BRUSSELS, BELGIUM | In the August 23 edition of The World, the New York Times newsletter, Somini Sengupta reported that the global food system rests on three assumptions and that none of them currently holds. Evan Fraser of the University of Guelph named them: “seamless trade, cheap energy, stable climate.” Fraser went on to call it naive to expect a system built for a different era to keep working, and to argue that the way the world feeds itself needs rethinking.
The piece does more than list three failures. It traces one of the couplings directly: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz drove fertilizer prices up during the Northern Hemisphere spring planting season, and Australia, a major wheat exporter, responded by planting fewer acres. That is a complete circuit running from a naval chokepoint to a reduced harvest on another continent.
Our forecast at the International Burke Institute, published on August 20, argues that there are six such circuits and that they are wired to each other. Conflict, drought, energy, fertilizer, migration, and demography no longer behave as independent risks; they form a closed loop in which deterioration in any one immediately worsens the other five. The question for 2027 through 2029 is not whether a new crisis begins, but how many of the six already running arrive inside the same agricultural cycle.
We assign 54 percent to the baseline scenario, in which all six continue along current trajectories and the EU’s southern and eastern member states drift toward chronic shortage. Cascading collapse, where the binding constraint stops being price and becomes physical availability, we put at 28 percent. Managed adaptation, the outcome most European policy currently assumes, comes last at 18 percent.
The mechanism
The analytical core is an argument about what food dependence actually costs. The EU imports roughly 45 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer it consumes, close to 46 percent of its phosphates, and as much as 58 percent of its potash. Natural gas accounts for 70 to 80 percent of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer domestically. That ratio is what turns an energy shock into a food shock without a single physical supply chain breaking. The conversion is automatic, and Hormuz has already run it once.
From there, the loop closes on itself. Higher gas prices shutter European ammonia capacity. Less domestic fertilizer production deepens dependence on the same suppliers the escalation has already made unreliable. Drought cuts domestic yields precisely when external compensation is most expensive. Fertilizer shortages add to the climate damage instead of displacing it as the cause of the shortfall.
Demography gets the least attention and does the most to degrade Europe’s capacity to absorb the other five. Eurostat’s EUROPOP2025 projections, released in April, put the EU population at a peak of 453.3 million in 2029, declining to 445 million by 2050. The fertility rate stands at a record-low 1.34. As of 2023, 57.6 percent of EU farm managers were at least 55 years old, and only 11.9 percent were under 40. Pension and healthcare costs will compete for the same fiscal space as agricultural subsidies through exactly the period in question.
The August numbers track the loop precisely. The FAO recorded wheat at a three-year high in July. Ukrainian shipments in the first half of August ran roughly 76 percent below year-earlier levels, with no vessels entering the Greater Odesa cluster that normally handles about 90 percent of the country’s agricultural exports. The damage is now mutual: Ukrainian strikes have taken more than 90 percent of Russia’s export capacity in the Azov and Black Sea basin offline, a basin that moved 46.3 million tonnes last season, and grain terminals at Novorossiysk suspended operations after a drone attack this month. The hedge in which one supplier covered for the other is gone. Overland fallbacks are failing on their own terms: the Danube is at record-low water, river freight to Constanta has doubled to around 28 dollars a tonne in two weeks, and the Rhine, which the Times covered separately on August 6, has barges running light-loaded into the German industrial core.
The USDA expects combined output from the seven largest exporters to fall 11 percent in 2026/27 and their exports to fall 7 percent. U.S. production is forecast at 1.531 billion bushels, the smallest crop since 1970/71, with exports down 15 percent. Canada is down 15 percent on production and 8 percent on exports. COCERAL cut its EU and UK grain estimate to 286.6 million tonnes against 310 million last year.
Food as a component of sovereignty
The Burke Index measures a state’s capacity to make and execute policy without external permission. Food dependence enters it as a component in its own right, and it deserves more weight than indices of national power conventionally give it. The reason is simple: a government that cannot feed its population without cooperation from a hostile or unstable supplier has constrained autonomy regardless of its GDP, its military, or its diplomatic weight. It is a hidden tax on sovereignty, paid in unrelated currencies: sanctions design, energy policy, positions in negotiations that appear to have nothing to do with grain.
European fertilizer policy shows the tax in codified form. On nitrogen and complex products, Regulation (EU) 2025/1227 has been in force since July 2025 and escalates duties to 315 euros per tonne on CN 3102 and 430 euros on the CN 3105 group by July 2028, a level the Commission’s own explanatory memorandum calls prohibitive, with volume thresholds that trigger the top rates early. That is a phased ban.
Potash is the exception, and the exception is the point. Council Regulation (EU) 2022/576, published in April 2022, wrote two annual quotas into the sanctions architecture itself: 837,570 tonnes of potassium chloride under CN 3104 20 and 1,577,807 tonnes across CN 3105 20, 3105 60 and 3105 90, each running from July 10 to July 9. Brussels has renewed that carve-out every summer for four years. This is not a pragmatic reading of the alternatives taken in 2026; it is a standing legal admission that Canada cannot replace the eastern channel, restated annually.
A second cost channel opened this year independently of gas. CBAM began applying to fertilizer imports on January 1, and January nitrogen imports came in at 179,877 tonnes against 1,183,728 tonnes a year earlier. Fertilizers Europe argues the comparison is distorted by 2.37 million tonnes of pre-buying in December. Either way, the Commission exempted fertilizers from tariffs on February 24 and proposed suspending most-favoured-nation duties on urea and ammonia. Brussels is unwinding its own instrument eighteen months before our forecast window opens.
Ceuta
The section we had to rewrite before publication was the one on migration. It entered the analysis as a deferred risk: pressure contained by administrative measures, not reduced by them. Frontex recorded a 37 percent fall in irregular crossings in the first half of 2026, with the West African route down 67 percent.
Then, on July 30, tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into Ceuta in a single day. Spanish authorities initially said close to 50,000 and later revised upward to around 72,000, against a permanent local population of roughly 84,000. The death toll rose through the week from 18 to 72; Ceuta’s president Juan Jesús Vivas told El País the city morgue had received 88 bodies, including some from earlier crossings, and later put the figure above 100. The proximate cause was judgment 814/2026, issued by the Supreme Court on June 29 and published on July 8, which held that summary return under the tenth additional provision of Organic Law 4/2000 could not apply to migrants intercepted at sea. One month separated the ruling from the crossing.
Most of those who entered went back. More than 48,300 had returned by the afternoon of July 31, and the EU commissioner handling the response confirmed that not one person reached mainland EU territory. That fact cuts against the reading of Ceuta as a breach, and it should be stated rather than avoided, because the stronger reading survives it. The flow reversed when Rabat allowed it to reverse. A border that can be saturated and drained on a neighbour’s decision is a border under someone else’s management, which is the sovereignty argument in physical form.
The European response is the durable part. Italy suspended Schengen with Spain for August, limited to air and sea arrivals of third-country nationals, and within days 22 member states signed a letter aligning with Rome. Madrid summoned Italy’s ambassador; Pedro Sánchez called the response a matter of treaty obligation rather than optional solidarity. The same Frontex data shows the Western Mediterranean as the only route growing, up 17 percent, driven by departures from Algeria toward the Balearics as controls tightened in Morocco. Pressure moved. It did not shrink.
What should be measured?
The existing instruments, the Global Food Security Index and the FAO self-sufficiency ratio, measure how much a country imports. They do not measure where it imports from. A state with a mediocre ratio and a diversified, politically reliable supplier base is safer than one with a strong ratio and a single unstable source for a critical input.
We propose a composite Food Sovereignty Index on four weighted components. Classic self-sufficiency carries 30 percent. Supplier concentration, on a modified Herfindahl-Hirschman basis, carries 25 percent. The geopolitical character of those suppliers carries another 25 percent. Resource sustainability, covering water, energy, labor, and the share of farmers over 55 without a successor, accounts for the remaining 20 percent. It would be calculated per member state, since the EU average conceals precisely the countries closest to the transition.
Washington should read this as a live position rather than a forecast. American wheat is already functioning as leverage, and the mechanism is tariff policy rather than the market: Bangladesh and other importers agreed to buy substantial volumes of U.S. wheat to avoid higher tariff rates, and are now obliged to pay the U.S. price even where other origins are cheaper. Analysts in Dhaka have called the arrangement unfair. That is food dependence converting into policy compliance, and it is happening now, in the direction the Index predicts.
The counterargument
One thing genuinely cushions this year: 2025 produced a bumper crop, and carryover grain remains in farm, trade, and government storage. Sengupta is right that this is the saving grace of 2026.
It is also a one-season instrument. A buffer absorbs a single bad year; it does not absorb three. Our window runs 2027 through 2029 precisely because that is the period in which a second and third failure would arrive against a reserve already drawn down, with the EU’s own harvest 8 percent smaller, U.S. stocks down 22 percent, and both Black Sea exporters constrained at once. The indicators that would confirm the pessimistic path follow from this: Hormuz closed beyond three months, a second consecutive EU harvest decline above 5 percent, complete rather than redirected loss of the eastern potash channel, and a repeat of the Ceuta event on another stretch of the southern or eastern border within twelve months.
Probability estimates get revised. What is not an estimate is that six pressures treated as separate risks two years ago are now demonstrably coupled, that the coupling has already run once through Hormuz into Australian planting decisions and once through a Spanish land border into a suspension of Schengen, and that Europe will enter the hardest part of this period with its margin already spent.
https://ibi.institute/read/on-the-brink-of-starvation?type=research
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