As the war in Ukraine takes over from the pandemic in disrupting global trade, the world contemplates the rising risk of food shortages.

(Originally published April 22 in “What in the World“) Ukraine isn’t the only reason why food prices are soaring at the fastest pace since the 1980s. The absence of wheat exports from both Ukraine and Russia, the world’s largest exporter, have driven up prices for wheat and its handy substitute for making whisky and other alcohols, corn. But there’s also a port strike underway in the world’s number-three corn exporter, Argentina. And sanctions against Russia are disrupting its exports of fertilizer.

The litany of agricultural woe goes on. An outbreak of avian flu in the United States is driving up prices for poultry. And California is in the third year of one of its seemingly perennial droughts, so Californian farmers don’t have enough water for crops. The U.S. is the world’s fourth-largest exporter or rice and California the second-largest rice-producing state after Arkansas. And a global shortage of shipping containers, sparked by the pandemic and its disruption to port workers and trans-oceanic trade flows, has created a persistent snarl in the global supply chain that has left farmers struggling to get crops to market.

The war in Ukraine promises to drag on for the the rest of the year, exacerbating the kinks in the global supply chain as the world becomes increasingly divided between the U.S. and its allies on one side and Russia, China and their allies on the other. Biden just announced another $800 million in military aid to Kyiv, the second such package in this month. At the bi-annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, D.C., meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is leading discussions on how to alleviate these supply-chain issues to ease food-price inflation and prevent a global food crisis.