy from farmers to supply retailers and food service outlets. As their transactions account for a large proportion of the total production in their respective sectors, they effectively function as marketing boards, notes the report. Major cooperatives also collaborate closely with farmers’ unions when the latter negotiate an annual agreement with the government to set target commodity prices and draw up farmer support schemes. Resilient self-reliance Beyond taming price volatility and supporting farmer livelihoods, IPES-Food envisions market management policies as forming part of a broader strategy to forge “resilient self-reliance” amid the unstable new geopolitics of food. It describes a resilient food system as being able to “weather shocks and rebound in ways that uphold equitable food access, livelihoods, and sustainability”. Self-reliance, meanwhile, does not necessarily imply 100% food self-sufficiency or autarky but, rather, lays emphasis on supporting greater domestic food production to lessen overdependence on imports. The report outlines a number of ways in which market management measures could contribute to resilient self-reliance. Firstly, these measures can “help support local cultures and communities, while ensuring people can feed themselves appropriately”. Appropriateness refers in this sense not only to sufficient calories and nutrition but also to preferences, adequacy of diets and cultural appropriateness. Thus, for example, a PSH programme may seek to purchase and distribute a diverse range of traditional, culturally appropriate crops grown by small farmers. Secondly, market management measures can be combined with policies that support territorial markets. Historically, says the report, these local markets have often been sidelined by government-led self-reliance initiatives, which instead looked to policies and infrastructure that favoured large-scale corporate-centred food supply chains. Supporting territorial markets would not only counter corporate concentration but enhance resilience as well, by integrating into the food network additional and decentralised channels of distribution. “Territorial markets remained resilient during supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” the report notes. In this regard, the PSH programmes of India and ECOWAS show the way by prioritising procurement from local small farmers. Thirdly, market management measures can foster ecological integrity, the report suggests, by incentivising sustainable farming practices. “For example, supply management programmes could prioritise small-scale agroecological producers, while simultaneously reducing farmers’ exposure to market volatility.” All these functions come on top of the abovementioned role played by market management tools in shielding countries from excessive price volatility. These policy tools support producer livelihoods, thereby promoting more reliable food production over time, while also, in the case of PSH programmes, enabling access at reasonable prices for consumers. Finally, market management policies can be implemented in the context of cooperative international trade and aid partnerships, the report says. It highlights the ECOWAS RFSR as an example of how countries can boost not only domestic food security but also regional collaboration in the form of resource pooling, information sharing and collective responses to address market volatility and other challenges. On a wider scale, global buffer stocks (virtual as well as physical) have been mooted as a means of supporting national and regional public reserves and enabling market management at the international level through commodity derivatives markets. “Together,” says the report, “these approaches can support a strategy of resilient self-reliance within a broader food sovereignty framework.” Food sovereignty initiatives, it explains, include “the cultivation and revitalisation of Indigenous foodways and knowledge systems, the protection of seed sovereignty, and the defence of the rights to land, territories, forest, water, and productive resources. They also encompass the rights of peasants, pastoralists, and fisherfolk, as well as regional collaborations to build territorial and agroecological markets.” As IPES-Food expert Shalmali Guttal emphasises: “We need to rebuild food systems from the ground up, closer to home, with food sovereignty – stronger local production, fairer markets, targeted distribution systems and food subsidies, and the tools to protect people when shocks hit.” The IPES-Food report is available at https://ipes-food.org/report/the-new-geopolitics-of-food.
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